Author: Nigel Pereira

In addition to terrestrial, marine, aerial navigation, NavIC is also being used for military operations, disaster management, geodesy, resource monitoring and more. It’s been exactly 60 years since India started its journey into outer space. It was November 21st, 1963 when India launched its first rocket, an American rocket called The Nike Apache which was taken to its launch site on a bullock cart before being successfully launched 207 Kilometres into the atmosphere. Replica of Nike Apache. (Image Credit: Magerson Bilibio on Flickr) Fast forward to August 23rd, 2023, India becomes the first country to land a vehicle on the…

While the idea of getting bacteria to remove nutrients and generate electricity during the process sounds Utopian, it’s not unthinkable anymore! While most people associate Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria with severe diarrhea and stomach cramps, a recent study suggests this humble gut dweller could be the answer to a couple of important problems. Those problems being energy production and waste management. Low-temperature electron micrograph of a cluster of E. coli bacteria, magnified 10,000 times. Each individual bacterium is oblong shaped. (Image Credit: Wikipedia) That’s right, the answer to the energy crisis may just be a simple strain of bacteria…

Humans have been mesmerised by fire since the beginning of time and celebratory fireworks are a tradition that is literally centuries old. Fireworks are an integral part of so many cultures across the globe that it’s difficult to picture the world without them. That being said, however, fireworks have increasingly come under fire, no pun intended, for being unsustainable, polluting the environment, and even creating unhealthy and dangerous working conditions. While Diwali, Chinese New Year, or the 4th of July are all unimaginable without fireworks lighting up the skies, the recent incident with protestors in France using fireworks as weapons…

While many say a water-fueled car is impossible, the guy who built the first internal combustion engine thought otherwise. A car that runs on water would change the world, period. From an economy that practically runs on the petrodollar to the oil-rich countries that have grown wealthy beyond measure, a lot would change. That’s probably why many people believe the industrialists and oil tycoons of the world keep suppressing this invention every time it comes out. Stanley Meyer’s Water fuel cell concept. (Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons) The fact that Stanly Meyer, one of the first people to achieve fame by…

True brilliance is always found in the most unsuspecting places, like who would think a slime mould could design a railroad? The world of microbiology is like an entire other planet that exists alongside us but is just too small to see. If you’ve watched the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi or the hit post-apocalyptic show The Last of Us, you know exactly how beneficial or deadly this world can be. Image Credit: Netflix We don’t often think about microorganisms when we talk about intelligent creatures, in fact, most of us don’t think about microorganisms at all. What’s interesting about this…

The problem, however explains Nigel, is that when you mess around with the genetic sequences of a human embryo, you could be causing a number of unknown mutations at the same time. Can you imagine a future where you could edit your genes to remove unwanted inherited diseases, conditions, or traits? While one scientist has already spent three years in jail for editing genes in human embryos to create “designer babies,” a future where this practice becomes commonplace is not unthinkable anymore. Gene editing is the process of using “molecular scissors” to cut away an unwanted strand of DNA and…

Fionn Ferreira,an 18-year-old Chemistry student, discovered a new way to clean plastic from the ocean using Ferrofluid. A study in October last year revealed that the average person consumes about a credit card size worth of microplastics weekly. If that thought causes you anxiety, you’re not alone. Fionn Ferreira, an 18-year-old Chemistry student at Groninger University in the Netherlands at the time, was quoted stating ” I got really anxious when I found out about microplastics,” and explained how these pollutants will stay in our environment long after we stop using them. Anxiety can be a good thing sometimes, like…

A parliamentary panel has recommended the use of AI and “tiny robots” to help offset the uphill economics of agriculture on small farms in India. If any of you have ever tried your hand at farming or even just growing vegetables in your backyard you would know that controlling weeds is a major part of the battle, especially if you’re growing organically in soil. While there are a lot of ways to mulch the soil and even use fabric to prevent weeds from eating your plant food, the whole process can be quite expensive as well as labor intensive depending…

While technology isn’t at a place where it can resurrect our pets just yet, it is at a place where it can create genetically identical clones of them. Losing a pet is arguably the hardest day of a pet owner’s life and it doesn’t end there. What follows is often months and even years of longing and a sense of loss that isn’t easy to deal with. While technology isn’t at a place where it can resurrect our pets just yet, it is at a place where it can create genetically identical clones of them, provided of course that you…

“All you have to do is internally articulate words as if you were silently reading and the device, wearable like a headset, picks up signals from your brain and converts them back to natural language”. The definition of telepathy is to be able to communicate with someone using only your mind. While we haven’t achieved that yet and are still restricted to either the written or spoken word or in some cases sign language, we can now communicate telepathically with computers. Designed by an Indian MIT student Arnav Kapur, the AlterEgo enables users to communicate with machines, AI assistants, online…