How Normal Cells Become Brain Cancers

 by Biomechanism 

Brain tumor specimens taken from neurosurgery cases at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center has given scientists a new window on the transformation that occurs as healthy brain cells begin to form tumors.

The work may help identify new drugs to target oligodendroglioma, a common type of brain tumor, at its earliest stage, when it is generally most treatable. Any potential drugs identified will have to prove safe and effective in clinical trials, a process that can take several years.

Representative NG2+ cell pairs from tumor and non-neoplastic tissue stained for NG2 and EGFR. Scale bars represent 10 μM. Photo: Jason Bardi

As described in the journal Cancer Cell this month, the UCSF team found that the pool of cells from which oligodendroglioma tumors emerge normally divide “asymmetrically” by splitting into two unequal parts – like giving birth to fraternal twins who look different and have distinct fates. When these normal cells transform into cancer cells, they switch gears and begin dividing symmetrically, essentially giving birth to identical twins instead.

“This happens early – before the tumor forms, and it may provide a point to intervene in the process of tumor initiation,” said Claudia Petritsch, PhD, an assistant professor with the UCSF Brain Tumor Research Center who led the research.

The Brain Tumor Research Center is part of the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery, which is consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top departments in the world. Its doctors perform more than 1,100 neurosurgeries a year to remove brain tumors, and in the last 30 years, this work has helped to build one of the most extensive brain tumor repositories in the United States, with tissue samples collected from more than 7,800 cases of cancer.

In their research, Petritsch and her colleagues used genetically engineered mice to identify that a protein called NG2 controls this switch, and they are working on ways to target genes that regulate the process as a way of fighting oligodendroglioma and perhaps other brain tumors.

Why Divisions Matter to Cancer

Oligodendrogliomas are unusual among brain tumors because they often respond to chemotherapy drugs. However, the tumor frequently returns in a form that is resistant to chemotherapy and requires repeated surgical removal.

Petritsch and her colleagues first discovered last year that oligodendroglioma tumors derive from a type of progenitor cell called “oligodendrocyte progenitors” that proliferate in the brain throughout life. These progenitors may also play an important role when the brain is injured by multiplying rapidly and helping heal wounds.

The new studies in mice suggest that lacking an injury, these progenitors divide mostly asymmetrically, maintaining an equilibrium of these cells within the brain. Progenitors can also switch gears and divide symmetrically instead. Scientists believe that allows the brain to provide an expanded pool of cells when needed.

Using mouse models of the tumors as well as tissue samples taken from people with the disease, Petritsch and her colleagues showed that before the tumors arise, the cells preemptively make this switch, transforming from dividing asymmetrically to dividing symmetrically.

They used bioinformatics to discover that dozens of regulators of asymmetric cell division including NG2 are dysregulated in oligodendrogliomas. The Petritsch lab calls these “asymmetry proteins” and argues that if mutated they probably cause the switch to abnormal cell divisions and thereby initiate the genesis of tumors. Modulating NG2 and dysregulated asymmetry proteins pharmacologically may restore normal division modes and provide a new way to fight the cancer with drugs.

The article, Asymmetry-Defective Oligodendrocyte Progenitors Are Glioma Precursors” by Sista Sugiarto, Anders I. Persson, Elena Gonzalez Munoz, Markus Waldhuber, Chrystelle Lamagna, Noemi Andor, Patrizia Hanecker, Jennifer Ayers-Ringler, Joanna Phillips, Jason Siu, Daniel Lim, Scott Vandenberg, William Stallcup, Mitchel S. Berger, Gabriele Bergers, William A. Weiss, and Claudia Petritsch appears in the September 13, 2011 issue of the journal Cancer Cell.

This work is supported by grants from the National Brain Tumor Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the American Brain Tumor Association, the National Cancer Institute, the UCSF Brain Tumor SPORE, the Brain Tumor Research Sobrato Fund, the Farber A and J Foundation, the Grove Foundation, the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation, the UCSF Sandler Program in Basic Science, the Swedish Society for Medical Research and Medical Research Council, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.

