Research Matters

The Earth is a planet we share with a billion of other living animals and plants. Often, we encounter them everyday, use them as food, shelter or clothes, and interact with them as pets or pests. A new term of such interactions, at times, is called ‘conflicts’ where sharing the area we live with wild animals becomes a bane. These animals are often dangerous, causing widespread damage to crops, livestock and lives. How do we prevent this? What can people do to minimise such conflicts? A study now attempts to look at ways of addressing human-animal conflicts in the fringes of the forests in India.

Getting stuck in a huge traffic jam is a tragedy, especially if you live in cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai or Delhi. The rising number of vehicles are increasingly adding to this problem, depriving us of our time, money and health. A new research now attempts to reduce traffic pileups in cities by using videos of surveillance cameras. Using Artificial Intelligence and Convolutional Neural Networks, the researcher have built TraCount, a system that can count the number of vehicles in a traffic jam and help authorities manage the congestion in a smart and informed way.

What if a shoe could save your life when you are stuck in a building that is burning down? Though it sounds like a science fiction, the OpenShoe project aims to do exactly that! Built on a novel navigation technology called Inertial Navigation System (INS), researchers have built a minute navigation module that can be plugged into a shoe to track every step to the accuracy of a centimeter! Such foot-mounted systems help in tracking objects in the absence of satellite based navigation and would complement the widely used satellite based navigation systems, say the researchers. 

On 31 May 2017, three space-based observatories – India’s Astrosat, NASA’s Chandra and NASA’s and ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope, along with a ground-based observatory High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), participated in this exciting exercise and have detected a coronal explosion -- an unusually large release of plasma and magnetic field from a star – in Proxima Centauri.

Increasingly, today’s youth of the country are blowing up their childhood in smoke, quite literally! A new study has revealed some shocking reasons behind the addiction to tobacco based products among the youth. The study calls out that parents, especially mothers, play a great role in increasing the probability of their kids getting addicted to tobacco, as much as three times! In spite of the anti-tobacco laws introduced by the government, families play a great role in dissuading the children from using tobacco, claim the researchers.