Zulqarnain Haider
Bio
I write short stories and poetry. I hope you find yourself in between the spaces of my words.
Stories (121/0)
Joining the war: Foreign nationals flock to Ukraine
On February 27, three days into the war in Ukraine, the country's foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, took to Twitter to echo a statement from the president's office and launch an appeal for foreign citizens to join Ukrainians in the fight against the Russian army.
By Zulqarnain Haider2 years ago in The Swamp
Ukraine conflict must not spark NATO-Russia war:
NATO must not allow Russia's invasion of Ukraine to spill over into an open conflict between the alliance and Moscow, its chief Jens Stoltenberg said Friday, warning a no-fly zone would likely lead to full-scale war.
By Zulqarnain Haider2 years ago in Journal
A Letter to Our Community Regarding COVID-19
In troubling and uncertain times like these, we find more meaning than ever in our company mission, which is to create economic opportunities so that people have better lives. It is through this lens that we are responding to the current COVID-19 crisis. I want to update everyone on the steps we are taking and the ways we can help both businesses and freelancers navigate the current challenges.
By Zulqarnain Haider2 years ago in Journal
How to Prevent COVID-19 from Impacting Your Credit Score.
Since the beginning of March, COVID-19 has turned millions of Americans’ financial situations upside down. While the economy is showing signs of recovery, many Americans are still unemployed and having to dip into their savings to cover basic living costs. To that end, the question remains: How do you protect your credit score? Read on for some tips.
By Zulqarnain Haider2 years ago in Trader
Russian attacks forcing Ukraine’s hospitals underground
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced patients, including children and mothers with newborn babies, to retreat to hospital basements in besieged cities. Many are continuing to receive care in underground shelters while Russia’s attack on their country continues above.
By Zulqarnain Haider2 years ago in The Swamp
Classifying invertebrates is hard. Butts can help
When French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck set out to categorize the animal kingdom in 1801, he divided it into two groups: vertebrates, those with spines, and invertebrates, those without. The terms have stuck around for more than 200 years, but around 1900, scientists realized that they’d been categorizing wildlife wrong. Plenty of animals without spines—like starfish, invertebrates that extrude their own stomachs to eat—are more closely related to us than to their shellfish prey. Certainly, some animals have spines, and others don’t. But the spineless world is defined by much more than what it lacks. The real line that separates humans from insects, slugs, and shellfish? The answer lies partly in the anus. According to more recent thinking, the development of butts has become a key question for taxonomists cataloguing the diversity and evolution of the animal kingdom. All animals begin life as a rapidly dividing bundle of cells. Early in that process, the embryo is just a tiny sphere of cells. But to develop a gut, the round blob needs to somehow turn itself into a donut. To do so, a dimple forms on the sphere, and eventually pushes its way to the opposite wall. In humans and starfish, that dimple becomes the anus, working its way back to a second opening—what becomes the mouth. In shellfish or crabs, these openings develop in reverse; the original dimple usually becomes the mouth. That distinction separates most animals into two categories: deuterostomes, or “mouth second,” and protostomes, or “mouth first.” While all vertebrates are butt-first, not all invertebrates fit into either bucket. Even the textbook Invertebrates: A Synthesis distances itself from the word “invertebrate,” writing on the first page, “The distinction [between vertebrate and invertebrate] is hardly natural or even very sharp.” So-called invertebrates aren’t categorized by their lack of spine, so much as their approach to the anus. Or so it used to be. “It is true that deuterostomes were classically said to be defined by the development of the anus,” says Imran Rahman, a paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum, “but we now know that some protostomes also develop in the same way.” More recently, researchers realized that certain mouth-first animals, like some species of brachiopods, a type of shellfish, developed butt-first. Others develop both at the same time, where the spherical embryo hollows out and rolls over on itself like a burrito. In 2016, a team demonstrated that the shape of the gut is actually an artifact of a more subtle process: The embryo transforms from a sphere into a stretched out, shrimp-like shape. That would mean that our common ancestor may have evolved the shrimp-like