AN ENTREPRENEUR’S ACHILLES HEEL: TIME MANAGEMENT

Richard Branson on Time Management

Editor’s Note: Entrepreneur Richard Branson regularly shares his business experience and advice with readers. What follows is the latest edited round of insightful responses. Ask him a question and your query might be the inspiration for a future column.

Q: Virgin is a large company with many diversified businesses and a culture of delegating. How do you avoid breakdowns in communication and ensure that good decisions are made? – Shezad Virji, Kenya

Q: How do you deal with the hundreds of emails you receive from readers? I know you are very busy. Do you have any secret? – Harvey Chen, China

A: Reading through recent emails, I was struck by the number of questions from readers about how entrepreneurs can better manage their own time as they manage their complexbusinesses.

As a successful business matures and expands, bureaucracy usually starts to take hold and members of the senior management team find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of meetings and volume of correspondence. At this stage, an entrepreneur faces the challenge of how to effectively manage this new structure — a transition that has been the undoing of many enterprises.

First, let’s look at how to manage your own time. I receive 300 to 400 messages a day, so time management is an issue for me. I’m aware some senior executives simply delete all emails from people they don’t know personally, arguing that most of the messages just create distraction. To them, it is not worth the effort of weeding through the emails to find those that contain useful information. But I find this approach impolite and bad for business.

Recalling a time when I was just starting out and needed advice, I try to respond to as many reader emails as I can. I read through the list every morning and dictate quick answers to my assistants, pass some to colleagues, and usually write a couple of longer, more detailed responses myself. This is the most effective way of dealing with my inbox, and while doing so, I learn about trends that may affect Virgin businesses or about problems that need my attention.

You must manage your Blackberry; do not let it manage you. Many executives check their smartphones throughout meetings and during off-hours. This is not good for concentration, and has a negative impact on decision making. Use it only in bursts: check emails for an hour or so and then put it away so you can focus on the task at hand.

Shirdi Sai Baba bhajans ~ THE NEHRU CENTRE ~ LOndon Pt 2 - YouTube.FLV

Scientists Reveal Molecular Sculptor of Memories

 Researchers working with adult mice have discovered that learning and memory are profoundly affected when they alter the amounts of a specific protein in certain parts of the mammals' brains.

The protein, called kibra, was linked in previous studies in humans to memory and protection against late-onset Alzheimer's disease. The new work in mice, reported in the Sept. 22 issue of Neuron, shows that kibra is an essential part of a complex of proteins that control the sculpting of brain circuitry, a process that encodes memory.

"There are populations of humans who are slightly smarter and have better memory recall than others, and these traits have been mapped to the gene that codes for the kibra protein" says Richard L. Huganir, Ph.D., professor and director of the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. "Our studies in mice show that this same gene is involved in the operation of synapses, through which neurons communicate, and in brain plasticity, suggesting that's what its role might be in humans too."

In their lab, Huganir and neuroscience graduate student Lauren Makuch isolated kibra from mouse brain cells and confirmed by standard biochemical tests that it interacted with a neurotransmitter receptor in the brain known as the AMPA receptor.

They then determined that kibra regulated the delivery of AMPA receptors from inside the brain's nerve cells out to the synapses by first growing live brain cells from embryonic mice in a dish for two weeks and then genetically altering some of those cells to produce less kibra protein. Next, they placed the live neurons in an imaging chamber and recorded the activity of the AMPA receptors once a minute for 60 minutes. Results showed that AMPA receptors moved faster in the cells with less kibra than in control cells with normal amounts of the protein demonstrating that kibra regulates how receptors are delivered to the surface of brain cells.

The work affirms that the addition of AMPA receptors to synapses serves to strengthen connections in the brain, Huganir says, noting that most forms of learning involve the strengthening of some synapses and the weakening of others, a phenomenon known as plasticity, which is responsible for sculpting circuits in the brain that encode memory. Without kibra, this process doesn't function properly; as a result, learning and memory are compromised. Huganir hypothesizes that kibra specifically helps create a pool of receptors that is used to add receptors to synapses during learning.

