Scientist hopes to run vehicles on ‘plastic’ 

          New Delhi – March 10 – For people worried about rising petrol costs, there may now be some cause for cheer.   Nagpur-based scientist Dr. Alka Umesh Zadgaonkar claims it is possible to derive petrol from plastic waste.  That’s just what she and her team demonstrated in the Capital to an audience that included Lok Sabha Speaker Manohar Joshi and HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi. 

Hindustan Times – March 11, 2003

Email providers work together to combat spam

          The three leading providers of email accounts – America Online Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. - said they had started to work together to develop ways to reduce the volume of unwanted commercial messages, commonly known as spam, that are increasingly clogging their customers’ mailboxes.  Each company has developed its own technologies to identify and discard spam.  But even though these companies sidetrack several billion messages a day, they miss so much more that spam has become a leading source of complaints from users. Now once email users can identify the sender of a message, the companies propose developing a list of email marketers who agree to a set of standards for responsible practices.  This will not prevent any one from sending email.  But users could choose to ignore mail from those not on the approved list.  The companies forged the agreement over the last few weeks in advance of a three-day forum on spam by the US Federal Trade Commission starting on Wednesday.

The Asian Age – April 30, 2003

Here Comes Electronic Paper

          London – On Wednesday, scientists revealed a super-thin, flexible electronic-ink display screen.  Just 0.012 inch thick, the device developed by researchers at E Ink Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can be flexed without distorting the type and paves the way for electronic newspapers, wearable computer screens and smart identity cards. 

The Times of India – May 9, 2003

Nepal’s Latest Hi-tech Spot: Everest Base Camp

          Everest Base Camp (17800 feet):  The camp, at a height of 17,800 feet, is now home to the world’s highest Internet café that has been recently set up by Tsering Gyalzen, the grandson of the only surviving Sherpa to have accompanied Edmund Hillay on his first ascent of Everest.  The proceeds of the café are being given to the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, which helps manage solid waste in the area.

The Asian Age – May 10, 2003

Library’s robot is a real page-turner

California – May 12, 2003 – Michael Keller, the head librarian of Stanford University, has added a tool to his crusade.  He unlocked an unmarked door in the basement of the Stanford library to demonstrate the newest agent in the march toward digitisation.  Inside the room a Swiss-designed robot about the size of a sport-utility vehicle was rapidly turning the pages of an old book and scanning the text.  The machine can turn the pages of both small and large books as well as bound newspapers volumes and scan at speeds of more than 1,000 pages an hour.   Occasionally the robot will stumble turning more than a single page.  When that happens, the machine will pause briefly and send out a puff of compressed air to separate the sticking pages.

The Asian Age – May 13, 2003

Hi-tech bugs to turn future battlefields into mass of sensors

             London: Technology advances will turn future battlefields into a mass of sensors giving troops up-to-the-minute information on the enemy, experts said on Monday.  “We are talking about a battlefield that literally talks to the soldiers, within the next 20 years,” said Maj. Charles Heyman, editor of Jane’s World Armies.  Speaking at the Future Weaponry Conference at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank, Heyman said the problem for both front-line troops and army commanders throughout the ages had been getting accurate  and timely information about the enemy.  Even in the latest war in Iraq, American commanders had in many cases been ignorant of what lay in front, though they had been able to track their forces with pin-point accuracy.  “What forward commanders really need is information about what the enemy is actually doing now,”  Mr. Heyman said.  The answer, he said, lay in spreading hundreds of tiny sensors across the enemy’s positions that would send out constant sound, visual and electronic intelligence. The sensors, which need be no bigger than a match-box and can be disguised to resemble small rocks, can operate for a long time using digital communications in bursts to make them impossible to detect, Mr. Heyman said.

The Asian Age – May 21, 2003

Ministry of suspicious walks – Lab Report  

            Operating on a theory that an individual’s walk is as unique as a signature, the Pentagon is developing a radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk, for use in a new anti-terrorist surveillance system.  A research project has been financed at the Georgia Institute of Technology that has been 90 to 95 per cent successful in identifying people.

  Hindustan Times – May 22, 2003.

Catching a liar before the lie 

          Philadelphia – May 27, 2003 – Scientists are using cutting-edge technology from MRIs to near-infrared brain scans, in an attempt to answer what courts and corporations have long wanted to know.  How can you prove that someone’s lying?  There is another question that must be addressed:  Is it ethical to look into people’s minds if they’re suspected of being untruthful – even if it is for the greater good?  At the University of Pennsylvania, biophysicist Britton Chance is testing a headband outfitted with near-infrared light emitters and detectors to “see” blood-flow changes in the brain, and psychologist Daniel Langleben is putting volunteers inside a type  of MRI and telling them to lie as the machine photographs their brains.  Both say their work could potentially be used to detect deceit better than today’s polygraphs.

            Hindustan Times – May 28, 2003.

Food for Thoughts

Education, in the broadest of truest sense, will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition.

George Washington Carver
(1864-1943, Scientist) 

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"Lost time is never found again."

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  "First we loose health to gain money and then we loose money to regain health."

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  Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.

Cathy Better

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"A thankful person is thankful under all circumstances. A complaining soul complains even if he lives in paradise."