A long hauling war of Wit and Wisdom  

Created by Rakesh Prabhakara

After posting my last article, I've been stagnant in the sense that I am resettling: I catapulted myself from India to Sacramento through a turbulence at least for 8 hours before approaching San Francisco. Well, all I gotta say is, It was an awesome experience traveling through time to see a highly civilized world just a hemisphere apart viz-a-viz the final destination for gen-Y |..|

It's been a month since I breathed the first air of the Hollywood Nation and I haven't yet felt the taste of fresh wine off Napa valley which I shall some day. I will not explain anything about life here because I would become a spoilsport messing up the whole movie scene: you must come and watch it for yourself.

umm... well, I shall kick-start building my blog as usual, with more innovations and excitements of course. I would however like to post a poem of mine which shall convey the fact that "No matter how good you are in solving Schrodinger wave equation, You gotta be good in solving common problems that you face around you to make a better person out of you. You are, what you are.

Justify Full"In the midst of having loads of work leading to concussion,
In the midst of having so many problems to raze,
I believe that a moment of time spent on discussion
would lead to what i call "breaking of espionage".

Had the Penicillin been kept as a secret elixir,
we would all be sulking on motorized wheel-chairs,
So come out with your ideas, dear friends,
for tomorrow lies in the hands of the youth, we embrace.

A Tree that caters you with shades and hopes,
was a sapling, remember, that our Forefathers catered love for.
So let us cater our ideas into this world,
for it shall overturn the , god forbid, very blurry future our heirs would crave for.

let us all hold hands and sing the scolion of "A New Generation",
let us break the anomaly with an utter denegation,
let us show the world the power of communication,
with dignity, pride, courage and determination".

I would like to say one thing before I turn on the conveyor laid beneath my feet, that progress is a vernacular term and I am a vernacular blogger but Life that we live each and every moment depends on how we look at it and what we make out of it. In my next posting, I shall unveil the beauty of Virtual ground, the Operational Amplifier and the Importance of negative feedback, just like in life.......

Filed under 0 comments

A Rock Band Analogy of a Current Source Circuit  

Created by Rakesh Prabhakara

I have decided to renovate the very basic foundation of pedagogy of electronics so that the aspirers get a better hold of the subject and be confident when they are asked to deal with larger or complex analog and digital circuits. I am thankful to a Bulgarian Analog circuit design guru named Prof. Cyril Mechkov, who has been the kind of person I’ve been looking for, to seek world-class education via Internet, through his web resources. I shall interpret few Analog circuit design concepts oftentimes through this blog, in a format understandable by a novice analog circuit designer, or even a Financier of a Rock Concert.

Well, did I say ‘Rock concert’? Yes I did. So, let me take up a Rock Concert organized by a crew not more than Seven members. Each crew member has his/her own role to play in order to run the show successfully. Let me introduce the crew:

1. The Financier is very important since not only will he finance the Organizer, but the entire crew. The Financier is the ‘VOLTAGE SUPPLY’ (could be variable; during Recession/Boom).

2. The Organizer is the key crew member who is highly unpredictable: he either runs the show or the show must run for him. The organizer is none other than the ‘LOAD RESISTOR’ (variable, of course).


3. The Band Manager: The Band Manager is a Variable Resistor (a potentiometer) who shall take care of the Rock Band (power them accordingly). He sets the BASE CURRENT.

4. The Bodyguards: The Bodyguards are Shielding RESISTORS in series with Organizer and Band Manager in case someone tries to mess with them (creating a short/open circuit since they are variable resistors).

5. The Rock Band: The ROCK BAND is our one and only, world famous, life transforming, TRANSISTOR (BJT) with BASE being the drummer, EMITTER being the Guitarist and the COLLECTOR being the Vocalist.

6. The Watchmen: The Watchmen are VOLTMETERS who keep a watch on (Voltage across) the Organizer and the Rock band, only during the show.

7. The Undercover: The Undercover is an Ammeter keeping an eye on the very purpose of the show, the COLLECTOR CURRENT, the very MUSIC driving the Rock Band and the Organizer, irrespective of the pressure from the Organizer or the Financier himself.

The following is the ramification of the Rock Concert crews in the form of a circuit, or vice versa:


The day of the ConcertJustify Full
Few sponsors this time and the Organizer has his fingers crossed on the Rock Band.

CASE I: A call from an Ad agency, an altercation and the Organizer is very angry, he builds up pressure (the LOAD RESISTANCE increases), The watchman 1 is alert (Voltmeter 1 shows rise in Voltage across the Load resistor: As Mr. Ohm once said “Resistance builds pressure”).

