Ever wondered how you can hear your name in a crowd, amidst all the chaos? Because it’s YOUR name. Your brain has been trained for several years to recognise it as your identity. Hearing it means someone is in need of your attention. Imagine being interrogated, or interviewed. If you are in a position of taking a…
Take an exam - or any equivalent of a pressure situation - presentations at work, project submissions at college. Anything. The nights before deadlines stretch forever. For a large part of the world, the solution is mug of coffee. Nobody minds a performance boost. There used to be a time when mothers thought having capsules of cod liver…
Remember the New Horizons mission? Beautiful images of Pluto will remain our closest encounter with any planet for the next few centuries at least. It's a momentous achievement for humanity - and it was realised largely thanks to an element after the planet itself - Plutonium. The New Horizons spacecraft used plutonium-238 to generate electrical…
I grew up in a time when families had their own general physicians, who equipped with all the family medical history, were called on to treat every ailment – small and big. This practice gave way to the era of specialists, who had their amazing skill-set that curtailed to a specific organ system or a…
Our ability to harness energy would figure high up on the list of factors helping us dominate the planet as a species. With time, we've made expected strides on to more efficient energy utilization. We're not burning wood anymore - or at least, most of the planet isn't. Instead, we're hopelessly dependent on coal and…
Neural networks have always been an unexplored area of the human brain. Some of the negative consequences of evolution are neural anomalies. Neural anomalies make detection of neurological diseases harder. Despite that, modern research and study of the brain from its embryonic development till ‘brain death’ has been producing satisfactory results. This not only involves the application of neurology, but…
Adjudged one of the 10 best emerging technologies of 2015 according to MIT, Supercharged Photosynthesis is stepping up to meet the increasing crop demands of the world’s growing population. Recently, geneticists from all corners have been analyzing the result of experiments conducted on engineered crops in 12 laboratories spread across 8 countries. The results are certainly…
Since the start of the industrial revolution, our main source of energy has been fossil fuels – coal, petroleum, and natural gas. But with the rising issues that arose with their usage, the world has been shifting stance. Over 441 nuclear reactors are currently running in about 31 countries, and they account for 11% of…
As the self-proclaimed ‘superior’ species on planet Earth, we've always been quick to point that our brain, with its amazing thinking prowess, has given us our edge over other species. Our brain has not only provided us with the ability to ‘sense’ our environment but to think and plan. Anticipation and execution of tasks, movement, growth…