Electricity consumption from the manufacture of artificial intelligence (AI) chips has soared by more than 350 percent worldwide between 2023 and 2024, according to new research from Greenpeace East Asia. In East Asia, the global hub for AI semiconductor production, growing electricity demand from AI chipmaking has been met primarily …
The 5 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are easily among the most pampered of this country's academic institutions. Used to fund-guzzling in the name of quality technological education, it is suspicious of recent government attempts to force them to raise a portion of their funding through contracts with industry. This …
Madhu K S of IIT Bombay has designed houses for slum dwellers which integrate lighting and ventilation concepts to provide better living conditions. This got Madhu the first prize in a lighting design competition organised by the Indian Society of lighting Engineers. This project shows how lighting design can combine …
THE Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) may soon adopt a corporate culture with consultants from the World Bank being roped in to identify its selected laboratories and turning them into moneyspinners. According to Raghunath Mashelkar, the new director-general of the CSIR, an action plan has been devised to …
HILLY areas denuded for the sake of development can now be greened again, thanks to a new technology evolved by the G B Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development, Almora under the aegis of the ministry of environment and forests. The Sloping Watershed Environmental Engineering Technology (SWEET) as the …
IN DISHEVELLED Second World War buildings in the countryside west of Birmingham, UK, Bernard Hooper is working through the problems of developing a new diesel engine for small cars for the 21st century. He is trying to develop a 2-stroke engine with a stepped piston design which would achieve low …
CHINA'S 700-page white paper on scientific research, presented at the recent National Science and Technology Conference in Beijing, calls for the commercialisation of research results, according primacy to marketable advancements. It is a pertinent effort, in tune with the ongoing technological revolution in the world and the upgrading of outdated …
WITH the fossil fuels depleting fast, hot dry rock (HDR) found several kin under the earth's surface promises an ecofriendly, economically viable and virtually inexhaustible energy source. The Australian Geological Survey Corporation (AGs()) predicts that one cubic km of rock at 25(Y'C can produce the energy equivalent of 40 million …
THE expression sinall is beautiful has been proved true in the case of the internal combustion engine. Rick Mayne and his colleagues at Split-Cycle Technology in Arundel, Queensland, Australia, have substituted a few large pistons with scera small ones in a 2-stroke engine and claim that this would sharply reduce …
A non-polluting hydrogen-powered automobile developed over 14 yews may welk he the vehicle that its inventor Gus Ehrenberg, an engineering graduate from the California Institute of Technology and now an octogenarian, dreamt of. The automobile has potential use as a family vehicle with a range of more than 240 kin …
The much-maligned diesel fuel is being cleaned up. Rhone-Poulenc, the French chemicals and pharmaceuticals group, has developed a technology which it claims reduces carbon emissions from the fuel by 80-90 per cent. The system is being tested on the fleets of the urban transport authority and Trois Suisses, a mail …
EVEN x-ray machines and metal detection chambers are not always able to detect hidden guns and knives. But if a us $2 million'sclipme of the us Department of justice succeeds, it will become tougher to slip concealed arms and drugs past security systems. The department is evaluating 3 competing technologies …
ENJOYING one's food is almost as dependent on the sense of P1 smell as on the tastebuds. In P-9 fact, it is the nose that first gets a whiff of aroma emanating from the meal, which if found appetising, makes the mouth water. Again, addition of saliva to food morsels …
Cyberspace technology has hit Hollywood. While actors are shooting at sites in Hollywood, the back- drop is being built inside the memories of computers in London. Lawntnower Man 2: lobe's War, which is to be released by the end of the year, involves scenery being sent down each night via …
Martin Cooper of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside in the UK has developed a laser technique to deans off the dirt from sculptures without damaging them (New Scientist, Vol 146, No 1978). Short pulses of infrared radiation heat the dirt on the sculpture, with the result that it …
Coriander, used only for culinary purposes till recently, can now be used as a source of industrial nylon. Scientists of the John Innes Institute in Norwich, United Kingdom, have found out that coriander seeds contain per-roselinic acid, which can be broken down to yield adipic acid, used in the production …
Datasonix has introduced a mobile, tape storage product for laptops which offers a host of new features. The product, called Pereos, which uses technology Aeveloped by Sony for its digital tape recorder, is the size of a coffee cup and can store UP to 1.25 gigabytes of data (roughly equivalent …
Dorvial Michel, a scientist at Compagnie Industrielle de Tubes et Lamps Electriques Citel, a French company, has devised a lightning arrester. The device has an external metal casing containing a neutral gas (that does not react easily), a metal electrode and a fuse. Under normal conditions, the electrode is electrically …
A GROUP of American and British scientists claims to have developed an instrutment to measure the levels of fine air-borne particles from vehicle exhausts, which cause respiratory disorders in thousands of people each year. The vibrating tube impactor (VTI), developed by scientists led by David Booker Of AEA Technology, along …
A new solar dryer developed by a team of scientists headed by K K V Nair from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Bombay, has made it easier to dry agricultural products. Unlike the conventional solar dryer, the new apparatus can be folded and efficiently dries fruits, wafers, green pepper, …
Two UK-based companies, Thorn EMI Electronics and McLennan Marine, have developed a night surveillance system that can enable the coastguards to spot a 20 metre boat at a range of 7.5 kin or a person in water at a distance of 1.5 km. And to top it all, the people …