  1. The Rock Band is called upon and instructed by the Organizers to give their best on the stage (The BJT must perform well to keep the flow, to keep the game ticking, to keep the current through the load constant).
  2. The Manager instructs the Rock Band to perform the way he wants (The Potentiometer sets the BASE current).
  3. The show begins, the Rock Band gives their best and ease the tension, the Watchman 2 is relieved (The Voltage drop across the CE decreases since it has to compensate with the increase in voltage across Load resistor) and the overall situation is normal (Since Voltage across CE decreases, the Resistance across them decreases too, thus compensating the increased Load resistance).
  4. The Undercover sees no problem and ensures that everything is fine (The Ammeter shows constant current throughout the show). A successful concert at last!





CASE II: Wait a minute, what would happen if the Organizer showed no interest in the Band? (What if the Load resistance decreases?) The watchman 1 is relieved (the voltage drop across Load resistor decreases). The Rock band needs to pace up a little, the watchman 2 is alert now (the voltage drop across the CE of BJT increases thus increasing the CE resistance: so the overall resistance is constant, hence constant Current) thus keeping the show prevailing. The concert would be successful in this case too.

CASE III: Convinced are you? You shouldn’t be because the recession is showing up and the Financier seems trembling. The financier needs to cut cost by financing every crew members but the Manager and his Body Guard. So, Irrespective of how efficient or inefficient the Organizer be, how famous the Rock Band be, when the financier trembles, everyone trembles (Since the main voltage is supplying voltage for every component including the Potentiometer and the shielding resistance in series with it, with a variation in main voltage, even the current through the Potentiometer is affected and so is the BJT, the Rock Band).

As is said by great men, only Technology and Strategy can beat Recession, only a good conceptualization can help the Rock Concerts give their best all the time. Now a Separate financier is needed for the Manager and his Bodyguard. Manager is Important because he plays with the contracts and endorsements with various organizers, he promotes the Band. The Manager is clever, he knows that he can’t rely on the financier of his organizers; he knows he needs to be equipped in any case. What does he do? What is the new concept implemented? Until next time........

Filed under 0 comments

Kudremukh: A bizarre Repercussion of an infant in me  

Created by Rakesh Prabhakara



Coagulated with reminiscence, archived with colorful pictures of my childhood memories, and having been desperate to unleash the kind of attachments I have had with this stunningly beautiful, serene and enchanting place called Kudremukh, I have decided to discharge some of the electrifying moments I have had over there. Nonetheless, My verbatim shall not be able to exceed the limitless beauty of her, yet I shall try my best to emulate her.

A snapshot from the Google Earth showing the complete Kudremukh range:






Overlooking the Arabian sea, situated near a mountainous range of Chikamagalur district lies, yet, a secluded town that most of you people aren’t aware of. Kudremukh, being the largest reserve of tropical wet evergreen forest in Karnataka and also my birth place, is situated right in the middle of a relatively dense and wild basin (10th standard Geography :), famously known for its wildlife reserve. I spent most of my summer holidays during my school days with my cousins over there and It has always been a pleasant trip whatsoever.







Being calculative of number of days of stays over there, I would pack my clothes accordingly. My bus journey would be scheduled during nights wherein the departure time would be around 9:30 pm. Seated near the window, I would stare outside and see chaos, a chaos of mumbling passengers, distinctive voice of a lady announcing the bus schedules which no one could understand, and a faint smell of freshly loaded Diesel. With two 50 paisa coins in my hand, in the mean time of departure, I would get off the bus and run towards the weighing machine, a machine with colorful LEDs blinking with kaleidoscopic patters. As I stand on this machine, I would be asked to insert a 50 paisa coin and out comes a cardboard slip apparently showing wrong weight, but with a phrase quoted by some famous personality which is worth Crores of rupees. The diesel streaming towards the preheated engine, mixed with the air of busy Bangalore Bus stand, ignited by auspicious prayers of the passengers sitting beside me, including me, compressed by the force of mother Nature, and a sustaining torque ensured by a familiar Driver and a conductor, shall voyage me towards my destination for the next 9 hours, during which I shall do anything but be awake.



The dim light of a typical 6’o’clock in the morning occluded by the aromatic spell of the eucalyptus trees, making fringes on my covered eyelid, would wake me up to present herself in the form of a cool perennial breeze and hair pin curves impeding the throttle totter, the driver, wearing a scarf covering his ears and neck from the chilling cold aboard the altitude 1894 meters above the seal level. People of familiar attires of Uttar Kannada walking besides the road, with tethered cows and calves in their hands, smoking tobacco buds and greeting one another, is more than that meets the eye.





