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CSK All The Way

There is something special about the Chennai Super Kings and I know that I have millions of fans to back me up on this theory. Ever since the conception of the Indian Premier League, they have stood out amongst the rest. Yes, some of that credit can go to the conspicuously bright yellow jerseys they have on as their uniforms but most of it is attributed to the individual efforts that blend in well with the team’s ideology and in turn helps them produce a unified yet and distinctively successful results. And the remaining credit should indubitably go to the captain- Mahendra Singh Dhoni, without whom the fate of the Super Kings would have been significantly different.

The C S K Group started off in the I P L journey with some of the best contemporary cricketers available such as Hayden, Stephen Fleming, Muttiah Muralitharan, M.S.Dhoni and Michael Hussey. An amount of one and a half million dollars was shelled out to rope in Dhoni. They finished the year 2008 as the runners up of the tournament and with $600,000 as prize money.

The next year they paid fifty grants more to bring in English all rounder –Andrew Flintoff to the team. Though they didn’t quite make it to the finals, one of their own- Matthew Hayden, who scored 572 runs in 12 innings at an average of 52 and strike-rate of 145, was adjudged the Player of the Tournament and was given the Orange Cap for being the lead scorer.

The much acclaimed Andrew Flintoff decided to sit the next season out and hence they filled in his slot with talented substitutes. Suresh Raina was particularly efficient and produced the match winning innings in the finals. And they rounded up the 2010 premier league season as the I P L Champions.

Michael Hussey was brought back in the 2001 season while retaining the likes of MS Dhoni, Suresh Raina, Murali Vijay and Albie Morkel. This season was the best that the Chennai Super Kings had seen to date as it not only involved them defending their title as Premier League Champions, but also the Super Kings stood above the rest with a win percentage of 64.11.

For the 2012 I P L auction, the team welcomed Sir Ravindra Jadeja for a whopper of two million dollors, this was a huge mark in the Chennai Super Kings news and history.

According to the current IPL updates, C S K lost to the Pune Warriors by twenty four runs.

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Interesting Facts about IPL Part 2

What sets the Indian Premiere League apart from the rest of the tournaments and competitions? Without a doubt it is the commercial aspect surrounding the whole shindig. This is the Board of Control of cricket in India’ million dollar brain child that has revolutionized the way the world looks at the game of cricket. It is more than nine teams fighting each other. It is the cutting edge; the penultimate creative concept. It is pure entertainment. And we are not talking about the thrill of watching a sporting event unfold but it is also the fragrance that emanates from a potpourri of the famous personnel and celebrities from all walks of life. Industrialist, socialites, movie star, cricketers and gorgeous cheerleaders make up for unadulterated (maybe a little ‘adultery’ is involved) fun. Below are some more interesting facts about the Indian Premier League:

• It is the first event ever to be broadcasted live on the You tube in the year 2010.

• The night that the western musical legend- Pit Bull performed saw one of the biggest turnover ever.

• The Chennai Super Kings or better known as the ‘CSK’ have secured the highest number of runs by a team in a tournament with an eye popping tally of twelve thousand seven hundred and thirty six runs accumulated at an average of thirty per wicket.

• It needs to acknowledged here that the tournament run average would be marked somewhere between twenty five to twenty six.

• The Mumbai Indians have been regarded as the most economical run getters with a figure of 7.34 runs an over.

• Virender Sehwag (Delhi) became the first player to score 4 consecutive fifty in Indian Premier League (IPL) history.

• Lasith Malinga became the first player to be responsible for not one but two ‘golden ducks’ in a match.

• During the Indian Premier Leagues’ inaugural season in the year 2008, only one team had a non Indian captain- the Rajasthan Royals.

• This is something everyone should be aware of: the organizers of the Indian Premier League tournament in the BCCI.

• According to the Mumbai Indians news and snippets of information, Sanath Jaysuriya while playing for the respective team scored the highest number of sixes with thirty one to his credit.

• IPL news can be followed regularly and even as it happens by logging on to some particular cricket related websites.

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New Method to Predict Protein-Environment Interactions Found

It is well-known that proteins are the cornerstone of life and play a key role in all biological processes. Therefore, understanding how they interact with the environment is critical to developing effective treatments and designing the basis for artificial cells.

Recently, the Protein Design and Immune Engineering Laboratory (LPDI) of the Institute of Bioengineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), in collaboration with the Institute of Computational Science at the USI School of Information, Imperial College, and other units in the United Kingdom, has developed a groundbreaking machine learning-driven technique for predicting interactions between proteins and the environment and achieving a description of the biochemical activity of proteins based only on surfaces. In addition to deepening our understanding of protein function, this approach, known as MaSIF, can also support the future development of protein-based components in artificial cells. The study was published in the December 9 issue of Nature Methods.

In this new study, the research team took a large amount of protein surface data and entered these chemical and geometric properties into a machine learning algorithm and trained them to match them to specific behavioral patterns and biochemical activities. Then, they used the remaining data to test the algorithm.

“By scanning the surface of a protein, our method can define a ‘fingerprint’ that can then be compared between proteins,” said the leadauthor, Dr. Pablo Gainza of EPFL Bioengineering Institute and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

Scientists have developed a new method to predict interactions between proteins and other proteins and biomolecules, as well as to predict their biochemical activity by looking only at their surfaces.

The team found that proteins with similar interactions all share a common “fingerprint”.

“The algorithm can analyze billions of protein surfaces per second,” said Bruno Correia, Ph.D., director of LPDI and corresponding author of the study. “Our research has important implications for the design of artificial proteins that allow us to program proteins to behave in a specific way simply by changing their surface chemistry and geometry.”

The method is published as open source and can also be used to analyze the surface structure of other types of molecules.

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