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 …
Computers will now bring peace in war-ravaged West Asia. This hope has inspired Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres to initiate a project that could give a new direction to information technology in the region. On January 29, he organised a meeting with the Egyptian foreign minister and senior executives of …
OFTEN, a question elicits the cryptic "maybe" as the reply. The fuzzy logic behind such an answer has not escaped mathematicians who have built a mathematical theory known as fuzzy set theory around it. Considering the nebulous character of such logic, the benefits accruing from it are nothing less than …
European railway companies have decided to undergo a facelift. A consortium of 11 railway companies are joining hands to develop a crossborder European communications network. It plans to lay fibre optic cables alongside Europe's rail lines to provide an uninterrupted network transnationally. The consortium has linked up with Global Telesystems …
Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences has become the country's first hospital to launch a new technique to detect artherosclerosis -- a disease of the blood vessels caused by cholesterol deposition within the arteries. Called the Intra Vascular Ultra Sound (IVUS), the new technique is currently being demonstrated by …
TAKE some silk cotton. Add a dash of the bacteria Rhodospirillum rubrum. Keep aside for a few days. Sieve and dry. This, in essence, is the recipe for a new environment-friendly method of paper manufacture that scientists at the A M M Murugappa Chettiar Research Centre (MCRC) in Madras have …
The US Department of Energy and a Maryland-based company, Fusion Lighting, have jointly developed sulphur light bulbs, which experts claim could be the light sources of the future (New Scientist, Vol 144, No 1951). These bulbs are small glass spheres filled with a mixture of sulphur and argon which when …
FOR international environmental technology firms, Asia's colossal environmental problems are a business paradise. The darker side of growing economic prosperity and a burgeoning population are the major invites. Plummeting air quality is just one indicator that Asia has much cleaning up to do. According to the World Health Organisation, 12 …
A Japanese company, Hitachi, has developed the technology for making pocket-sized camcorders -- video cameras which are becoming essential family items (New Scientist, Vol 143, No 1945). The technology is based on a secret technique to compress data some 100 times, thereby enabling it to be recorded on "flash memory", …
Not content with chemical methods of assessing the impact of pollution on a river's ecosystem, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has intensified its efforts to develop a method that uses bioindicators for the purpose. A project aimed at developing a universal biomonitoring methodology to study all the river systems …
Now Americans can windowshop to glory without stepping out of their homes. Shopping Network (HSN) and America Online Inc (AOL), the 2 front-runners in the television retailing and computer-networking industry, are gearing up to sell goods in cyberspace. The HSN has bought the Internet Shopping Network and the AOL Inc …
SCIENTISTS are often awestruck by the quality achieved by craftspersons hundreds of years ago which, they believe, would be hard to equal even using the tools of modern technology. For instance, experts have been intrigued by the rust-resistant alloy of the Iron Pillar at the Qutab Minar in Delhi, whose …
Clean-air campaigners can't always pin down the source of a pollutant, by no means an easy task at best. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a way to solve the problem. They are studying micro-structures in soot that should, in theory, trace each particle's history and …
History of sorts is being created by the Indian Science Congress, as the traditionally state-funded Organisation is reaching out towards corporate giants like the ITC, Hindustan Lever, the ACC and the Peerless Group to prepare for lie 82nd congress to be held in Calcutta between January 3 and 8. The …
In arguments concerning weight, the final arbiter is a cylindrical piece of a platinum-iridium alloy kept in an airtight chamber in Sevres, France, which is deemed to weigh exactly I kg. But a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist says that he has a more precise alternative -the mass of an …
DEVELOPING countries have reiterated their demand for more support from industrialised nations in their efforts to phase out the production and consumption of ozone depleting substances. At the 6th meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol, held in Nairobi from October 3 to 7, developing country representatives said they …
Zooms may soon be out of the picture. At least 5 Japanese companies are close to developing a filrsmart enough to do a zoom's job (New SciennVol 143, No 1941). The Dew film, detaile cc which are a closely guardc secret, will be coated magnetic material that ca store information …
An elecbehk 'bloodbound' may soon becoiae the nemesis of croaft in Switaiin- Barbam Sommmeram vNe of the Universky unique dleuke - bask an electronic nose tot is sensithie enough to Whodfy weple by their body odour. Accordi" to Somom ville, the smarter she has created forthrightly named skxwmmd - waft …
European Laboratory for Particle Physics sees little chance of an agreement g hammered out soon for the financing of Europe's next generation particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHCJ (Down to Earth, September 30, 1994). CERN's 2 host countries, France and Switzerland, continue to stonewall efforts by Germany and the …
IN OCTOBER 1993, the US House of Representatives voted to terminate funding for the $11-billion Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the most expensive basic research project in history. However, the chances are that only a few of the representatives realised the consequences of their decision: it could scuttle the fate of …
Our perception of what constitutes fundamental particles has changed continually with the ability to "see" at smaller distances. The microcosm has revealed several layers within itself: starting from molecules and atoms to electrons and nuclei, to protons and neutrons within the nucleus and finally to quarks within the protons and …
