Bharat Rakshak

Neshant wrote:

ramana wrote:I read this story in Bloomberg Businessweek issue while waiting in the doctors office.

Micromax Phones Eat into Nokia's Indian share

Pretty interesting stuff.

But does Micromax actually design its own phones or are these just relabelled imports from China ?

Motorola’s successful run with the Moto G and Moto E in the country has hurt most of the international as well as national manufacturers including Micromax. So, Micromax has decided to launch the Unite 2 for Rs 6,999 which not only matches up to the Moto E, but also comes across as a better device in some regards.

It is the only phone in country to support 21 languages which has been done with the aim of catering to every India. It has support for English, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Assamese, Marathi, Nepali, Bodo, Dogri, Konkani, Kashmiri, Maithili, Manipuri, Sanskrit and Sindhi.

Pattom wrote:I have a design for a produce (vegetable/fruit) vendor's cart that costs relatively little to manufacture but can significantly extend shelf life and reduce wastage of fresh produce. The cart is secure from pilferage and can also serve at night as a cot that provides some shelter from rain. Can anyone suggest an NGO that may be willing to manufacture and market it? I'm not looking for any personal returns, monetary or otherwise.

Please email shortput1 at gmail dot com if you have any suggestions. Thanks.

Yogi_G wrote:I have written this to Sri Modi, hope he takes note of it.

Dear Shri Modi ji,
I take great pride in your party coming to power, all the more satisfying as I have been associated with RSS right from my young age. Without paying heed to the conspiracy theory tag associated to the question of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) I humbly request that the GOI perform an objective study of the UFO phenomenon and ascertain if a perennial energy source technology can be obtained from the same. This will be a great service to humanity.

Smart Cities

Smart Parking
Monitoring of parking spaces availability in the city.

Structural health
Monitoring of vibrations and material conditions in buildings, bridges and historical monuments.

Noise Urban Maps
Sound monitoring in bar areas and centric zones in real time.

Smartphone Detection
Detect iPhone and Android devices and in general any device which works with WiFi or Bluetooth interfaces.

Eletromagnetic Field Levels
Measurement of the energy radiated by cell stations and and WiFi routers.

Traffic Congestion
Monitoring of vehicles and pedestrian levels to optimize driving and walking routes.

Smart Lighting
Intelligent and weather adaptive lighting in street lights.

Waste Management
Detection of rubbish levels in containers to optimize the trash collection routes.

Smart Roads
Intelligent Highways with warning messages and diversions according to climate conditions and unexpected events like accidents or traffic jams.

Smart Environment

Forest Fire Detection
Monitoring of combustion gases and preemptive fire conditions to define alert zones.

Air Pollution
Control of CO2 emissions of factories, pollution emitted by cars and toxic gases generated in farms.

Snow Level Monitoring
Snow level measurement to know in real time the quality of ski tracks and allow security corps avalanche prevention.

Landslide and Avalanche Prevention
Monitoring of soil moisture, vibrations and earth density to detect dangerous patterns in land conditions.

Earthquake Early Detection
Distributed control in specific places of tremors.

Smart Water

Potable water monitoring
Monitor the quality of tap water in cities.

Chemical leakage detection in rivers
Detect leakages and wastes of factories in rivers.

Swimming pool remote measurement
Control remotely the swimming pool conditions.

Pollution levels in the sea
Control realtime leakages and wastes in the sea.

Water Leakages
Detection of liquid presence outside tanks and pressure variations along pipes.

River Floods
Monitoring of water level variations in rivers, dams and reservoirs.

Smart Metering

Smart Grid
Energy consumption monitoring and management.

Tank level
Monitoring of water, oil and gas levels in storage tanks and cisterns.

Photovoltaic Installations
Monitoring and optimization of performance in solar energy plants.

Water Flow
Measurement of water pressure in water transportation systems.

Silos Stock Calculation
Measurement of emptiness level and weight of the goods.

Security & Emergencies

Perimeter Access Control
Access control to restricted areas and detection of people in non-authorized areas.

Liquid Presence
Liquid detection in data centers, warehouses and sensitive building grounds to prevent break downs and corrosion.

Radiation Levels
Distributed measurement of radiation levels in nuclear power stations surroundings to generate leakage alerts.

Explosive and Hazardous Gases
Detection of gas levels and leakages in industrial environments, surroundings of chemical factories and inside mines.

Smart Animal Farming

Hydroponics
Control the exact conditions of plants grown in water to get the highest efficiency crops.

Offspring Care
Control of growing conditions of the offspring in animal farms to ensure its survival and health.

Animal Tracking
Location and identification of animals grazing in open pastures or location in big stables.

Toxic Gas Levels
Study of ventilation and air quality in farms and detection of harmful gases from excrements

Domotic & Home Automation

Energy and Water Use
Energy and water supply consumption monitoring to obtain advice on how to save cost and resources.

