Believe it or not. The National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad records thousands of earthquakes everyday. In fact, a quake is recorded every second by the highly sensitive machines installed at the NGRI campus. However, it is surprising how the people of the city or elsewhere in the state do not feel the many "tremors" or "quakes" recorded by the NGRI machines. No, the equipment is not faulty. The trouble lies with the heavy traffic and the consequent "tremors" caused by vehicles. When NGRI was set up at the outskirts of the city, the traffic flow was nominal, and hence the tremors created by the vehicles did not bother the scientists or the machines. Now that the traffic has grown by leaps and bounds, the vehicular movement on the Tarnaka-Uppal Road is creating artificial tremors and the sensitive machines are recording the data. This makes the job of scientists difficult. They have to eliminate the useless data to arrive at the real tremors and earthquakes. If the centres are located at busy areas fake alarms are quite common and can disrupt the research work. But scientists have to continue with their work despite these hazards. If the NGRI scientists are making extra efforts to eliminate tremors caused by vehicular traffic and natural quakes, one must also know the precision with which the scientists at NIN take to maintain animals for research. The animal lab at NIN is the one of its kind in the country. The scientists have to feed rats to the extent they become obese and then conduct the research. But because of strict ethical guidelines on treatment of animals, scientists handling the animal lab have to take extra precaution and ensure that they do not invite the wrath of animal lovers. Animal activist, Ms Maneka Gandhi, who headed the Union Environment Ministry, came out with stringent laws against the ill-treatment of animals. Scientists now have to mention in their research reports how they treat the animals during their research and study. The animal lab is meeting the requirement for breeding and experimentation purposes for over 180 institutions in the country. Apart from breeding and supplying of animals, it undertakes quality control of laboratory animal feed and checks the health and genetic background of lab animals. Scientists now have to take care of their research activity, in addition to the care of the animals in their laboratories. This is adding an extra burden to their work. Besides this, there are regular checks on the laboratories and the functioning. The number of animals has also come down considerably because of intervention by animal rights activists. "Cruelty to animals is bad. But for research purpose experiments on animals should be allowed without any restriction. Unless scientists are given a free hand on animal experimentation, they cannot come out with a model which can be tried and tested on human beings," a senior scientist said.