Stimulus shelter is a mechanism that shields us from the barrage of information coming our way every minute. An individual is constantly bombarded by television, mobile phone calls, text messages, emails, social networking messages and the resultant multi-tasking puts a lot of pressure on the brain. In such a situation, concentration and focus is lost and the person has to …

Solid State Drives, or SSDs as they are popularly called, are new age storage drives and are slowly but gradually replacing traditional hard drives. A hard disk has heads, magnetic surfaces and many other complex moving parts, which enable it to function properly but they also make the hard disks fallible. The moving parts also make hard disks slower in …

Many of the most unpleasant aspects of urban life are caused by cars, for both driver and the city itself. Large sweltering expanses of tarmac in cities contribute heavily to the urban heat island effect, whilst cars also become unbearably hot in summer sitting in these urban deserts. Optimizing the heliostatic photovoltaic panels ultimately resulted in their leaf like shape. …

A solar oven or cooker is a device which uses sunlight as its energy source, and costs nothing to run. They are used so as to save wood and end the desertification of the earth. A solar cooker can be used in outdoor cooking, drying and pasteurization, and is one of the many inventions to utilise solar energy, fast becoming …

The solar balloon is designed to trap solar energy using an inflatable plastic thin-film balloon called a solar concentrator. Half the balloon is transparent. When inflated, sunlight falls on it and focuses on a photovoltaic cell placed at its centre. This design reflects sunlight, producing 400 times the electricity that a solar cell would create without the concentrator and has …

A digital device that detects the signs of charisma and measures them in action, the sociometer is about the size of an iPhone. The wearable gadget is equipped with an infrared sensor and a tiny microphone. It tracks patterns of speech and body movement. The sociometer does not, however, record speech. It was created by computer scientist Alex Pentland and …

In fact, shooting stars are not stars at all. We call them meteors, and scientists believe that they are broken fragments of comets, which still move about in space when the comet itself does so no longer. We see them when they enter out atmosphere because they leave a trail of light behind them, caused by the friction of air …

Seed crystals are tiny single crystals made to dissolve in a solution (or melt) from which larger crystals are drawn either by precipitation, centrifuging or drawing up from a melt. Seeds have the same chemical composition and crystalline structure as that of the larger crystal. Large crystals are grown on a preferred geometer (normally the most densely packed) plane of …

It is an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor by inserting a large number of negative reactions into the system. It is derived from the WWII usage of the term ‘Safety control rod axe man’ which referred to emergency situations wherein a rope was cut to stop the operations urgently and to limit the damages arising out of continuance of …

A scale model is a representation or copy of an object that is larger or smaller in size. Its size is proportionate to the original size of the object that it represents. The proportion is often shown in some ratio eg 1:10, which means one inch of scale model is equivalent to 10 inches of original object. Very often, the …