Later in their study, using slices of brain from mice with or without kibra, postdoctoral fellow Lenora Volk recorded and measured electrical activity and synaptic plasticity in nerve cells, noting that mice lacking kibra showed less plasticity, a phenomenon that translates into a reduced ability to learn and recall new information, Makuch explains.

Finally, the Hopkins researchers conducted a series of behavioral studies using adult mice to compare the learning and memory of normal mice with those that made much less kibra protein. They used a well-established fear-conditioning task by placing the mice in a training chamber and exposing them to a tone and subsequent shock. After two days of training, the animals' rates of "freezing" in place -- a normal rodent response to fear -- were measured. Kibra-deficient mice took longer to learn to associate the tone with the shock than it did the others. On day three of the experiment, upon simply being placed back into the training chamber, the normal mice had a high rate of freezing, while the kibra-deficient mice had a very low rate, indicating impairments in contextual fear response and therefore, memory.

"Our work in the mammalian brain shows that kibra, required for normal brain function and associated with learning and memory, is important for regulating the trafficking of AMPA receptors," Huganir says. "In addition, as kibra has been associated with protection against early onset Alzheimer's disease, these studies may help define novel therapeutic targets for the treatment of age-related memory disorders."

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Authors on the paper, in addition to Huganir, Makuch and Volk are Victor Anggono, Richard C. Johnson, and Yilin Yu, all of Johns Hopkins.

Other authors are Kerstin Duning and Joachim Kremerskothen, University Hospital Münster, Germany; Jun Xia, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China; and Kogo Takamiya, University of Miyazaki, Japan.

Easily Embarrassed? Study Finds People Will Trust You More

Science Daily — Don't feel bad if tripping in public or mistaking an overweight woman for a mother-to-be leaves you red-faced. A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that easily embarrassed people are also more trustworthy and generous.

"Embarrassment is one emotional signature of a person to whom you can entrust valuable resources. It's part of the social glue that fosters trust and cooperation in everyday life," said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a coauthor of the study published in this month's online issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.In short, embarrassment can be a good thing.

Not only are the UC Berkeley findings useful for people seeking cooperative and reliable team members and business partners, but they also make for helpful dating advice. According to the study, subjects who were more easily embarrassed reported higher levels of monogamy.

"Moderate levels of embarrassment are signs of virtue," said Matthew Feinberg, a doctoral student in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper. "Our data suggests embarrassment is a good thing, not something you should fight." The paper's third author is UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, an expert on pro-social emotions.

Researchers point out that the moderate embarrassment they examined should not be confused with debilitating social anxiety or "shame," which is associated in the psychology literature with such moral transgressions as being caught cheating.

While the most typical gesture of embarrassment is a downward gaze to one side while partially covering the face and either smirking or grimacing, a person who feels shame, as distinguished from embarrassment, will typically cover the whole face, Feinberg said.

The results were gleaned from experiments that used video testimonials, economic trust games and surveys to gauge the relationship between embarrassment and pro-sociality.

In the first experiment, 60 college students were videotaped recounting embarrassing moments, such as public flatulence or making incorrect assumptions based on appearances. Typical sources of embarrassment included mistaking an overweight woman for being pregnant or a dishevelled person for being a panhandler. Research assistants coded each video testimonial based on the subjects' shame.

The college students also participated in the "Dictator Game," used in economics research to measure altruism. For example, each was given 10 raffle tickets and asked to keep a share of the tickets and give the remainder to a partner. Results showed that those who showed more significant levels of embarrassment tended to give away more of their raffle tickets, indicating greater generosity.

Researchers also surveyed 38 Americans whom they recruited through Craigslist. Survey participants were asked how often they feel embarrassed. They were also gauged for their general cooperativeness and generosity through such exercises as the dictator above the game.

In another experiment, participants watched a trained actor being told he received a perfect score on a test. The actor responded with either embarrassment or pride. They then played games with the actor that measured their trust in him based on whether he had shown pride or shame.

Time and again, the results showed that embarrassment signals people's tendency to be pro-social, Feinberg said. "You want to affiliate with them more," he said, "you feel comfortable trusting them."