My uncle, Aunt, Grandma with a stick in her hand trying to scare away the oxens and cows from the garden full of blooming flowers and unusual herbs, and my three Cousin sisters would wait outside with anticipation and exhilaration. Hard water, derived mainly from the surrounding mountain lakes, rich of Calcium and Magnesium with depressed traces of Iron, Aluminum and manganese, may sound like a mineral booster but having a bath would be a disappointment due to the hydrophobic dispute between the soap lather and the skin. Leeches, crabs and red ants have been my acquaintances during my course of stay.

My cousins house:


The day life would be spent with Cartoon network with yogi bear, Scooby doo, and Laff-A-Lympics followed by Star TV, Sony TV and Zee TV soaps. The fun would begin after the sunset when we would head towards the Sports club. A bedazing group of Adults with their young ones trying to flap their tiny little arms in the swimming pool located just besides an expatriate, a group of old ladies with their glasses on their nose, pen in their hands and anticipation in their thoughts, playing the game of Lotto in the ballroom and we would either head towards the indoor badminton court or the downstairs Table Tennis court, the place where I saw the demise of one of my maxillary Lateral Incisors when a gentleman pounded his Table tennis racket onto my mouth while giving a smash to the opponent. After a ho-hum evening, we would have a chatty walk-n-talk either to a tacit Krishna Temple with a bonny pair of Marble sculpted Radha and Krisha floored at an altitude, or head back to the pavilion. The night is playacted in the nearby Nehru Circle where we, along with the neighbors, would play the I-Spy. An erected statue of Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru in the middle of the circle is the counting spot where I, being the youngest one, would be victimized all the time, for making the first count to ten. A whistle from the watchman (we also call him Goorkah) and we would run back home without making even a bit of noise.

The Nehru Circle:


The expatriate amalgamated with the club:


A bridge taking us to the circle below: The river below is dried up most of the times except in monsoon.


The main circle:


A view from the expatriate:


A fruits n vegetables market nearby:


Just a few steps from the house and we are closer to the Kendria Vidyalaya Kudremukh (KVK) and a few Kilometers into the cross roads and we have waterfalls, caves, Sanctuary, Bridges and importantly Lakhya Dam and Kudremukh Children park. Most of the times, with paltry inhabitants around, we rule the spot. Whatever it be, these noisome tourists are ironically the ones who mess up the places with polythene bags, empty whiskey bottles and cigarette buds; they are the perfect killjoys.





The same waterfall as above,but with me in it: Believe me, the mountain water was so chilly and pure that I spent an hour there: I found colorful and weathered stones, I saw eggs of Hornets on the wet rock. Placing my feet in the flowing water, I felt something that I can't really explain.



Kudremukh Park:



Soft stones weathered by aeonic mountain water carbureted with magic spells of coniferous ambiance, I cannot put more words than this for it shall remain by itself without my expressions. They are Mother Nature’s formula and I have no rights to interpose into describing her. You have to give her a visit and you shall know the density of my words. I am proud to be born here. Thank you.


Filed under 0 comments

Videos of the month: JULY  

Created by Rakesh Prabhakara

Future is one thinking away:



A laptop wanting to slim down after watching Mac book Aero (Awesome music) :



I was flattened by this video, I guess I'll have to start UPGRADING myself right here, RIGHT NOW!!!:



Ever wondered carrying your car in your purse?



Theory of Evolution simplified.

Filed under 0 comments

My Grandson rocks! What about me?  

Created by Rakesh Prabhakara



A lazy Sunday afternoon. Rain pouring down supressing the faint music of "The Importance of being Idle" by Oasis, in the earphones, one plugged in and the outher lying out and I, staring out and window watching the wet sprouting shrubs and briskly walking students with Umbrellas in their hands, am wondering where am I? What really am I doing?.

The society I've been living with has been an eclectic combination of traditional sense and modern senselessness; A misrepresentation of certain protocols which makes no sense at all, like the most intellingent species suceeded by us Humans, the 'ants' wandering around with no definite goal other than taking care of their Queens. A burgeoning population, people with no patience, no traffic regulations, people slogging on boring Microsoft Excel sheets with glittering Identity cards tugged to their new Denim blue OZ jeans and claiming that they are Professionals, Chaos, Chaos and Chaos!!!. I, on the other hand, am neither expecting nor expediting any progress and invariably am being haunted by stigmas' of gratuity. Thanks to the stupid society, for it thought me to CHANGE.