Remote Control Appliances
Switching on and off remotely appliances to avoid accidents and save energy.

Intrusion Detection Systems
Detection of windows and doors openings and violations to prevent intruders.

Art and Goods Preservation
Monitoring of conditions inside museums and art warehouses.

eHealth

Fall Detection
Assistance for elderly or disabled people living independent.

Medical Fridges
Control of conditions inside freezers storing vaccines, medicines and organic elements.

Sportsmen Care
Vital signs monitoring in high performance centers and fields.

Patients Surveillance
Monitoring of conditions of patients inside hospitals and in old people's home.

Ultraviolet Radiation
Measurement of UV sun rays to warn people not to be exposed in certain hours.

Pattom wrote:I have a design for a produce (vegetable/fruit) vendor's cart that costs relatively little to manufacture but can significantly extend shelf life and reduce wastage of fresh produce. The cart is secure from pilferage and can also serve at night as a cot that provides some shelter from rain. Can anyone suggest an NGO that may be willing to manufacture and market it? I'm not looking for any personal returns, monetary or otherwise.

Please email shortput1 at gmail dot com if you have any suggestions. Thanks.

Biohackers Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi are working on crafting a plant-based concoction that’s nearly identical in makeup to what’s found in grocery milk.

To achieve this, they’ve gone so far as modifying sunflower oil so that it can take on a structural composition similar to milk fats, substituted lactose with galactose, a nearly indistinguishable sugar, and culturing yeast to release casein, a natural animal milk protein. If successful, the process they’ve developed could someday be used to churn out a wide range of dairy products, such as cheese, butter and yogurt.

The duo, both with bioengineering backgrounds, are the co-founders of Muufri, a San Francisco-based start-up that hopes to fashion the idea of lab-brewed milk as a more humane alternative for consumers. Funded by Singularity University’s Synthetic Biology Accelerator program, they’ve spent the last few months in a lab at University College Cork in Ireland, where they’re closing in on a prototype batch that’s 100 percent animal-free.


“If you have all the right ingredients, making milk by hand can actually be surprisingly easy,” Ryan Pandya says. (Muufri)
“If you have all the right ingredients, making milk by hand can actually be surprisingly easy,” Pandya says. “Part of the reason why we’ve come this far and to put in the effort to see if it would work is because we’re passionate animal lovers at heart.”

Ambitions to manufacture milk sans cow has been around for a least a century. In 1912, German scientists, using a mix of vegetables, created a synthetic mixture they claimed had a more nourishing creaminess than what you can get from a cow. Another notable effort in 1921 from an inventor in Boston led to a version made from grounded peanuts, oatmeal and “a pinch of salt.” None of these efforts, however, yielded anything comparable in taste and composition that would pass muster with the masses.

Since then, dairy farming in America has ramped up its output to account for as much as $140 billion annually. But to satiate growing demand, farmers have expanded the use of standardized practices that are known to be particularly resource-intensive. In fact, it takes about 1,000 liters of water to produce one liter of milk, according to data from the non-profit Water Footprint Network.

Thus taking the process of milk production down to where it’s simply a matter of chemistry and hacking yeast cultures, Pandya says, could potentially go a long way toward easing the industry’s strain on the environment. Besides, he adds, moving the process in-house, where each phase of production can be tightly controlled, would also ensure better sanitation, not to mention the added benefit of a longer shelf life.


“We’re basically using biotechnology to make milk without pasteurization and without the risk of contaminants like pesticides, hormones or bacteria that can spoil the milk quickly,” Pandya says. “It’s quite similar to the process to make medicine and insulin, so it will be super sterile.”

But perhaps the biggest advantage of milk that’s man-made is that it’s highly customizable. Each element, for example, can be processed separated and tweaked to whip up healthier formulations like lactose-free or cholesterol-free milk, without any significant compromises. Currently, the refining process for turning out such variations involves either using Lactaid, an enzyme, to break down lactose or high-speed centrifuging to remove fatty acids. In both instances, the taste is altered and, in the case of non-fat skim milk, minute amounts of cholesterol remain in oxidized form.

Team Muufri’s admits, however, that they may have a ways to go before having something that poses a legitimate challenge to traditional milk. Their latest test batch, while comprised mostly of plant-derived fats and sugars, isn’t entirely cow-free. The taste, though, Pandya describes as “97 percent” resembling milk. To get to 100 percent, they’ve taken the approach of feeding the DNA sequence for cow’s milk into the yeast’s genetic code to make casein, a technique they’re hoping to get perfect by early next month. Still, the crucial part is seeing whether they can scale up the system to where it’s feasible to make enough of the product for large segments of the population.