So, can one infer from the results that overly confident people aren't trustworthy? While the study didn't delve into that question, researchers may look into it.

Army Developing Drones That Can Recognize Your Face From a Distance

And even recognize your intentions

By Clay Dillow

Building a 'Soft Biometric' Profile Progeny Systems Corporation via Danger Room

It’s not enough for the U.S. military to be able to monitor you from afar. The U.S. Army wants its drones to know you through and through, reports Danger Room, and it is imbuing them with the ability to recognize you in a crowd and even to know what you are thinking and feeling. Like a best friend that at any moment might vaporize you with a hellfire missile.

Of a handful of contracts just handed out by the Army, two are notable for their unique ISR capabilities. One would arm drones with facial recognition software that can remember faces so targets can’t disappear into crowds. The other sounds far more unsettling: a human behavior engine capable of stacking informant info against intelligence data against other evidence to predict a person’s intent. That’s right: the act of determining whether you are friend or foe could be turned over to the machines.

That’s a bit disquieting whether you are an insurgent warfighter or not. But back to the overarching topic at hand: The U.S. military is pulling in more ISR data than it knows what to do with these days, a lot of it useless noise that’s inconsequential to ongoing operations. And, as DR notes, the strategy in Afghanistan has changed from one of winning hearts and minds through nation building projects to targeting specific bad guys.

The hard part is keeping up with the bad guys, and that’s where Progeny Systems Corporation’s “Long Range, Non-cooperative, Biometric Tagging, Tracking and Location” system comes into play. The facial recognition layer of its technology is pretty standard: take some 2-D pictures of a target’s face, use them to build a 3-D model, and then use that 3-D model to recognize the face later.

But that’s not necessarily easy. It’s difficult enough for computers to pull off biometric facial recognition when the subject is stationary and looking straight at the camera. Toss in the many variables inherent in aerial ISR--a moving target who may be in profile or looking downward, a moving drone, low resolution cameras, etc.--and it’s a major challenge.

Progeny’s system, if it works the way the company and the Army envision it, needs just 50 pixels between the target’s eyes in a 2-D image to build the 3-D model. “Any pose, any expression, any face,” the company’s lead biometric researcher tells Danger Room. From that model stored in Progeny’s database, the system could identify the target from an even lower resolution image or video.

The closer the drone is to the subject, the better all of this works. But progeny also layers in a second kind of recognition that can work at more than 750 feet. This “soft biometric” system basically takes in a bunch of non-facial but otherwise outwardly relevant data--skin color, height and build, age, gender--to build a larger kind of model for its vision algorithms to work with. If a body is moving through the crowd, Progeny claims that a drone circling high overhead can keep track of him or her simply using this larger, whole-body identification system.

But what good is tracking if you don’t know who your enemies are? Another contract handed out to Charles River Analytics seeks to develop a human behavior engine known as Adversary Behavior Acquisition, Collection, Understanding, and Summarization (ABACUS). It mashes up all kinds of behavioral data into a system that churns out an assessment of adversarial intent, determining if a subject has enough built up resentment toward the U.S. and its aims to be a potential threat.

So pretty soon the drones may know who you are, where you’re going, and what you’re planning to do when you get there.

[Danger Room]

For the First Time, Researchers Use an Atom Interferometer to Measure Aircraft Acceleration

By Clay Dillow

Atom Interferometry Explained by Geiger et al. via arXiv

Atom interferometers are neat little devices that exploit the wave characters of atoms to make exact measurements of things like distance and or the force of gravity. But because they are fickle by nature--even the most minor vibrations distort their results--atom interferometers have been mostly limited to highly controlled experiments in underground labs or free-falling zero-g experiments. But a team of French researchers has announced today the first use of an atom interferometer to measure the acceleration of an aeroplane.

This is useful because atom interferometers are more sensitive than the inertial sensors used widely on modern aircraft. Those inertial sensors have been known to fail with potentially disastrous results, but more frequently, they cause slight errors to creep into navigation systems that must later be corrected. With no moving parts and a high degree of accuracy, atom interferometers could mitigate these problems, recording inertial effects 300 times weaker than the normal fluctuations in acceleration in a standard aircraft.

