Author: Lekhani Ray

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Currently a B.Tech CSE student at VIT Vellore. A Music-lover, an avid reader, she loves to play the Piano, and spends most of her free time playing with different softwares and living upto her obsession with artificial Intelligence.

One of the most realistic episodes in the Black Mirror anthology is ‘Shut Up and Dance’ (Season 3, Episode 3). It featured a fairly corporeal story with several parallels from real life that made the episode extremely spooky. The world is fresh from the horror of the Blue Whale challenge. It is still reeling from the effects of the Momo Challenge, this is one episode that stung hard. With 19 episodes out so far, there are too many them drawing a striking similarity to real world systems. Is social media wrapping our lives? The show highlights the worst of the…

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While non-smokers are finding it difficult to breathe in the poisonous smog of the NCR-Delhi region, imagine how much worse it’d be getting for regular smokers. Coming to their rescue, are folks from IIT Roorkee. The team has created what it calls the Post purification Filter (or PpuF), which can make the smoke inhaled through cigarettes almost chemical free (and smell free too!). Yes, you can smoke a little less guilty now! How did PpuF come about? PpuF is a plug-on filter for cigarettes, that designed to filter out toxins from the smoke while retaining the flavor of the cigarette.…

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At the end of July, Hyperloop One completed its second series of full systems test in a vacuum environment. The prototype pod was blasted down the testing track in the Nevada Desert. A top speed of 192mph had been reached. However, CEO of Hyperloop One, Rob Lloyd believes that the portrayed speed is no indication of what the system could have achieved had they not run out of tube to push the limits. A Recap: What is Hyperloop One? The Hyperloop was first conceptualized and formulated in 2013 by Elon Musk. He open sourced the concept, and many companies have…

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Mankind is inching a step closer to the ambitious dream of carrying out manned missions to Mars. Thanks to Elon Musk’s personal aerospace baby SpaceX’s latest space launch vehicle – the Falcon Heavy. The Falcon Heavy was first announced in 2011 at the Washington D.C Press Club by Musk. With his latest machine, he promised “more payload to orbit”. From the very onset of the idea, it was designed to carry humans into space and enable crewed missions to the Moon, or Mars. When launched later this year, Falcon Heavy will be the most forceful and powerful rocket in operation. What…

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Ever wondered how smoke effects are created in Nightclubs? Or how fog spills out of the ice cream bowls in Master Chef Australia? Welcome to Cryogenics. What is cryogenics? Cryogenics is the study of the behavior and properties of materials at very low temperatures. Temperatures go down to 93 K. Cryogenics has several applications mostly related to preservation – of food, sperms or the whole human body of late. The substance it deploys is usually Liquid Nitrogen or Liquid Helium. Nitrogen liquefies at a very low temperature of 63 K and slows down all processes. This helps in preserving substances so that…

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No, this isn’t another concocted way to predict the uncertain weather, nor is it a way to kill off those pesky insects. As recently as 2015, Fogging, or more appropriately known as Fog Computing is an extended and more compact version of cloud computing. It can carry out a substantial amount of storage and communication at the desired speed. Why do we need Fog Computing? Before fog computing, almost 15 years ago, we were waking up to the concept of cloud computing. It helped accelerate smartphone culture. A pocket-sized phone was now able to revolutionise our lives because it could retrieve an unlimited amount…

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You’ve heard of Virtual Reality, and you’ve heard of Augmented Reality. And we’ve had plenty of discussion on which of the two will dominate our future. Intel is now delivering a combination of both – Merged Reality. The little gaps in Virtual Reality have now been filled to give us more dynamic and natural real world experiences with Merged Reality. Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, dropped a post announcing the product, which the company is calling Project Alloy. What can we do with Merged Reality? Merged Reality is convenient. The focus is getting the user to interact with real-world objects…

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You may not know it yet, but our music is already highly reliant on artificial intelligence, from the AI DJs crafting mood-based scores for advertisements and movies to the AI algorithms behind your favorite game’s soundtrack. Even our personal assistants, Siri and Cortana, leverage a touch of AI to suggest music based on our preferences. Streaming services like Spotify take it a step further, using AI DJs to curate personalized playlists and deliver new music that hits all the right notes. But with AI’s growing role in music, the inevitable question arises: will AI DJs ever appreciate music the way…

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Imagine being able to eliminate cancer cells from a patient’s body altogether, or grooming bigger cows that give you double the meat (or milk). Imagine curing blindness. Thanks to the CRISPR revolution, all this and more, is now possible. CRISPR is a segment present in the genetic code of prokaryotic organisms. Humans have eukaryotic cells – so what’s the relevance here? CRISPR is deserving of all its hyped because it allows us to modify the genetic code of almost any organism. The first connection to what can be now termed and considered as CRISPR originated in Osaka University in Japan in…

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