The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
in a society that is fast depending on compelling scientific evidence, often explanations as 'gut feeling' or intuition for taking a particular decision are laughed at. But scientific evidence has just surfaced to show that intuition indeed plays a crucial role in helping people make sensible decisions and clues to …
LIQUID air can now be used to chill the atmosphere safely, thanks to a technique that prevents oxygen building up as the air evaporates, thus preventing a fire hazard. This technique will allow liquefied gas to be used to cool places where people work or where animals are kept. BOC …
the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation's (saarc) Integrated Programme of Action identifies 12 areas in which the member countries could cooperate. Science and technology (s&t) is one of them. A technical committee
R w Schoenlein and his collaborators at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, US, have reported the generation of ultrashort pulses of X- rays using an infrared laser. The X- rays have a wavelength of 0.4 angstrom and the pulse duration is 300 femtoseconds (one femtosecond is 10-15 seconds). They scattered a …
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), US, is planning to improve the EGRET (energetic gamma-ray experiment telescope) -the best high energy gamma-ray instrument installed in the Compton gamma-ray observatory satellite. Observations of gamma-rays in the cosmos provide us with important clues to young pulsars and gamma-ray bursts from different …
Particle physicists are planning to make the largest linear accelerator called the Next Linear Collider (NLC), which, though not as powerful as the Large Hadron Collider, will complement it. Most colliders in the world are circular accelerators where the beams of particles are bent using huge magnets. This process makes …
THE video cassette recorder (VCR) may never achieve the historical status of the steam engine, printing press or the PC, but there is no denying that it is one of the great inventions of the 20th century. Since the VCR's introduction in 1975, more than 520 million have been sold …
CARBON thin films are one of the most important applications of carbon nanotubes and elongated fifflerenes, named after Buckminister Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome. G A i Amaratunga and his collaborators Zihe University of Liverpool, UK, have reported the development of a hard, elastic, carbon thin film made …
TAKING help from a computer for solving a crime was something considered breathtaking futurism just about 30 years ago. That was the past. Today, it is fairly routine for law enforcement authorities to use computers in order to locate hidden clues and patterns in heaps of data about complex criminal …
A ROBOT clerk that can turn pages, load fax machines, staple documents, put office rubbish in bins and open cans has gone on trial with severely disabled people in the uk. Currently on trail at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, the us $5,0000 pc system can be controlled by a joystick on …
People will soon be buying CD-quality music by downloading it over a phone line, courtesy American company AT&T;, which has applied to patent an administrative set-up that will ensure that publishers and musicians still receive royalties. The
A new navigation system that uses voice-recognition technology is now available in the US. Developed by Amerigon of Monrovia, California, the Interactive Voice System(IVS) is not speaker dependent, so you do not have to train the programme to respond to your voice. You simply spell out one word in the …
the speed of a rocket is determined by an old law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction (Newton's third law of motion). Current rocket technology is dependent on the speed of the exhaust gases emitted from its nozzle. If this speed could be increased by accelerating the gases …
computation might take a giant leap in its race against time, by storing data in single molecules that can transmit signals in femtoseconds (fs; 10 -15 seconds). Even the fastest of today's silicon-based computers rely on switches a million times slower, registering information in nanoseconds. Although there are some experimental …
lasers, like integrated circuits, are now an important part of many devices and techniques. Their unique properties like coherence and their non-dispersive nature help them play a crucial role in research in areas like quantum mechanics and communications. N Tessler and his colleagues at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, uk …
robots will have yet another dimension added to them to enhance the various capacities in which they can serve humans. If scientists at Israel's Weizmann Institute have their way, robots will be fitted with three-dimensional vision soon, allowing them to carry out tasks that require a perception of depth. The …
a night-time boost to car safety is in the offing from an affordable infrared ( ir ) camera that will detect hazards beyond the limit of headlights. ir night vision systems are currently the exclusive preserve of military vehicles and warplanes. But researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory ( ornl …
milking machines can now have a system to detect whether a cow has developed mastitis (inflammation of udders) or not. The system can detect early signs of mastitis much before the painful inflammation develops, by monitoring the electrical conductivity of milk as it passes the milking machine. The infected cells …
the dynamics of glass is what recent work by P Chandra and colleagues at the nec Research Institute, Princeton, us , may shed a new light on. In our understanding of the nature of the states of matter, it is generally accepted that for any substance, rigidity and order always …
