SCIENCE & DEVELOPMENT

OpenAI drama, AI and Big Tech

LAST month witnessed high drama at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI Board, apparently at the behest of chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever. The move sent shockwaves across the tech world. OpenAI engineers wrote a letter to the board threatening to quit in protest. Microsoft, which had invested more than 10 billion dollars in the company, offered to hire Sam Altman, other key executives and engineers.

COP28: Low Expectations, High Price

THE annual climate summit is upon us, with COP28 taking place in Dubai from November 30 to December 12, 2023. COP28 is a milestone event since it will take up the first five-yearly Global Stocktake (GST) to assess where the world stands with regard to decisions taken under the Paris Agreement (PA). The GST covers mitigation, adaptation, financing and other support to developing countries.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship: Explosive Innovation, Horror for Workers’ Safety

THE massive Starship super-heavy lift launch vehicle by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company took off last week on November 18, 2023 on its second test flight.  The launcher is the largest and most powerful ever built, weights 5,000 tonnes and can carry payloads of 100-150 tonnes. The launcher is a 2-stage vehicle comprising the booster and the spaceship atop, both stages being powered by SpaceX’s own Raptor engine, 33 of which power the booster.

Endemic Disasters in Himalayan Transport Infrastructure

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×ANOTHER highway project in the Himalayan region, this time part of this government’s flagship Char Dham Highway, yet another tunnel, and one more disaster, fortunately with no casualties so far as this goes to print.

Annual Air Pollution Festival

SO here we are once again, regular like the seasons, with Delhi and the entire Indi-Gangetic plains right down to West Bengal shrouded in a grey haze of pollutants as visible in photographs from space.  13 of the world’s 20 worst polluted cities or towns in the world are in India, including Delhi, satellite towns and other urban centres in northern and eastern India. This has now become such a hardy and recurrent annual feature that it may as well be declared yet another festival of which we already have so many in this country.

White Hydrogen: Not the New Saviour

THE energy and climate change universe is abuzz with the new developments around discovery of large deposits of natural or “white” hydrogen, with many commentators hailing it as great news and a potential game-changer in the battle against climate change. Fossil-fuel related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are today, even after so many international emissions control agreements and considerable installed capacity in renewable energy, still 91 per cent of global CO2 emissions.

ISRO’s Successful Test of Crew Escape System

ONE thing that has always been known about human space flight is that it is very dangerous. So far, 19 astronauts or cosmonauts (we will use the former term here for simplicity) have died in space accidents, which is a relatively high 3 per cent approximately compared to other forms of transportation. Significantly, only 3 of these fatal crewed space flights had flown above the Karman line, symbolically marking the edge of space at 100 km above the earth. Most fatalities have occurred during the launch phase or during re-entry, especially the former.

Global Stocktake Pre-report: Glass Quarter Full

THE Paris Agreement (PA) had mandated a periodic five-yearly cycle of assessments of climate action called the Global Stocktake (GST) starting in 2023. GST is a process involving both country parties i.e., governments, as well as non-party stakeholders to review progress made on the different actions agreed upon in the international negotiations under the aegis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to tackle the greatest crisis to confront humankind, namely climate change.

Remembering Allende and His Project Cybersyn

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×FIFTY years back, Pinochet's coup destroyed Allende's government and the structure of liberal democracy in Chile. Allende died with a machine gun in his hands, defending his attempt to build socialism in Chile against the combined power of the US and the forces of reaction in Chile, including the military.

Dangerous Renewed Thrust on Biofuels

AS one of the outcomes of the recently concluded G20 Summit in New Delhi, a new Biofuels Alliance was announced, with India, Brazil, the US and other countries taking the lead towards a programme of action aiming to increase the uptake of sustainable biofuels especially in the transport sector.  Here in India, much has been made of this initiative as another triumph showcasing the growing global leadership of the present government, and also as a step towards a big push to India’s already sizeable and ambitious biofuels programme.  The impression is that this new global alliance would work

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - SCIENCE & DEVELOPMENT