“The beauty of this method is that we can use the same DNA since the difference between various kinds of milk, like donkey’s milk or goat milk, has mostly to do with ratios of fat, sugars and proteins,” Ghandi says. “So the most important thing is to get the flavor as close to exact possible.”

At the moment, Ghandi and Pandya are pushing feverishly to have something in select stores in California before 2017. Just ahead though is a return trip to San Francisco on Aug. 19, where they aiming to unveil the world’s first glass of genuine milk, made entirely from scratch (or the closest thing to it).

The brilliant idea came to 34-year-old creative designer Anusheela Saha when she was talking to her domestic help, “She told me about the problems her children faced while studying at night. There are frequent power outages in her slum. This got me thinking.”

Saha’s solution was simple. Attach solar panels to schoolbags that collect energy during the day to power an LED light in the night. The bags are also equipped with a nifty device that converts a child’s movement into electricity as they walk around during the day.

krishnan wrote: Saha’s solution was simple. Attach solar panels to schoolbags that collect energy during the day to power an LED light in the night. The bags are also equipped with a nifty device that converts a child’s movement into electricity as they walk around during the day.

Like a number of other blood glucose measuring research efforts we've seen in recent years, such as carbon nanotube "tattoos" and biochips that measure glucose in saliva, the Princeton team's method doesn't require direct analysis of a blood sample.

Instead, the new approach detects the level of blood sugar by directing a specialized laser at a person's palm and measuring the amount of absorption by the sugar molecules in the person's body. Rather than the person's blood, the laser targets dermal interstitial fluid, which has a strong correlation with blood sugar.

Instead of near-infrared light, which is used by many medical devices, the Princeton team's method uses mid-infrared light. This is because although near infrared light is not blocked by water, making it suitable for use in the human body, it interacts with a number of acids and chemicals in the skin, making it unsuitable for detecting blood sugar.

However, the use of mid-infrared light presents its own problems – it is difficult to harness with standard lasers and requires relatively high power and stability to penetrate the skin and scatter off bodily fluid. The researchers found the answer in the form of a new type of device particularly capable of producing mid-infrared light called a quantum cascade laser.

Quantum cascade lasers boast the ability to produce one of a number of frequencies by passing electrons through a "cascade" of semiconductor layers. Recent developments have also provided increased power and stability, allowing the researchers to produce mid-infrared light with the properties required to penetrate the skin

India on Tuesday launched an ingeniously manufactured microscope that generates 3D images of objects. The Broad Spectrum Confocal Microscope has several applications in medicine and materials sciences. It uses an infra red beam which passes through a patented photonic crystal fibre made by the Central Glass and Ceramics Research Institute (CGCRI), Kolkata.

“The optic fibre produces multiple wavelengths from the laser due to its surface which has very small holes. This is similar to the way a peacock’s feather scatters light. This is projected on to the target object which allows us to see a three dimensional structure of the object,” CGCRI Director Kamal Dasgupta said.

The microscope was developed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) along with Vinvish Technologies, Thiruvananthapuram, under the New Millennium Indian Technology Initiative, an effort launched by the CSIR over a decade ago to develop technologies through collaborative efforts by research laboratories and technology companies in India.
Cost-effective
While similar confocal microscopes cost about Rs. 4 crore to import, these will be priced between Rs. 1.25 crore and Rs. 1.5 crore, said Suresh Nair of Vinvish Technologies.

“It has taken us two years to develop this with a Rs. 2.5-crore loan from CSIR,” he added.

Dr. Dasgupta said the complex fibre optics was a result of a decade of work which cost around Rs. 15 crore. In fact, it was these specialised applications of fibre optics that had made his centre’s work profitable, he said.

Minister of State for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh said, “This not only fulfils our goal of Make in India but it is also world class … A dream I cherish is to make the CSIR’s 38 labs into centres of excellence that would attract students from around the world. Scientists have also agreed to devote 12 hours every year to teaching in schools and colleges.”

vivek.rao wrote:http://www.libelium.com/top_50_iot_sens ... s_ranking/

.... snipped ...

To succeed at a moonshot, you need curiosity, impulse, and a problem that no one seems to be investing in.

For years, Google CEO Larry Page had dreamed about a tantalizing possibility: using balloons, rather than satellites, for communications.

There were plenty of reasons why the idea was interesting. Satellites take years to build and cost millions of dollars to build and launch. For someone used to releasing products in “beta,” and perfecting them through rapid iteration, this was a huge barrier to innovation. “You’re pretty averse in your development of these things,” Page said during a recent interview. What’s more, the cost and time involved in a launch often led to technology lock-in—if something you’ve invested millions in works, you’re going to stick with it rather than trying to perfect it and risk a setback.

