“The Cobra Event” written by Richard Preston in 1998 is a science thriller which narrates a botched bioterrorism offensive on the USA. In the book, the perpetrator of the attack, clones a virulent smallpox genome with a highly contagious common cold virus, and cranks out a genetically engineered...
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On a fine afternoon in San Diego, California. Things suddenly began to go amiss. Air-traffic controllers at the airport tower, stared at their monitors only to discover that the systems for monitoring approaching planes had become abruptly dysfunctional. At the Naval Medical Centre , emergency ...
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The 1997 Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies”, feels intriguingly relevant, for fortuitously prognosticating the alarming state of the world today. In the movie, an evil media baron Elliot Carver grabs hold of a GPS encoder and uses it to send counterfeit signals, hoodwinking a British warship to s...
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Can robots commit crimes? Killer robots are an erstwhile fodder of science fiction cinema. Films like Terminator have already given us a peek of the apocalyptical world we are quite likely to inherit. Researchers have cautioned that robots and computers will commit more crimes than humans by 2040. M...
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Cybercrime is on the way up, and it is becoming easier and easier for criminals to steal people’s data or alter it. Toolkits to create viruses, spyware, and other forms of malware which alter data are now readily available to anyone yearning to Hornswoggle and do damage. As a result, the integrity...
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Back in 1818, when people even in their wildest imagination could never have conjured up computers and robots, Mary Shelley in her book “Dr Victor Frankenstein” prophesied artificial intelligence (AI) with her bizarre concoction of an artificially generated creature who could think as we do. Tod...
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When I show up at my office at Alandur for work, I am required to flash my ID badge to the ID reader to gain access into my office. Likewise, when I open up my laptop, I need a login to log into my computer, and a PIN at the ATM to retrieve my cash. Similarly, when I get to the airport, I need an ...
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Is a perfect murder possible ? I am yet to come across an Agatha Christie novel to date, where the murderer is sipping wine in a countryside villa, laughing to himself over the murder he got away with. Though most of Christie’s crimes seem unsolvable, but Poirot or Miss Marple always solves the mu...
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As I riffled through the day's newspaper, a report titled “Swine flu virus claims six lives in Tamilnadu“ grabbed my attention. It made my mind, hark back to a time when Billy Corgan, the lead singer of famous “Smashing Pumpkins” had bemoaned in his blog that the swine flu virus was not a na...
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History has time and again taught us that, science fiction is only a fantasy until science makes it a reality. In the 1940s Isaac Asimov, a prolific science fiction writer wrote about a future where robots are a part of the human world. Similarly, in a sci-fi film, “ Robocop” made more than thir...
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On May 6, 2013, a video surfaced on the internet showing a young man in blue jeans and a black polo shirt firing a single bullet from an off-white, plastic 380 single-shot pistol called "the Liberator", fabricated by him with a Stratasys 3D printer bought on eBay. That young man was Cody Wilson - a ...
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What would Johannes Gutenberg, the man who invented the first modern printing press in 1454, have said if someone told him that one day we would be printing human beings? He would have probably cocked a snook at the idea. Recently, in 1997, “ The Fifth Element” an iconic sci-fi film made by the ...
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The smartphone is the world's greatest weapon of mass distraction (WMD), owing to the magnitude of the distraction epidemic and cyber-mania it has unleashed on us. Day and night our mobile phones, and other devices, buzz, ping, beep, hum, drone, croon, howl their way into our attention. Our brains a...
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