Firstly education fooled me by narrowing down my understanding to a bunch of mathematical expressions and chemical reactions, during which I could have build a Ham-Radio powered by hand drill, in the backyard of my home. Very late that I felt the hormonal reactions when I first hovered the mouse watching the pointer on the computer screen, during which I should have been watching artificial arms giving me the fingers, of coures I programmed them.


I danced for my heart beats when I was chased by a Stray Dog while riding my new Hero Ranger Bicycle, when I was supposed to be bitten by genetically mutated baby veloci-raptors in the newly built Jurassic park (above) just few Kilometers away from my home. My grandson surely rocks!



Now that I am 24, I happen to hear the natures premeditated news that a company from Massachusettes is releasing the first ever flying car. I shall soon hear that a Blah Blah lab successfully demonstrated a robot that could soon replace your lazy project lead, or manager. Study, Graduate, Earn, Marry, Conceive, Stock exchange, relatives, mid sized car, a 3BHK condo and life insurance: these are phrases which shall be hardwired into every contemporary fools besides me, BUT NOT ME.



How can I compete my Grandson then? If I happen to pen down a book of mine, it would make no sense untill after 200 years, during which a cataclysmic Extinction Level Event (ELE) would show herself unexpectedly and the successfully surviving civilization would later unearth my book and make it their CONSTITUTION. Of course my Grandson would cover up remaining chapters and, maybe, revamp the Preamble. What I mean to say is that I would not see any transformations in my life and be jinxed by emotions and serendipity.

In the wars of Science and religion, wit and wisdom, husbands and wives; we spend our life with newspapers in which we never bother to read the contents and be satisfied with highlighted headings; This is an everyday routine, but at other hemispheres of sentiency, it would be in the form of a business phones or answering machines and life is just as analog as it can be. What would my grandson do when he would have celebrated his 54th birthday? He would stare outside through the window and see a faintly transparent geodesic dome covering the entire city he is living in, with global warming at its fullest throttle. He would prefer taking his grand daughter to a flight cruise (shown below) around the valleys of New Zealand which would be a minute drive from Bangalore,


rather than taking her to a walk in the downtown with fears of crashing space cars. Get back home and he shall drink a cocktail of Organic fruits juice prepared by his android maid.



His Bathroom:



His car in the garage:



His wash basin, ain't bad:



"Oh, the monday fever":



His wife's car, An Audi Calamaro:



His Son's 15th year birthday gift:


I would like to end up saying, sitting besides the same window, watching the same wet sprouting shrubs and students walking with their umbrellas in their hands, that my life rocks in a different way!.


Filed under 0 comments

Me and IISC: A Farewell  

Created by Rakesh Prabhakara



Like said, you fetch Apples only from the orchards, Grapes from the vineyards and Honey from the hives, you sure fetch Excellency from the Indian Institute of Science (IISC). The aroma of sophistication surely influences your genes unless you wish to grow strawberries out of pine trees. Brewed with the rainwater splashing over my raincoat during my Kindergarten and school days, with the tears of joy of having my first video game and with sweet memories of finches tweeting and singing the spring songs during the Aprils, My 24 years of stay here has injected in me an everlasting aura of benignity, honesty and formidability: Being an IISCian is a legacy, a class, a certification.

Before you deploy yourself off to an alien world outside, just a compound aside or an outsider beside, you still have soil of ages stuck in your roots and this soil shall last till you perish into the abysmal complicacy of the modernization which is an axiomatic proposition: an entrapment of unavoidability. This is due to the variation in the cognition spectrum of the clusters of people living within and outside the campus and your relatives are no exceptions. Besides, you are weaponed with tough shields of intricate Sentiency that only you can feel and never fall for falsely jetted professionalisms and IISC shall assure you of that: you feel like an Iron Man.

IISC is nature in its purest form: Exigency is not the schema of progress here. Of course external world has subsetized certain parts of the campus but if you take Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Biology, you will see bright yellow amber gums glued to the old British walls of the respective Departments with the DNA of pureness trapped within them, with absolutely no external influences. In fact when you go near these Departments, you get Goosebumps for sure. Do visit it as it is a temple of perpetual mightiness.



Few IISCians that I would like to mention have been highly influential in my life:

1. Mr. Nagendra who was working on genetic coding of groundnuts in the Department of Molecular Biology and who also thought me Vedas after my thread ceremony. I was influenced to music, violin and mrudhangam during this time.

