RESEARCH

People were happy when it became the most popular search engine. When it offered virtually unlimited space in email accounts, only the competitors cribbed. Then it scared Governments with GoogleEarth and mobile phone operators with Rs 4,000 web-surfable cellphones. Here are two of its latest ‘Googlies’ G oogle is coming up with Google Health, its latest service — this time of personal health records management. This is how the service will appear on your computer monitors. You first have to be a ‘user’; in web service’s parlance this means registering at the site with personal details — in this case, your medical history as your physician has diagnosed. On the right section of the screen, the user’s health profile will appear in a sidebar containing the medical conditions he has experienced, the medications he has used for treatment, allergies (if any) and procedures adopted for cure. On the left hand side will appear another sidebar with URLs to the subscriber's profile data, medi

The US claims that destroying one of its defunct satellites with a missile was necessary for the hazard its toxic fuel posed to life on Earth. It's an understatement that the world isn't convinced; neither are American experts. Here is an exposition of a six-week (perhaps more) long drama K eep aside the game of American and international politics surrounding the recent shooting down of a defunct spy satellite by the US; the logistics and science involved in the exercise was simply fascinating. Once, not giving two hoots to international concern, the US Administration gave the order to demolish with a missile the 'dead' National Reconnaissance Office satellite, the Department of Defence needed to re-programme the weapons -- outfit three Navy cruisers, the USS Lake Erie, USS Decatur and USS Russell, with remodelled Aegis anti-missile defence systems and a total of three SM-3 missiles -- within a few weeks. The confusion: Too many cooks spoil the broth, they say. Much bef

T he Indian Railways’ act of using signal detonators (crackers) about a quarter kilometre away from outermost signal points to warn train drivers of approaching stations and yard’s staff of incoming trains under foggy conditions is a ludicrous anachronism in this high-tech era. The news comes in the wake of a recent Press release by the Railways that talked of a laser technology to be developed jointly by IIT, Kanpur, the Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) and other industry partners on a “fog vision instrumentation” project, which will allow trains to run unhindered in foggy conditions. This is nothing impressive. The largest public sector employer has never suffered from a dearth of ideas. But converting science into practicable technology has always been a problem with it. Browsing the documents of the Commission of Railway Safety, one comes across a plethora of ideas for safety that were either not implemented at all, or were meant only for privileged trains like Raj

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