But the vibrations in an aircraft have previously made deployment of atom interferometers in planes unfeasible. That’s where Remi Geiger comes in at the Laboratoire Charles Fabry in Paris. He and his colleagues have created a system that compensates for the effects of vibrations via mechanical accelerometers that record the movements of the aircraft itself.

Using that vibration data, their system recalculates the interferometer’s data to compensate for any vibration skewing its final result. By stripping out the vibration noise, they end up with a clean, high-resolution atom interferometer result. The system could go a long way toward delivering better acceleration data to the cockpits of large jets. Geiger and company have already tested their system successfully on an Airbus A300.

But an atom interferometer that can operate free of laboratory constraints isn’t limited to jetliner applications. The researchers hope their method will lead to more precise measurements of geodesy and of gravity itself, enabling some fundamental experiments that have been previously very difficult to conduct and challenging some existing principles of physics with more and better data. More at arXiv.

[Technology]

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Standing Out

“(Hanuman did not see Sita) who (in Lanka) was like a crescent moon having its outline blurred, like a streak of gold covered by dust, like an injury left by an arrow (a scar), or like a series of clouds broken up by the wind.” (Valmiki Ramayana, Sundara Kand, 5.26)

avyaktarekhāmiva candrarekhāṃ |
pāmsupradigdhāmiva hemarekhām |
kśataprarūḍhāmiva bāṇarekhāṃ |
vāyuprabhinnāmiva megharekśām || 

To find success In his search for Sita Shri Hanuman would have to go by certain features as clues. He had not met the divine princess up until this time, and to properly identify her he had to go off of her qualities described to him and also her presumed current state of mind. Having met the lord of his life breath, Shri Rama, Hanuman knew that anyone who would ever be separated from His company would be in a troublesome situation. If a lover is forced to leave the side of their beloved, it is natural for them to feel distressed. When the mind is constantly focused on one object, on meeting this object’s needs and putting a smile on its face, and then that object of affection is suddenly removed from the vision, the living being will have nothing to do but lament. Bearing this in mind, Hanuman knew what signs to look for. He was searching for the most beautiful princess in the world, whose irradiant beauty and grace were now somewhat covered up by her tremendous grief.

Wouldn’t this be a difficult task? For starters, how many of us are always happy? What area could we travel through where we’d find everyone either completely miserable or fully satisfied? In Hanuman’s case, the job was made easier by the fact that the women residing in the location he was searching were well-dressed and enjoying the pleasures of home life. The land where Sita had been taken was called Lanka, and it was the capital of the vilest Rakshasa community of the world. A Rakshasa is a sort of human-like species that is more prone to sinful activity than ordinary human beings. A sin is anything that goes against the law codes of shastra, or scripture. These edicts are not put into place to punish or to make others suffer, but rather to ensure that everyone can live together peacefully, remain happy, and continue on a steady march towards a purified consciousness. When the mind is fixed on the lotus feet of the Supreme Personality of Godhead at the time of death, the cycle of birth and death immediately ceases.

“Whatever state of being one remembers when he quits his body, that state he will attain without fail.” (Lord Krishna, Bhagavad-gita, 8.6)

We get more than one life to live? Just as the measurement of our lifetime gets divided up into smaller units such as days, weeks, months, and years to make things easier to analyze, the infinite duration of the soul’s existence is grouped into units of time based on its residence in various body types. To make this easier to understand, let’s say that we didn’t even know what a “day” was. We consider a day to have passed when we wake up each morning, but this is an entirely relative delineation, for what if we stayed awake the entire night? Does not a day pass then? Even the calendar is subjective, for it operates on the movement of the sun, which means that any person could take any point in time and use that as their starting point instead of the regular calendar days. Just as not every person lives for only one day, the soul does not remain in a specific body type forever. The soul’s qualities of knowledge, eternality and bliss are always present; it’s just that in the conditioned state of being awareness of these features remains lost. Through instruction from the Vedas, the ancient scriptures of India and the original set of law codes to be followed by the human society, steps can be taken that allow the soul to break free of the cycle of birth and death and thus achieve a spiritual body that is permanent in its existence.