2. Prof. Bhat, the then chairman of Physics Department, who educated me of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and Nanotechnology when I approached him to do my 12th standard Physics Investigatory project on Superconductivity. I had burnt my index finger with Liquid Nitrogen there.

3. Prof. Sharma of Ecological Science department who explicated to me the importance of Bio-diversity with stunning images of his research work on Elephants in the Bandipur National Park. I was the head scout, I guess during my 7th standard.

4. Mr. Ravi Kumar Nair, My Mathematics teacher who bestowed me confidence and courage during my school days; The days of Half-Life 2.

5. Prof. S. Mohan of Instrumentation Department, who enlightened me of the six sigma rules of life, ways to deal with administrative bureaucracy, and ways to focus on the subjects of one’s passion in life.

6. Prof. Ananthasuresh of Mechanical engineering, an M.I.T PostDoc who influenced me when I used to attend his seminars and casual talks. I learnt the following “The four quadrants of life”, “Viswamitra - Nakshatrika system”, “compliant mechanics in autonomous robots” and of course the “Pipe crawler” for which I did some Microcontroller coding.

7. Prof. Patnaik of CEDT who offered me an 8085 board which looked like a jewel box. I tasted the misti-doi (sweet curd) during Durga Pooja with him besides me after I completed my 4th semester summer project under him. I learned a lot about digital electronics under him. He is long retired.

8. Prof. Rudra Pratap, the MATLAB guru of IISC. I met him during the Minnesota bridge collapse incident and he told me that the collapse was due to failed sensor telemetry. He explained the Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN) and importance of Analog Integrated Circuits integration with sensors. I happened to watch a firsthand video of astounding Microfab facility, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland that he captured when he was on Sabbatical to EPFL.

My last month of stay in the campus and only I know the pain. A very sacred relationship that we had needs to be terminated on the judgment day being 8th of August on which I shall be leaving to Sacramento. These are some of the things that can’t be explained. Recently when I attended the IISC centenary conference, I saw alumnus who stayed here for more than 50 years and I could hear faint white noise jetting out of them and spreading all over the auditorium of their inexplicable attachments with the IISC. The nostalgia of her beauty, serenity and attire of nihilistic delusion where lectures from great minds would sound like vedic chants of ages, shall haunt me for eternity.

“Bless me oh Mother IISC ! for I shalt bow in front of thee, with hopes and faith".

Filed under 0 comments

My Ten Wishes  

Created by Rakesh Prabhakara

Ever since I hit my puberty and started snuffing through Science magazines, I have dreamt of being a super-human being. I lit two match-box rockets during my school days and both failed to defy the gravity and not only that, they fumigated the entire neighborhood . I messed up my room with an innovative pulley system that could transport coins from one corner to the other with ease. I glued a tethered cork ball to a ceiling fan to see it rotate fuzzily. But with upgradation in imagination, we would want to see "more than that meets the eye".

I shall pen down ten such vague imaginary ideas that i would wish to see, to have, to rule. In the past, when cell phone was introduced into the market, it was a toy for the super-riches, but now it is owned by more than half the population on this planet. The same applies to music record systems which are now found in every pockets. Crystal-ball gazing is a fraught endavour, but I have decided to take the plunge. Here i begin:

1. Super-Vision

Who could ever pass up the chance to try on a pair of real X-ray specs? You may not always like what comes into view, but endowed with Superman-like vision, you would be able to see through solid walls, peer in at your neighbours or keep a watchful eye on your kids upstairs. Unfortunately, they still don’t exist, despite what those flummoxing scenes from the Super-Man movie suggest. Yet there are some technological tricks that can give you the next best thing. Unlike visible light, radio waves can pass through solid materials. In 2006, engineers at Cambridge Consultants in the UK announced they had built a briefcase-sized system called the Prism 200 which can detect people through a brick wall by firing off pulses of ultrawide-band radar and listening for returning echoes.





According to the company, these pulses can pass through building materials over 40 centimetres thick, and spot activity over a range of up to 15 metres. The device could be used to track people in hostage situations, the company suggests, but it has a crucial weakness. To avoid being blinded by walls and other fixed structures, it is designed to only register objects that generate rapidly varying echoes. In other words, it can only detect people when they move. Even human statues would be hard pressed to avoid detection by radar sensor, however. A research team at the Technical University of Munich in Germany has built a device that can pick up tiny motions like breathing, or even a beating heart, through a closed door. His team found that radio waves at between 433 megahertz and 24 gigahertz can pass through skin and bone but are partly reflected by the fatty layer surrounding muscles such as the heart. The team has exploited this by using the Doppler effect to pick up sub-centimeter changes in movement caused by a beating heart or the motion of the lungs. Lets hope to see one such in the near future. Now comes the second one.

