Bharat Rakshak

krishnan wrote:wont work here

krishnan wrote:nothing to do with possibility , but will people in here accept something like that ?? We will have to see

Aditya_V wrote:Everyday , when I take my morning walk, I notice a lot of bad smell from certain gaarbage/ from drains. These must contain a lot of methane. Is there any way we can haarness the methane generated from garbage and drains in Indian cities and use it for electricity generation. This coupled with Solar panels and water heaters in Buildings could be useful to us.

5 January 2015 Last updated at 19:21 GMT

A team of researchers in the Netherlands has discovered that potatoes can grow in earth fed by salty sea water.

The development could spark a revolution in the way food is produced in land previously considered unsuitable for agriculture.

Anna Holligan reports from the Dutch island of Texel.

Lalitesh Katragadda, the man behind Google Maps, is picking up where Nandan Nilekani, former Unique Identification Development Authority of India (UIDAI) chairman, left off.

After quitting his lucrative job as Google’s India head for products in March last year, Katragadda is building a national information platform - an exhaustive database of information on the ‘next billion’ people in India.

He is using the same method as he had for Google Maps.

He has set up a core team of engineers to develop this platform, which will be accessed by users to build a database. Crowd-sourcing of information is also on the cards.

“When you talk about an information platform for the next billion, Aadhaar is a very important tool. But a lot more can be done to make information more useful and powerful, for everyone,” Katragadda says. “Aadhaar is the enabling infrastructure, and the government is looking at other tools as well. But there is a need to build a more enabling infrastructure.”

“Today, all that people like, say, slum-dwellers have for identity is a little Aadhaar slip or a voters’ card. How about an information system that lets you know who these people are and track what they do? This might even solve the problem of finding a reliable maid or a trustworthy driver,” he added.

Trust comes through validation or authentication by more people, almost the same way as the Google Mapmaker works. “Everything in Mapmaker was drawn and authenticated by some people and machines.”

Katragadda, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and a doctor of philosophy (Robotics) from CarnegieMellonUniversity, is credited with developing Google Mapmaker, a tool that eventually led to the creation of Google Maps.

He had joined Google in 2002, when a robotics start-up he founded in San Francisco was acquired by the search giant.

Subsequently, he moved to India to set up Google’s India operations, the first international engineering centre for the Mountain View, California-headquartered company.

Katragadda, who is also advising the central and Andhra Pradesh governments on redesigning the fibre grids to make high-bandwidth internet available to all at affordable prices, says an information platform like the one he is building can have a transformative impact.

What he is trying to build, he says, is a transformative project like Aadhaar, even if not as stupendous.

Aadhaar, he suggests, could succeed to an extent because it was backed by the government machinery, with fixed a budget and manpower. “It’s a stupendous task if an organisation does it. It’s a straightforward task if people do it.”

He, however, agrees there are some risks in his project, too, as he is looking to establish digital footprint for those not accustomed to using information technology, not even for entertainment. Many of them do not even know how to send a mobile text message.

“Mapmaker was successful because of participation from educated people, who were already were internet savvy. This platform has participants who are not familiar with technology. So, there is another level of risk,” he said.

Katragadda is now in the process of incorporating a company that will eventually go for external funding as the work progresses. However, he would be cautious while roping in investors.

“There is a lot of interest but I want to be cautious and take investment at the right time. The moment you take investment, you are responsible for returns. Information systems like these, especially for the next billion, will take longer to mature,” he added.

Winter and Wright work at MIT’s Global Engineering and Research Lab, or GEAR, which designs technical solutions tailored for use in developing countries. The desalination project is being backed by Jain Irrigation Systems Inc. of India and by MIT’s Tata Center for Technology and Design, which researches technologies for developing countries. The center is backed by the founding family of Tata Group, one of India’s largest corporations.India has 16 percent of the planet’s population but just 4 percent of its fresh water. Much of this water is underground, and about 60 percent of it is brackish — not quite true seawater, but too salty to be safely consumed by plants, animals, or people. Still, Winter said about 70 percent of Indians must drink groundwater, even when it’s too salty.
This salt can be removed in several ways, but water desalination has traditionally required lots of electric power. Yet about a quarter of India’s 1.1 billion people live in rural villages of 5,000 or fewer, where for many, the availability of electricity ranges from sporadic to nonexistent.Instead of relying on an electric utility to drive their desalination system, Wright and Winter use a bank of lead-acid batteries, similar to those found in cars and trucks. These are charged up during the day by a set of solar panels, making the system entirely self-sustaining. The total package is designed to produce enough water to irrigate a small farm or to serve the daily drinking and cooking needs of up to 5,000 people.

The patented AT Transformer technology combines the capabilities of a helicopter, such as the ability to take off and land anywhere, with the capabilities of an off-road automobile. The AT Black Knight Transformer completed driving tests in December 2013 and completed its first flight tests in March 2014. The Black Knight Transformer is the world’s largest multicopter that is controlled and stabilized with propeller speed. The aircraft has a maximum takeoff weight of 4,400 lb.