The relevance of sin shouldn’t be too difficult to understand. The rules of the highway are meant to ensure the safety of all drivers. Running through a stop sign or a red light is considered sinful because it goes against the established law codes and it leads to a negative condition. If one person runs a red light, the crossing traffic that has a green light is immediately put into danger. Adherence to the rules, or piety, is followed for a purpose. Similarly, the restrictions onillicit sex life, gambling, intoxication and meat eating are present to allow the consciousness of the individual to fully develop. When dissociated from the Supreme Person, the entity most of the world refers to as God, the individual consciousness is left to seek out sense pleasures, which constantly suggest the breaking of the laws of regulated spiritual life. Just as running the red light has negative consequences, so does the flaunting of the laws of God.

The most obvious detriment to sinful activity is the fuel it adds to reincarnation. With material desires driven by lust, anger and greed, the soul remains tied to material bodies, i.e. forms which are temporary in their existence. When something is temporary, it automatically becomes the cause of lamentation. This may be a little difficult to understand, but if we review the cycles of different experiences undergone in life, we’ll see that this is entirely true. For instance, when a new child is born there is great celebration, elation and expectation. The child’s early years are especially enjoyed by the parents. The child is the final piece of the puzzle to family life, which acts as a support system ensuring that comfort and security are always there.

“For one who has taken his birth, death is certain; and for one who is dead, birth is certain. Therefore, in the unavoidable discharge of your duty, you should not lament.” (Lord Krishna, Bg. 2.27)

Life in a particular form of body is not permanent, however. Though the soul remains in existence forever, its temporary coverings do not. Therefore the elation that comes with birth is automatically coupled with the sadness that comes at death. When there is birth, there must be death. When there is the creation of something temporary, there must be the sadness that results from its destruction. In this way material desires are ultimately the source of misery and thus should be avoided. By following the principles of spiritual life passed down by the Vedas and their followers, one doesn’t even need to know the ins and outs of matter and the illusory component of material nature. Just following the instructions keeps one on the straightened path.

The Rakshasas so flaunted the principles of dharma that they took their sinful way of life to be the right way. This is akin to thinking that stopping at a red light is sinful and that going through it is pious. In their community the Rakshasas especially enjoyed eating human flesh and drinking wine. Why was Hanuman traversing through such an area, especially considering that he is today famously known as Lord Rama’s greatest devotee? Rama is an incarnation of Godhead who roamed the earth many thousands of years ago in the guise of a warrior prince. When His wife Sita Devi was taken away from Him behind His back, He enlisted the help of a band of Vanaras, or human-like monkeys, residing in the forest of Kishkindha.

Sita had been taken to Lanka, where the leader of the Rakshasas, Ravana, tried his best to win her over. But just as Rama was an incarnation ofLord Vishnu, Sita was an incarnation of Goddess Lakshmi, Vishnu’s wife in the spiritual world. Hence she never desires to even look at any man except her husband. Hanuman was the most capable of the Vanaras in so many different categories of ability, with his most outstanding feature being his eagerness to please Rama. He was fully committed to finding Sita, handing to her Rama’s ring, and returning the information of her whereabouts to Rama and the monkeys back in Kishkindha.

After infiltrating Lanka, Hanuman scoured through the streets in a form that went unnoticed by others. He saw all sorts of beautiful women engaged in different activities. The common trait shared by all of them was happiness through association with their beloveds. They were all enjoying the company of their Rakshasa husbands in some way or another. Hanuman thus understood that he had yet to find Sita. There was no way she would be enjoying with anyone else. Plus, none of these women could classify as the most beautiful in the world, nor were they capable of fully enchanting Shri Rama’s mind. Just as Sita always thinks of Rama, the Lord always thinks of her happiness and welfare.

