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 …
it is generally presumed that countries that lead in technological innovations will also reap the economic benefits arising from them. But history reveals that rarely have the innovators of technology done well economically. Interestingly, it also reveals that India has excelled in putting technology developed by others to her own …
• global warming Showing changes in sea temperatures and sea-level rise and their effect on fish movement • philanthropy Determining how much money is donated to the arts versus impoverished areas • rural marketing Keeping track of rural outlets and plotting the best supply routes to show increasing sales • …
The greatest obstacle to the spread of GIS, feel experts, is the access, or rather the lack of it, to authentic and accurate and unstoppable information - the soul of GIS. Says Subhan Khan of NISTADS, "In India, it is particularly bad. Here, it would appear, every piece of information …
Digital palimpsest: In 1991, the National Remote Sensing Agency, Hyderabad, used GIS to undertake a pilot study for wasteland development in Bellary district of Karnataka. The wastelands were divided into 16 classes based on various parameters. Digitised maps of single parameters, such as distance to roads (top left), soil type …
SANICHAR is a smalltime grocer in the straggling, dusty town of backyard Jhumri Talaiya in Bihar. He barely manages to sell a few dozen bars of soap and detergent a month. But 1,600 km away in Bombay, a man with a computer is keeping tabs on Sanichar"s bottomline sales. With …
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Testing in Maryland, USA, have developed an instrument that can detect gases present in infinitesimal amounts (Environmental Science & Technology, Vol 28, No 6). The instrument uses microwaves similar to those used in microwave cookers to measure as little as 10 parts …
NEC Corp, the Tokyo-based electronics concern, plans to dazzle consumers with a 256-megabyte flash memory chip. This "next generation" device, which will be 16 times as powerful as those now in the market, has the potential to beat the conventional dynamic random access memory chips hands down, says nec vice-president …
GERMANY is having the jitters about losing its reputation as the producer of world class technologies. In an open acknowledgement of the country's technological downslide, German chancellor Helmut Kohl is creating a National Technology Council to focus on technological shortcomings and revise policy. Kohl pointed out that in microelectronics, the …
AS COMPANIES move towards corporate profitability through technological advancements, Indian industries have come up with the Technology Platform -- a forum for the interaction of Indian and international research and development organisations, industries, and institutes involved in applied industrial research. The platform assumes importance in global markets as a forum …
The computer keyboard is not only a secretary's bete noire -- continuous typing leads to what is called the repetitive strain injury, characterised by the numbing of various muscles of the hand -- but all programming also presupposes a knowledge of English. Wishful though it may sound, if only computers …
SCIENTISTS at the University of California at Berkeley in the US have developed a method that cuts to 1/10th the cost of cleaning up nitrogen oxides produced when fossil fuels are burned (Nature, Vol 369, No 6476). The new technology is also environmentally less harmful than the techniques currently used …
MINI radars are being used in warning systems for cars when they are being reversed and for cruise-control systems to maintain constant distances from other vehicles. Now, Thomas McEwan, an engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, has designed miniature radars that, at just $10, are less …
The title would cause non-scientists to groan, "Not another harangue on equity..." Scientists might dismiss it as a bit of hackery -- how could anyone be preposterous enough to say that equity is good science? But C V Seshadri is no hack writer or blinded boffin. Despite his Carnegie Mellon …
SOUTH Africa's president-elect Nelson Mandela shocked environmentalists in the West when he told a Time correspondent: "My health is good ... One of these days I am going to take a gun and go and shoot, but don't tell the environmentalists!" The remark by the leader of the African National …
WHEN chief election commissioner T N Seshan announced that identity cards would be compulsory for all elections held on or after January 1, 1995, he opened up one of the largest markets in the world. With 450 million potential cards for an equal number of voters, growing by the year, …
A FRESH approach has paved the way for small and compact high energy accelerators to propel electrically charged atomic and subatomic particles such as electrons and protons. Chandrashekar Joshi, A Lal and their colleagues from the department of electrical engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles claim that …
• FARNWAY, a farmers' cooperative in northeastern England, is all set to pave the way for bio-diesel-fuelled vehicles. It plans to run its cars and lorries on bio-diesel produced from rapeseed. Farnway is not alone in the venture. It is a member of British Bio-diesel, a consortium formed by a …
AS IF science isn't perplexing enough to most people, here's a technology that believes not in removing hurdles but putting them up. Fortunately, "hurdle technology" seeks not to confound reason but tries to hamper the growth of bacteria and fungi whose company spoils food and, like other technologies, is aimed …
INFORMATION is power. "Information highways" serve as economic channels for world trade now, just as the sealanes, railways and roads were the foundation of trade and commerce in times past. Small wonder, then, that -- like wealth -- its distribution is skewed; it is the economically-deprived who are also the …
A NEW type of safety catch will prevent children from accidentally triggering firearms. The US Department of Justice and the Pentagon are jointly developing "smart" guns that will fire only when held by their legitimate user (New Scientist, Vol 142, No 1921). Smart guns become operational only when sensors embedded …
