How does one begin to understand the impact that science and technology have on our lives? Well, one can start by thinking about all that one has done during the day and imagining whether those things would have been possible had Newton not formulated the three laws, or if Galileo hadn’t been ingenious enough to think of his machines, or if Anur R Puniyani had not discovered the effect of fire on lead pencils, or if some scientific crusader or the other had not contributed in some way or the other to this continuing saga of the breathtaking power of combined human intellect. Ok I am sorry about the last one, I was just expressing a long held fantasy of mine, to be counted among the great minds of Science. And that was actually an experiment that I did as a child, sacrificing one of my dear lead pencils to Agni, the Hindu ‘God of fire’. Coming back to the point, I don’t think it should be difficult to imagine how deep our kinship with science and technology has grown to be over the past three hundred odd years or so, but just in case you have come to take science and technology so much for granted that you don’t seem to take note of its presence, the following might just make you let go off that feeling. Read the full story

Life for us is pretty convenient nowadays. Much of this convenience could be attributed to technology that is involved in our lives to such a great extent today that we almost take it for granted. You wake up thanks to the alarm on your cell phone (even better is the snooze feature that lets you extend your sleep), travel in A/C fitted vehicles with LCD screens while listening to your favourite Floyd song on the move, run programs or generate “process related” reports (although most of it is crap!) on your laptop/ desktop at work. You can speak to your friend in Scotland while gyming, put him on hold and pick your girlfriend’s call thanks to your cell phone (which has other less important features like GPS, GPRS, MP3 playback and a whole range of 3G features) . You can download music, movies, chat, shop, pay bills, book tickets, bank/ trade online, have virtual avtaars, network with people with the help of internet. You can travel long distances in the comfort of flights or save your company some bucks (and for what!!) by using tele/ video conferencing facilities. The things I’ve mentioned above are pretty common and one would feel ‘handicapped’ in a sense if some of these facilities were not accessible to him. I’ve not even started with smashing protons, QED, Mars missions, telescopes peeking into the birth and death of stars thousands of light years away from Earth, AS50, ICBMs, F1 technology……this thing could be endless!! Read the full story