RESEARCH

The train was moving as if inebriated. After hundreds of jigsaw-puzzle shaped irrigated fields, thousands of trees and lampposts, millions of rhythmic taps of the train-wheels' on the conjoint tracks and a billion stars in a moonless night, it stopped at a semblance of a station. A ramshackle structure was there, in which an excuse of a government servant, whose designation is a euphemism: "Station Master", was seen serving in odd hours, lest one should say the administration of the country does not work. In Baba's rectangular arms' lock, about five feet above ground level, I descended on what was supposed to be the railway stoppage of a paean-like name of a town—Bokaro Steel City. It seemed Baba knew the Bada Babu. A child all of three, I used to wonder those days how almost every person the elders came across appeared an acquaintance. After the mandatory niceties, we left along a serpentine way that looked like the parting of hair of an old lady with thinning ha

Google's new platform, Android, takes on the might of Nokia's Symbian, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry, promising to turn handsets into fully functional PCs. Google must now take the quantum leap It has been reported that Google, through a collaboration with 33 other companies, is going to launch in two years a Rs 4,000 mobile phone that will replace personal computers completely. Google's spokespersons say that the alliance is targeting Internet-enabled smart phones where the asking price worldwide is closer to $ 200 rather than $ 20. The Open Handset Alliance will include handset makers, technology developers and carriers, the prominent among them being Qualcomm, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica, LG, and Samsung. Google will offer up something called the "Android Mobile Software Stack", an integrated family of software including an operating system and new mobile applications. If you access the World Wide Web on a machine of Dell, H

The James Bond film, Die Another Day, had a fictitious North Korean terrorist scheming to set the Earth ablaze with harnessed solar energy. Now, some scientists want to use the idea to burn out asteroids rushing headlong towards us. Surajit Dasgupta differentiates science from fiction Last week, a large section of the popular Indian media was abuzz with the possibility of an asteroid, Apophis, hitting the Earth after William Ailor, director of the Centre for Orbital and Re-entry Studies, Aerospace Corporation, predicted that the collision could occur in 2036 if not in 2029. Elsewhere, Boris Shustov, director of the Institute of Astronomy, Russia, said on October 1 that the impact of the asteroid, of size equal to three football fields, would cause far more devastation than what the asteroid that hit Siberia in 1908 did. The Tunguska astral event affected 2150 sq km and blasted eight crore odd trees. The force of the impact was about 1,000 times more powerful than that by the atomic bo