Balloons offered an alternative. What if you could launch a balloon, test it, bring it down, learn something, and repeat, all in the course of a day? Then, you could go back and do it all over the next day. “It’s a natural question to ask,” Page said.

Many of Google’s moonshots—self driving cars, high-altitude wind turbines, and most recently ingestible nano-particles for early detection of cancer—started as zero million dollar problems. And as no one was working on them, Google was able to attract some of the top people in field, which Page says gives the company a huge advantage.

Page’s idea is no longer a zero million dollar problem. Google has invested millions in the projects, hired top scientists and conducted hundreds of tests in different environments. But at the genesis of this, and several other moonshots, there were some key ingredients: Page’s natural curiosity and his impulse for self-directed learning, which he traces to his education in a Montessori school.

“How do you play detective a little bit and then how do you convert that into things that can transform how a billion people can get their connectivity,” he said. “That’s the exciting part.”

vivek.rao wrote:
BTW, I had a chat with Survey General of GSI. He has a budget for 2000 crores to build a sensor network to achieve some of the goals such as smarty city or water system.

I will make a post in Technologies Useful for India thread. Please make contributions there.

Vriksh wrote:I have been working on an Idea for Urban transit system that allows personal (podded) rapid transport. Key features are that the system is vertically stackable, low footprint and promises to be cheaper than existing urban transit solutions. Need collaborators to flesh it out and get an alpha prototype for testing purposes. A large investment may be required to get a prototype out

I am confident that this will form the template largely replacing metro/rail/road systems for our smart city concept.

Frustrated at the lack of interest by the medical establishment in reducing the costs of diagnostic testing, and seeing almost no chance of getting the necessary research grants, Kanav Kahol returned home to New Delhi in 2011. He was a member of Arizona State University’s department of biomedical informatics. Kahol had noted that despite the similarities between most medical devices in their computer displays and circuits, their packaging made them unduly complex and difficult for anyone but highly skilled practitioners to use. As well, they were incredibly expensive — costing tens of thousands of dollars each.

Kahol knew that the sensors in these devices were commonly available and inexpensive, usually costing only a few dollars. He believed that he could connect these to a common computer platform and use commercially available computer tablets to display diagnostic information, thereby dramatically reducing the cost of the medical equipment. He also wanted to repackage the sensor data to make them intelligible to technicians with just basic medical training — the frontline health workers who do the tasks of physicians in parts of the world where physicians are in short supply.

Kahol and his Indian engineering team built a prototype of a device called the Swasthya Slate (which translates to “Health Tablet”) in less than three months, for a cost of $11,000. This used an off-the-shelf Android tablet and incorporated a four-lead ECG, medical thermometer, water-quality meter, and heart-rate monitor. They then enhanced this with a 12-lead ECG and sensors for blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate, blood haemoglobin, and urine protein and glucose. In June 2012, they sent this device to 80 medical labs for testing, which reported that it was as accurate as the medical equipment they used — but more suitable for use in remote and rural areas, because it was built for the rugged conditions there.

By January 2013, Kahol’s team had incorporated 33 diagnostic tests, including for HIV, syphilis, pulse oximetry, and troponin (relating to heart attack) into the Swasthya Slate and reduced its cost to $800 per unit. They also built a variety of artificial-intelligence–based apps for frontline health workers and started testing these in different parts of India.

According to reports that Kahol shared with me, in Muktsar Punjab, the number of antenatal care visits increased from 0.8 to 4.1 per mother after the Swasthya was deployed there. The blood-pressure and urine-protein sensors allowed for the diagnosis of a condition called preeclampsia, which is responsible for 15 percent of maternal mortality in India. A year earlier, only 250 mothers were screened for preeclampsia, and 10 were confirmed to be preeclampsic. Because the detection was very late in the pregnancy, eight of these mothers nevertheless passed away. After the introduction of the Swasthya Slate, 1,000 mothers were screened during their third trimester, of whom 120 were detected to have preeclampsia. All were given the necessary care, and there were no fatalities.

Vriksh wrote:Your email address Vivek? I will email you offline

Pattom wrote:I sent this suggestion to Modiji today. Would anyone care to comment?

A modular design for urban public toilets: modular toilets, with toilet & waste tank underneath comprising one unit; walls, flush unit, pipes, ceiling, water tank, solar cells, electrical system another unit. Bottom unit can be unlocked and slid out. Specially-designed trucks drive around replacing bottom units every few days, filling tanks with water, disinfecting walls with spray. Removed bottom units are taken to local centres, where the contents of waste tanks are fed to digesters and units cleaned thoroughly. Sensors relay information about water levels & waste tank status regularly. Multiple stalls slide into one another and can be taken away. Almost everything can be automated and hands-free, especially emptying the tanks and cleaning the whole unit.

Pattom wrote:I sent this suggestion to Modiji today. Would anyone care to comment?