When did social life start?

Living together with a division of labour in order to ease the 'individual' life is something which is not only found in humans but also in several living beings. So, when did it start? A single cell, say cyanobacteria, was capable of surviving on its own. It could survive in such a stringent condition, decreasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere so that it gradually became amiable for evolution of higher order organisms. In Microbiology, some 'single-cell' organisms have a social life. When in trouble (as in the dearth of nutrition), they come together to form a 'fruiting body' in order to disperse to a place with better nutrition facilities. The amzing fact is that, in this process, a significant part of the population has to sacrifice themselves to form the stalk of the fruiting body. Who are these altruistic fellows? Do they do it on their own or they are forced to sacrifice?
Scientists ivestigate this with various angles; right from investigation olecular mechanisms of signalling for stalk formation to game theoretical aspect f cheating and altruism. Well, if the single cell organism is so complicated, can we realy imagine how much complicated 'our' social life is (at least in terms of scientific queries)? What exactly 'being social' means to us?

On Nano

When I joined IISER, I had no idea about what basic science research is. All I knew was that science fascinates me. It fascinates because it is challenging, novel and demanding. To express my candor, I must confess that my first year here was like dwelling in an aerie. Right from entanglement to molecular motors, everything was fascinating! This was an uncanny experience and I fell into a perplexing situation where selection from options apparently demanded a meticulous effort. My NIUS project eventually turned out to be 'nano-based'. I was doing physics and chemistry there with biological molecules like lysozyme. Then I realized that nano is nothing but a novel approach of connecting various disciplines. No matter who is giving a talk on nano, a biologist, a chemist or a physicist, everyone starts with the famous RPF quote. I suspect how much popularity Feynman would have expected for his monologue ' ...plenty of room...'!
Nevertheless, when you go through Nature nanotech or PNAS or ACS or even PRLs and PLs, nano is ubiquitous. From basic scoience point of view, I realize that it is the qustion that we are asking is more important than whether it belongs to so and so area of research or not. Be it a Physical Chemistry problem or a Biophysics problem or a Biochemistry one, getting deeper into the field to uncover the enigma is really challenging and fascinating. It is, after all, nano!