2. Disappearing Act

Few dreams have flipped from science fiction to fact as quickly as “invisibility cloaks”. The first , which worked only for microwaves, was unveiled in 2006. Since then the field has been inundated with attempts to make cloaks to rival Harry Potter’s. Cloaking makes an object disappear by steering electromagnetic waves around it – as if the waves had simply passed through. So far, the only way to do this is with “metamaterials”, which are made of electronic components designed to interact with light and direct it in a controllable fashion . The goal is to create a cloak that works for a broad spectrum of visible frequencies. Making these components isn’t easy. They have to be tiny – smaller than the wavelength of light they are designed to interact with. Last year, a group at the University of California, Berkeley , constructed a material that was able to bend – rather than reflect – visible light backwards for the first time.

Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews, UK , has shown how metamaterials could work over a range of frequencies. Even more mind-boggling, a team from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in China has worked out how to cloak objects at a distance . They suggest using “complementary materials” which have optical properties that cancel each other out. A wave polarised on a single plane passing through one material will become distorted, but this distortion is cancelled out as the wave passes through the complementary material, making it look as if neither material is there.

3. Hands-Free Healing

Modern cellphones may do more than a Star Trek “communicator” can, but Doctor “Bones” McCoy’s portable medical scanner, which revealed internal injuries in an instant, is taking longer to appear in the real world. When it does, it may go a step further: engineers are developing a portable scanner to not only spot internal injuries like torn arteries, but also heal them in a flash. The secret of this device is high frequency sound waves. Medics already use these ultrasound beams to examine babies in the womb. But turn up the intensity and focus the beam into a spot and it can generate enough heat to cook tissue. Lawrence Crum at the University of Washington in Seattle has shown that high-intensity ultrasound can cauterise bleeding arteries. His company, Ultrasound Technology, has developed a hand-held device that allows surgeons to cut through blood-rich organs and cauterise the cut at the same time. Crum hopes to test it in humans this year. Weak ultrasound beams can also be used to spot the fast flow of blood characteristic of a bleeding artery.

The US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a project to combine the two ideas, which will result in the Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation system – a portable device that uses ultrasound to both spot and seal bleeding blood vessels. The device will consist of an array of ultrasound transceivers built into a cuff that can be wrapped round an injured limb. Transceivers emitting low power ultrasound will scan for reflections from damaged arteries. If they spot a leaking blood vessel, the transceivers zap it. To avoid damage to healthy tissue, several beams are carefully focused to meet inside the body where their combined heat will seal the tear.

4. Spider vs gecko

Peter Parker makes it look easy, but replicating his rooftop antics is so difficult it has had researchers climbing the walls for years. The problem is clear: the gloves and shoes of any Spider-Man suit must be able to support the weight of an average person while dangling from the side of a skyscraper. And of course hands and feet must also peel off easily when required – superglue is not an option. For inspiration, researchers have turned to geckos rather than spiders.



In 2003, Andre Geim at the University of Manchester, UK, designed a material with microscopic hairs that mimic those found on geckos’ feet . Intermolecular van der Waals forces, which take effect on tiny scales, encourage each hair to stick to the wall and, because a gecko’s feet are coated with millions of these hairs, the result is a powerful force of attraction. Geim’s material has hairs made from a substance called kapton, and 1-centimetre-square of it, if pressed hard against a vertical surface, can support 1 kilogram. But there may be problems scaling the materials up to a useful size. For example, the hairs need to be longer to provide a large enough surface area to support a person, and long hairs tend to tangle. Nicola Pugno at the Polytechnic University of Turin in Italy might have the answer. In 2007, he came up with a fir tree-like design , with long carbon nanotubes forming a trunk while shorter nanotubes branched off sideways. He has now made gloves that can support around 10 kilograms each. Nature still has the upper hand, however. Dirt among the artificial hairs would compromise sticking ability. Geckos feet are self-cleaning, a trick way beyond current designs.

5. YOU power your devices

Your cellphone is a marvel of the modern age. Yet no matter how sophisticated it is, it’s useless the moment it runs out of juice. But what if you could dispense with batteries and simply gather all the energy your gadget needs from the world around you? For a start, you could plug it into your shirt. In 2008, Zhong Lin Wang at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta wove a fabric made from zinc-oxide nanowires grown on strands of Kevlar. Each time the material is bent or squeezed, it generates a tiny current. Wang and his team found they could harvest it by coating each fibre with a film of metal.

