Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Yesterday’s science fiction is today’s reality as humans have already begun producing oxygen on Mars says Satyen K. Bordoloi In the climax of the 1990 sci-fi cult classic Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger is flung out into the atmosphere of Mars. His eyes and limbs begin bulging as there’s no oxygen to breathe. But just before this, he had managed to activate a giant instrument left by aliens that begins making oxygen on the planet’s surface. The result: he survives as the atmosphere of Mars is terraformed. Something similar has been happening since April 20, 2021 on the surface of Mars…

India’s EV market is being driven by cheap public vehicles says Satyen K. Bordoloi as he outlines how it could lead a global shift In December 2020, I witnessed a new vehicle in Guwahati. Regular buses don’t ply on interior routes serviced by cycle rickshaws, auto-rickshaws and trekkers i.e. modified SUVs like Tata Sumo. 8 months into the pandemic, I found the city full of electric rickshaws – called tomtoms locally – that ferried up to 6 people on these routes. Besides ease of driving and cost-effectiveness, their popularity also rested on the less paperwork they demanded. Since then, I’ve…

Video streaming makes up a bulk of global internet usage today, but how it came to pass reveals the ultimate human ingenuity writes Satyen K. Bordoloi When the first concert was broadcast live in 1993 as a proof of concept by Xerox, it hogged nearly half of the world’s total available internet data. No one thought of it back then, but that first streaming would become a metaphor for today when over 80% of all internet traffic is video i.e. streaming, and an average person is said to spend nearly 100 minutes daily watching videos. As this graph on the…

The world is producing so much data, there is a real danger of running out of storage if current trends continue writes Satyen K. Bordoloi while outlining solutions Bend the wrist, adjust the screen for an imperfectly cute frame, say ‘oooo’ (not smile) and press the red button on screen to click a selfie whose bits float through cyberspace and get saved in the ‘cloud’. You didn’t even think once before doing this. But you just added your 3 megabytes (MB) to, hold your breath, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data the world generated today. Data might be the new…

Networking technology enabling streaming of everything from YouTube and Netflix to Zoom meetings, has transformed the world, yet Satyen K. Bordoloi says, it is only just putting on its shoes Back in 1998-99 when I first began using the internet, speeds were so slow that I heard of romances starting while waiting for a page to load. None then fantasized that in less than two decades, we’d stream videos with resolution high enough to project live to a big theatre screen. If a woman went into a coma in 1998 and emerged 20 years later, streaming would seem like sorcery.…

Climate Change is exacerbating the problem of cooling data centers leading us into a spiral with implications for the very existence of the human race finds Satyen K. Bordoloi When both Google and Oracle data centers in London went out together on July 19th this year, it seemed like a scene straight out of the series Mr Robot where its protagonist tries to reset the world by destroying data centers storing financial information. The actual reason turned out to be something which so far we thought affected only humans: heatwaves caused by Climate Change. Oracle left this message after this…

As the world faces a power crisis and climate catastrophe, giant batteries have become a necessity, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he discovers simple solutions already being rolled out The 1970s was a crisis decade. Wars in the middle east had disrupted oil supply worldwide. In response, an English chemist – Stanley Whittingham decided to use a 1912 idea to try and make a battery. It would take him and many scientists over a decade to perfect the Lithium-ion battery that would win them a Nobel prize and fuel the 21st century’s great energy addiction by powering its best devices.…

Artificial Intelligence has become so ubiquitous that it has become indispensable even on the cricket field , writes Satyen K. Bordoloi As fan hysteria reached a fever-pitch during the epic India-Pakistan cricket match yesterday, #Hotstar trended on Twitter. With the match poised to be one of the closest finishes between the arch-rivals, viewership counts on the official digital broadcaster reached 1.3 crore. Folks marvelled at the technology used to achieve this. #Hotstar began trending yesterday and fans quickly started sharing screenshots with 1.3cr on top right of their screens But cricket fans need not have taken screenshots of the 13…

The opportunities for the tech sector are manifold as India steps up the use of Artificial Intelligence in its armed forces but we must also be wary of potential misuse, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi An infiltrator trained in a neighboring country reaches the border to re-enter India and finds no sentry. Just barb wires and cameras stuck on poles. He quietly cuts the wires and reaches his usual rendezvous point only to be welcomed by a large posse of army men. The infiltrator wonders who tipped the forces because he hadn’t informed anyone of his plans. What he does not…

The Internet of Things has turned the world into a chip-hungry monster writes Satyen K. Bordoloi on, what is kind of, its 40th anniversary In 1982, students and faculty at the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) faced a peculiar irritation. After their department was expanded, offices moved away from a coke vending machine popular with caffeine-addict programmers. Now they had to walk three floors down to get a coke, often to find it empty or worse: pay and get warm coke. A few of them got together, installed micro-switches to “sense how many bottles were present in…