physique first, and then figured out how to build its guts. The findings, the researchers argued, suggest that anuses (or in some cases, mouths) have evolved over and over again. That could explain the case of the comb jellyfish, which branched off long before the ancestors of starfish and humans had evolved a waste disposal system. Most jellies have what are called “blind guts”—an entrance with no exit. Most gulp down food, digest it, then spit up the remains. But in 2016, an evolutionary biologist recorded footage of translucent comb jellyfish eating tiny, glowing plankton. As the animal digested, the video captured the food moving through the jellies’ bodies, and then, after a few hours, out a pair of pores on the back of their “heads.” (When the biologist played the video at a conference, the audience reportedly gasped out loud.) This ability had gone undiscovered for more than a century because the jellyfish have what researchers describe as a “transient anus”—a temporary booty that only appears when the animals really have to go. It’s possible that the anus is much older than scientists realize, and comb jellies are evidence of a common ancestor with a through-gut. But it’s also plausible that the butt is just so valuable that jellyfish have come up with it on their own. And indeed, the oldest purported ancestor of humans, starfish, and all so-called “mouth second” animals is, intestinally speaking, a lot like a jellyfish. The creature was a seafloor-dwelling animal, called Saccorhytus coronarious, or “crowned wrinkly bag.” It was about the size of a pinhead, and had a huge, gaping mouth on top of a round body. It had no anus, but was covered in pores that its discoverers believe to be a precursor to gill slits. “However, not everyone is convinced by this interpretation,” says Rahman. The name deuterostomes has stuck around, though. More recent genomic work has demonstrated that we still evolved alongside animals that basically share our intestinal toolkit, letting us know that the animal kingdom is defined as much by butts as by spines.
By Zulqarnain Haider2 years ago in Petlife
‘Hangxiety’: why some people experience anxiety during a hangover
The morning after a night of drinking is never fun if you’ve got a hangover. For most people, hangovers involve a headache, fatigue, thirst or nausea. But some people also report experiencing what many have dubbed “hangxiety” – feelings of anxiety during a hangover. By some estimates, anxiety during a hangover affects around 12% of people, and can vary in severity depending on the person.
By Zulqarnain Haider2 years ago in Longevity
Proceedings of the EuBIC Winter School 2019
1. Introduction The 2019 EuBIC Winter School on proteomics bioinformatics, held from January 15th to January 18th 2019 in Zakopane, Poland, was the third conference of its kind organised by the European Bioinformatics Community (EuBIC, [1,2]), an initiative of the European Proteomics Association (EuPA) for user-oriented bioinformatics. The Winter School brought together scientists from both academia and industry in the field of computational mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics to present and discuss their research in workshops, keynote lectures, flash talks and poster presentations. The 93 participants (see Fig. 1) came from 18 different European countries, together with guests from the USA, Canada and China. Besides the scientific programme, which included 12 workshops, 10 keynote talks, 10 flash talks and 35 poster presentations, the participants were also given time to network, socialize and meet representatives of our main sponsors BSi, ProFI, Thermo Fisher Scientific and SVA. To trigger interactions and alleviate the mood, the conference bags contained tongue-in-cheek advice, such as “cite the tools you use”, “do calculate FDRs” or “join EuBIC” as well as a personal “Conference Bingo” sheet. For the Bingo, each participant had a number of words and events to cross out, which might occur in a talk (“open data”, “I would like to thank…”, “somebody starts clapping too early”, “presentation with font too small to read”). This Bingo culminated on the final day with a “BINGO” shout mid- session as a participant completed his version by crossing off “Speaker offers post-doc position”. Finally, as the main social event of the Winter School, a pub quiz with questions concerning proteomics and informatics with free drinks was hosted by the organizers at a local venue in Zakopane.
By Zulqarnain Haider2 years ago in Education
The Eternal Bond of Brother and Sister
I was born in a secluded village on a mountain. Day after day, my parents plowed the yellow dry soil with their backs towards the sky. One day, I wanted to buy a handkerchief, which all girls around me seemed to have. So, one day I stole 50 cents from my father’s drawer. Father discovered about the stolen money right away.
By Zulqarnain Haider4 years ago in Families