Gadgets implanted inside your body, such as pacemakers, could be powered by you. David Tran’s team at Stanford University, California, have devised a heart-powered electricity generator . The gadget produces electricity by forcing a small magnet back and forth through a tiny wire coil. The magnet is housed in a liquid-filled silicone tube with a balloon attached to each end, and the whole device is placed within the heart. As the heart beats, the balloons are squeezed in turn, forcing the liquid – and the magnet – back and forwards through the tube. Adam Heller at the University of Texas, Austin, has built a fuel cell that can be implanted in an artery and which uses glucose in the blood as fuel.

6. Jet Packs

Personal jets occupy a curious position inthe world of dream machines becauseengineers have been building and flyingthem for decades. Rocket belts , as they aremore accurately called, famously featuredin the James Bond movie Thunderball in1965, at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California, and in the pages of New Scientist in 2005 . It is 40 years since the first rocket belt flew, but all these machines work in the same way – and suffer from the same fatal limitation. Rocket belts generate thrust by catalysing the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into rapidly expanding steam and oxygen. The trouble is that each machine can carry only enough propellent for about 30 seconds of flight.



Who would want one of those? In1999,a company called Millennium Jet based in Santa Clara, California, built a personal flying machine with two vertically mounted rotors powered by a piston engine. Although promising, the machine crashed during a test flightand the company wound up operations in 2003. And that might have been that, were it not for the Martin Aircraft Company of Christchurch, New Zealand, which last July launched an entirely different kind of jet pack . Its machine is powered by two turbo jet engines, rather than a rocket engine. So it is a bonafide jet pack. The turbojets turn two vertically mounted rotors that provide lift. The machine runs on standard auto fuel and it can fly for 30 minutes on the single tank, with a range of roughly 50 kilometres. It is fitted with a parachute in case of emergencies. The downside is that they cost about Rs.50 Lakhs , the same as a high-end car. The company is already taking orders and hopes to deliver the first production machines in the second half of 2009. “I’d imagined it would be a rich boy’s toy but we’ve had interest from the military, search - and- rescue, and all kinds of groups,” says company founder Glenn Martin. The Martin Jetpack is a little on the large side – it is not so much strap on, as walk into – but if you have always wanted to commute to work with a jet pack, its time to start saving.

7. My other car is a spaceship


Fancy feeling the freedom of weightlessness or watching the sun set from orbit in your very own spaceplane? The prospect of zipping into space whenever you choose may not be as ludicrous as it seems. The biggest hurdle is to find an affordable way to launch a craft into space. The usual approach – essentially stuffing a metal tube full of high-energy fuel and lighting one end – can cost as much as 500 crore Rupees a shot. One way to reduce this is to add wings: the lift these generate helps a craft climb up through the atmosphere, reducing the amount of fuel needed, and thus the weight of the craft. This is the strategy adopted by two private companies, Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace, which are developing craft to ferry paying passengers into space. When it begins operations in 2010, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo will be carried to an altitude of 15 kilometres by a launch plane. At that altitude the spacecraft will detach and its rocket will take over, blasting it into space. XCOR’s smaller Lynx spacecraft will fly the whole way itself, taking off and landing like a plane. The company recently announced it will be charging around 45 Lakh Rupees per ticket – about half the price of seats on SpaceShipTwo. The Lynx, however, will only travel to an altitude of about 61 kilometres and so will not officially reach space – classed as 100 kilometres and beyond – as SpaceShipTwo is intended to do.





Alternatively, why not dispense with on-board fuel completely? According to Leik Myrabo, an engineer at Lightcraft Technologies, your personal spacecraft could fly into orbit on a beam of microwaves shone upwards from the ground . Myrabo has spent a decade developing small spacecraft that are pushed upwards by a ground-based laser. The beam generates an explosive plasma when it strikes the underside of the craft, creating thrust that pushes it skywards. He has now devised a system that uses microwave beams which he says could carry a crewed “lightcraft” into low Earth orbit by 2025 . Myrabo reckons he could power 1000 launches for the cost of a single conventional launch. “I can imagine personal spacecraft taking off within the next 50 to 100 years,” says Patrick Wood from space technology company EADS Astrium, based in Stevenage, UK.

8. Breathe Underwater

Even with scuba gear, you can only stay underwater for as long as the meagre air supply on your back allows. Yet the ocean contains oxygen, so why can’t we swim around like fish, extracting the gas from the water as we need it?

