Free Lantern

Unfortunately only bad news are heard these days:
A Kurdish teacher has been sentenced to death. Authorities arrested Kamangar in Tehran in July 2006 and held him in various detention centers in Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and Tehran. Kamangar claims that during a period of detention in Unit 209 of Evin Prison in August 2006, officials tortured him to such an extent that they had to transfer him to the prison clinic to receive medical attention. Kamangar also alleges torture and ill-treatment while in detention in the cities of Sanandaj in Kurdistan province and Kermanshah.
The Iranian judiciary should revoke the death sentence of Kurdish teacher Farzad Kamangar, Human Rights Watch said today. (Read More)

The pressure on women rights activists is increasing as “The Feminist School“, a website organized by a group of Women Rights activists have been filtered inside Iran.

The reason I’m not updating my blog are two:
First reason is that I’ve been too busy with work during the last weeks, even now that is Sunday I’ve spent it at work all day!
The second and maybe the main reason is that I’ve been trying to set up everything to move my blog to WordPress. I decided to move from Movable type to wordpress because it is an OpenSource and on the other hand my webhost supports it better.
Movable Type is a great management system but unfortunately when you have the personal free version there is no support for it and also I had problems with some of the features in my host so I thought would be a good Idea to move to wordPress and move the weblog to the root of FreeLantern at the same time.
I still have to sort out some of the features here like my feed links and the tags of my previous posts and … but for the moment everything is up and running!
I’ve also started writing in Persian again here, so if you can read Persian you can also read my Persian weblog!

2008 is the 60^th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human rights.The Elders say that the government have been signing this declaration for the past 60 years but now you have the chance to sign it in Every Human Has Rights website. You can read a plain language version of the declaration in this homepage and be one of those who sign and join this campaign.
The Hub, the media site specialized for human rights, is also working with Every Human Has Rights campaign to build a global digital data bank of human rights stories, in text, audio and video.

I saw this video in Britt Bravo’s blog, it is a music video created by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas based on Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech. As today is an important day I thought I’d share it here with you. Watch the video:

When I was doing my B.Sc. and M.Sc. I can say the only resource of learning we had were books. Nowadays there are so many scientific resources available online most of which are free (at least for educational and research purposes), that can make learning easier for students. I came across this award winning animation by BioVision at Harvard which is graphically reproduction of some of the important phenomena’s inside the cell. It is called The Inner Life of a Cell. I’m sure this short version with the amazing music you see bellow, anyone can enjoy even if you’re not a biologist. As a biologist/Molecular biologist I suggest that after watching the short form also watch the complete version with the explanation on their homepage.  I love the part showing the Motor protein carrying a vesicle along the microtubules.
I also use this opportunity to introduce this valuable webpage: MolecularMovies is an amazing collection of cell and molecular animations, you can surf through them and enjoy.