After Digital Locker trial version was launched in Feb, 2015 over 1,00,000 Digital Lockers have been opened by the Citizens, within 100 days of its launch representing the trust, benefit and convenience offered by the Digital Locker to a common man.

Digital Locker is one of the key initiatives under the Digital India vision, which is aimed at eliminating the usage of physical documents. Digital Locker will allow various agencies to push the documents into the Digital Locker of citizens mapped to their Aadhaar Number. It also allows citizens to upload their own electronic documents with or without digitally signing them using the e-sign facility allowing them to store all such documents for posterity. The Digital Locker system has the following advantages:

a) Print anytime from anywhere – All electronic documents will be in a printable, enabling user to print from anywhere. Also, incase of disasters, non availability of documents, it is easily accessible by user even when the documents are lost

b) Convenience – No more long queues or procedures to get the documents.

c) Free of cost – Digital Locker facility is provided to Indian Citizen free of charge and will enable its use by lower strata of society.

d) Shareable – residents can easily share the documents with other agencies/departments without having to share photocopies, scan copies, document uploads, etc. Sharing can easily be done even on feature phones even via SMS and text based systems.

e) Verifiable – most importantly, government documents and certificates issued can be verified online, eliminating the use of fake documents/certificates.

f) Secure - Only the owner has the right to see and share the documents as per their own requirement and convenience.

Few other benefits envisaged by users are

a) A number of individual certificates such as Birth, Domicile, etc., may be applied online to speed up the process. The user agencies will be authorised to access the documents by the owner of digital locker. Also, the local bodies issuing these documents can push these certificates in digital form directly in the Digital Locker eliminating the risk of fake document. This will greatly benefit the people who find it difficult to have proper storage space for physical documents. This would be safe during the National Disaster such as floods, cyclones, fire etc.

b) Hassel free registration of

a. Sim Card

b. LPG connection

c. Driving License

In effect Digital Locker will touch every Citizen life by bringing in lot of convenience and therefore fulfilling the government vision of citizen centric governance model of providing services at the door step of citizens.

In India, most of the government documents used for various purposes are in physical form. This inter alia means that every time a citizen needs to avail any service, a self attested photo copy either in physical or scanned form is shared. Use of physical copies of document creates huge overheads in terms of manual verification, paper storage, manual audits etc. and thereby incurring cost and inconvenience for all the stakeholders. This also creates problem for various agencies to verify the authenticity of these documents, thus, creating loopholes in the eco system leading to usage of fake documents/certificates by certain unscrupulous elements. The Digital Locker is going to address these concerns.

Scientists at IIT Roorkee have come up with a new construction technique for earthquake resistant housing using recycled pieces of rubber tyres and the scheme is based on the principle of dissipating energy.

Pankaj Agarwal of the department of earthquake engineering, IIT Roorkee told HT: “This is based on interlocking of pre-cast slotted concrete blocks with the help of energy dissipation links. These links are prepared by recycling pieces of rubber tyres laminated by very thin steel plates. These links not only restrict the movement of each concrete block is in all possible directions but also dissipate the energy through yielding under extreme earthquake loading conditions.”

Describing the methodology Agarwal said: “The load capacity of these links is kept lower than that of the concrete blocks so that under strong earthquake shaking, the energy is dissipated through friction between concrete blocks and the deformation of links without damaging the concrete blocks.”

The seismic performance of this interlocked block masonry system with energy dissipater links has been verified under simulated strong earthquake conditions on the shake table testing facility.

dwaipayandhar wrote:When I am trying to register with Digilocker it is saying that my mobile number is not registered. How can I register my mobile number with aadhaar?

NASA research into flexible, high-temperature space materials may some day improve personal fire shelter systems and help wildland firefighters better survive dangerous wildfires.

WASHINGTON: A 17-year-old Indian-origin boy in the US has developed a low-cost
3D-printed robotic arm that is programmed to replicate movements of a human hand
- such as pinching, grabbing or holding a spoon.

Nilay Mehta, student of the Irvine High School in California, US, has won six science
fair awards so far for his creation, including third place at an international
fair held earlier this year.

The robotic arm, made with 3D printed parts, operates by voice command. The user
can make the hand perform specific movements by speaking into a small microphone
attached to the arm.

"You can say 'spoon' and the hand will make a
shape that will be able to hold a spoon," Mehta said.

The hand can also
simulate "pinch," "grab" and other common figurations.

Mehta began
researching project ideas last year for the science fairs he wanted to enter.

......

vayu tuvan wrote:AmberG: That is a pie in the sky and had been from the days of Arnos Penzias' proposal within months of stepping down from the post of Chief of AT&T bell labs Research center at Morristown. Only now there are some results - this is in the past five years or so. Large scale manufacturing of the kind you are talking about is a holy grail and the applications are limited. India faces more pressing problems which need to be solved urgently which also require similar or even far more challenging fundamental research.