In 2002, a diver spent half an hour submerged in a swimming pool doing just this, breathing oxygen extracted from the water by an artificial gill . The device was built by Fuji Systems of Tokyo, Japan, using high-tech silicon membranes. These are permeable to gases but not liquids, so oxygen can diffuse into the breathing air from the water, while carbon dioxide diffuses out – just like the gills of a fish. But you won’t see divers using artificial gills any time soon, because simple diffusion gills produce dangerously low levels of oxygen.





Israeli inventor Alan Bodner has tried to get around this problem with a gadget that exploits “the champagne effect”: gases dissolved in water bubble out when the pressure cfalls. Bodner has shown his method can produce a breathable gas. Problem solved? Unfortunately not. We need a lot of oxygen and there just isn’t that much dissolved in a litre of seawater. So no matter how efficient the extraction method is, you would have to pump a huge volume of water through it to get enough. And while you do not need to carry air, you do need batteries and the means to make air, which means much more to go wrong. Artificial gills may have a rosier future for other applications, however. Underwater robots powered by fuel cells could use gills to obtain oxygen. They are also likely to be used to get rid of excess carbon dioxide from submarines and underwater habitats, perhaps boosting the oxygen supply at the same time.

9. You speak, it translates

In "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", Douglas Adams imagined a small yellow fish, called a Babel fish. When popped into one’s ear, it would use brainwave energy, unconscious mental frequencies and something called a “telepathic matrix” to achieve real-time language interpretation, making conversations with aliens effortless. Well, it’s not yellow, and it doesn’t fit in your ear, but US soldiers in Iraq are using a device that could become a universal interpreter. The soldiers use a system called IraqComm , developed by SRI International in Menlo Park, California, which consists of a laptop loaded with speech recognition and translation software. Speak into the microphone in Arabic and the software turns the phrases into written Arabic, before translating it into English. After the person has finished talking, a computer voice speaks the translation. IraqComm’s software, and other programs like it, learned to translate much as a person would – by studying conversations. The software searches for statistical connections between a series of Arabic statements and English translations. For example, when the Arabic word “haar” appears, so does the word “hot” in the English version (the correct translation). If this occurs frequently enough, the program concludes that they mean the same thing. Given enough examples, the software can learn grammar too. A similar system running on a hand-held PDA, called the Speechalator , was developed at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Do not expect these programs to cope with free-flowing language just yet. The IraqComm works well because it focuses on around 50,000 words soldiers need. The broader the subject matter, the harder it becomes for the software to distinguish the alternate meanings required in different contexts. “We’ll get there,” says SRI’s Kristin Precoda.

10. Smell-o-Vision

Whether it is the mouthwatering aroma of a roast dinner, the intoxicating perfume of a woman or the sulfurous smell of gunpowder in the heat of a battle, scent is a powerful force. So imagine the impact of TV and video games if scenes were accompanied by their aromas. That is the idea behind smell-o vision: giving TVs the ability to produce smells that fit the scenes they are displaying. We still don’t know why we perceive certain molecules to have particular scents and so cannot predict the scent of a novel molecule, nor manufacture a novel molecule to have a particular scent.



However, recent advances mean some of these scientific hurdles can be side-stepped, and suggest “smell-o-vision” may become a reality even before we truly understand how olfactory works. We group scents into about three-dozen categories, such as woody, grassy, fecal, floral and so on, says Avery Gilbert, an olfactory scientist who worked with DigiScents, a now-defunct company that developed smell-o-vision technology in the late 1990s. DigiScents built a prototype device that could generate most everyday odours. The smells were not perfect replicas but they were recognizable, says Gilbert. The silver screen is no stranger to smell-o- vision. It began in crude form in cinemas in the 1950s and has recurred periodically ever since. Most recently, in various scenes in select screenings of the film The New World. If it was not difficult enough already, emitting aromas for smell-o-vision has further down sides. How do you prevent the scents you release mixing into an unintended cocktail, or lingering longer than the scene requires? Researchers at Sony may have the answer: avoid the nose completely and go straight for the brain. The company’s plans were revealed in a patent application which described the idea of using ultrasound signals to directly stimulate selective parts of the brain to induce scents in a viewer’s or game player’s mind. Unfortunately, to date there has been no whiff of Sony producing the hardware required.

So, here were my ten wishes. Of course you too would have wished for the same and let me tell ya; it ain't far from reality and one day we shall be wearing such gizmos around. Thank you and I hope you enjoyed this article.

Filed under 0 comments
Newer Posts Older Posts

Blog theme music