In the above referenced verse from the Ramayana, we get a few more details of Sita’s distinguishing features at the time, clues that Hanuman could use to identify her. It is said that Sita shone like a crescent moon that had a blurred outline. Lord Rama, having a dark complexion, was often compared to the dark raincloud, and since Sita was fair-skinned, she was often compared to lightning, that which is white in color. Lakshmana, Rama’s younger brother, was sometimes described in the same way. When Rama and Lakshmana would walk together in the forest, the onlookers would compare the scene to a dark raincloud coupled with streaks of lightning walking through. In this respect, the comparison to the crescent moon is very appropriate. The moon shines bright in the sky and is noticed very easily because of the contrast to the darkness of night. Similarly, Hanuman was in a region ruled by the mode of ignorance, the level of material activity which has the least deference to piety. Sita would be the moon that stood out in the dark city of Lanka, but her brightness wouldn’t be complete, as her sadness due to separation from Rama would blur her outline.

Sita’s appearance in Lanka would also be like that of a scar on the body. If we get mosquito bites in the summertime or get a prominent injury on the body that leaves a scar, the marks are distinguishable. If someone were to see us, they would immediately ask what had happened. “How did you get that injury? Are you okay?” Comparing Sita’s presence in Lanka to a scar is very appropriate because she would certainly stand out. Hanuman knew that none of the women he had seen thus far could be the princess of Videha, Rama’s beloved, because their features weren’t noteworthy. Sita would also be a wound that ultimately would prove fatal to all the sinful residents of Lanka, and especially Ravana. Though Rama would later march to the city with the Vanaras and do away with the Rakshasas, Sita would actually be the real cause of Ravana’s demise. If he had not unlawfully taken her away from her religiously wedded husband, none of the resulting destruction would have taken place.

Sita would also appear like a streak of a series of clouds that had been swept away by the wind. When there are lots of clouds in the sky, it is difficult to distinguish which ones are which. On an overcast day, it doesn’t even appear as if there are many clouds in the sky; just one giant streak of covering to shield the sunlight. When the clouds part, however, due to the force of the wind, some streaks are left, allowing certain areas of the sky to be noticed. Sita could be recognized in the same way in Lanka.

These clues helped Hanuman continue ahead, for he was not happy to have not found Sita yet. He knew she wouldn’t be in a good condition, but since she was Rama’s wife, Hanuman was very eager to meet her. When it comes to achieving perfection in consciousness, just the mere desire to seek out God and His pleasure is enough to secure liberation. What then to speak of those who actually follow through on their desires and make bhakti-yoga, or devotional service, their way of life? With a sincere desire to serve comes the helping hand of God. Without the hankering to connect with pure spirit, adherence to dharma and the accumulation of spiritual knowledge can only take us so far.

In this respect the solution to life’s problems is very simple. Just chant, “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare” as often as possible and hear about the glories of divine figures like Shri Hanuman and Sita Devi. Just as Sita’s presence was distinct in the thick cloud of darkness that was Lanka, Hanuman and his acts always remain resplendent and superior to the activities of any mundane figure or hero. Whoever is fortunate enough to hear of Hanuman and honor him just once will have the seed of devotional service planted within them. When that seed, which is anxiously awaiting growth into a full blown tree, is regularly watered through devotional acts such as hearing, chanting and remembering, the return to the spiritual world is guaranteed.

In Closing:

Hanuman was desperate to meet her soon,

Sita, who looked like the indistinct crescent moon.

Natural brilliance hidden by her sadness,

Like dust covering streak of gold and its brilliance.

Injury from an arrow leaves on the body a scar,

Sita looked similar, though Hanuman not found her thus far.

In Lanka, strong were the forces of darkness,

Residents mistook their sin for righteousness.

Thus Sita, wife of Rama, would certainly stand out,

Her location, to please his lord, Hanuman must find out.

Discover her he would, ultimately to find victory,

Etched his place in the Ramayana, heartwarming story.

That Hanuman in his search for Sita we remember,

Consciousness thus saved from maya’s forces that blur.

Fruit of happiness in following piety in mood of bhakti,

Live happily thinking of Shri Rama and Sita Devi.