Satyamev Jayate's next episode to deal with "Dowry"

Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate has been the talk of the entire country since its debut two weeks ago. The actor shocked everyone – and at the same time made us proud – when he took up topics that are usually not discussed in the public domain and brought them to the fore. He spoke about female foeticide and infanticide in the first episode and about child sexual abuse in the second.

Now we hear in the third episode Aamir will discuss the important issue of dowry death. The custom of demanding dowry from a bride’s family when a wedding is fixed has been prevalent in India for several decades. It often takes an evil turn when the bride is tortured or killed just because her family is unable to meet demands from the in-laws. Even though there are laws in place that have made giving and accepting dowry a criminal act, this social evil continues to flourish.

You can see all the episodes on they official Satyamev Jayate video channel.

Camp Nectar

All other brands should just quit right now, because Brazilian juice company Camp Nectar has objectively the hands-down best ad campaign in the history of the juice-boxing business—all thanks to the creative agency AGE Isobar.

It took two years of experimenting, but ultimately they were able to produce lemons, guavas, passion fruit, papayas, apples, and oranges—all of them box-shaped and with Camp’s logo grooved into their flesh.

To achieve this triumph over nature, they manufactured specially-molded boxes to place over the earliest buds of fruit growth. Allowed to fully ripen in their molds, the fruit grew healthily, filling out the full shape and taking on the indentions of a bent straw and folded top-edges.

The clip below shows a time-lapse video of the fruit growing inside its custom housing. It’s pretty effing cool.

Chameleon Home Screen

Android tablet owners may have opted for their device over an iPad due to support for widgets, but a new home screen app called Chameleon is like widgets on steroids. And Chameleon’s developers are using Kickstarter to sell their app before it’s even released: A $5 backing will get you a copy of Chameleon if the project funds hits the $50,000 goal by June 15 (hat tip to Liliputing). After just a day on Kickstarter, Chameleon has already passed $6,700 in funding. After you see the software in action, you’ll understand why.

Instead of simple widgets, Chameleon is a dynamic set of home screens that you can customize on an Android tablet running Honeycomb 3.2 or better. The minimum screen resolution supported is 1280 x 800, so some of the early, small Android tablets may not work. What’s interesting about Chameleon is that its developers understand that users often open up groups of apps repeatedly at different times of the day or in different locations. So the app will change what it displays based on those two attributes, as configured by you.

The other intelligent bit here is that development team is looking to Kickstarter for the app. Of course it could build it, submit it to Google and get Chameleon in the app store for the same $5 price tag. By using Kickstarter, however, it guarantees a minimum amount of revenue up front instead of using Google Play and hoping to gain traction in a sea of apps. Clever on both accounts and good enough for $5.

Millions of us start the morning with a coffee and think nothing of it. But new medical research suggests that it could be helping you live longer—if you drink enough of it.

The large-scale study, which is published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that men who drank six cups of coffee or more every day were 10 per cent less likely to die during the 14 years of the study. Women who drank six cups or more were 15 per cent less likely to die over that same period. The result, fairly obviously, suggests that coffee drinkers live longer.

The researchers have also shown that the effect is seen across almost all causes of death, including heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, and infections. The effect, however, seems to decline with lower consumption—and a single cup of coffee a day was found to have negligible effect.

Dr Neal Freedman, one of the researchers from the National Cancer Institute, Department of Health and Human Services, in Rockville in Maryland, USA, explains:

“Coffee contains more than 1000 compounds that might affect the risk of death. The most well-studied compound is caffeine, although similar associations for caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee in the current study and a previous study suggest that, if the relationship between coffee consumption and mortality were causal, other compounds in coffee—for example, antioxidants, including polyphenols—might be important.”

All of which means, of course, that next time someone says you’re drinking too much coffee, you know exactly what to say.

Anonymous

Hacker group Anonymous has announced it has taken down India’s Supreme Court and All India Congress websites.

Anonymous announced the attack via Twitter, claiming the reason is “Internet censorship” and suggesting India should “install” a new government.

Both websites are unavailable at the time of this writing.

Namaste #India, your time has come to trash the current government and install a new one. Good luck. | #SaveTPB #Anonymous #Censorship

— Anonymous Operations (@Anon_Central) May 17, 2012 

India’s government asked Google, Facebook and other internet companies to censor content from users in India before posting it, a New York Times report revealed in December 2011.

This is probably a good enough reason for Anonymous to take action. The group has been busy this year, despite several arrests of its members or people somehow tied to the collective. It “hacked” Syria’s president’s email, taken down CIA’s website as well as websites belonging to CBS and Universal Music.

Energy to be generated from viruses

Researchers are putting viruses to work in the lab, using them to build tiny devices that gather energy from mechanical forces, like the press of a finger, to run a small liquid-crystal display.

“More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics,” study researcher Seung-Wuk Lee, at the University of California — Berkeley, said in a statement.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy‘s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have harnessed the energy producing power of a harmless phage virus.

“The scientists coated a postage-stamp-sized electrode with specially engineered, harmless viruses that, when tapped, generated enough electricity to power a small LCD display.”

The power produced by the resulting viruses didn’t generate a huge amount of electricity. In fact they produced, “just six nanoamperes, the equivalent of about one-quarter the voltage supplied by a AAA battery — but it was a start.”

“We’re now working on ways to improve on this proof-of-principle demonstration,” Lee said. “Because the tools of biotechnology enable large-scale production of genetically modified viruses, piezoelectric materials based on viruses could offer a simple route to novel microelectronics in the future.”

Sign Language Translator Trio

By far one of the greatest challenges of sign language has been to translate it for everyday folk that wouldn’t know where to begin a conversation with the deaf. Cornell University engineering students Ranjay Krishna, Seonwoo Lee and Si Ping Wang – along with some help from Jonathan Lang — used their final project time this past semester to close this gap in one of the more practical solutions we’ve seen to date.

Their prototype glove uses accelerometers, contact sensors and flex sensors to translate complex finger gestures from the American Sign Language alphabet into spoken letters: after converting hand positions to digital signals, the test unit both speaks out the resulting letters and sends them to a computer, where they can be used for anything from a game (shown in the video below) to, presumably, constructing whole sentences.

Along with being accurate, the Cornell work is even designed with a mind towards how it would work in the real world, as the glove and its transmitter are both wireless and powered by 9-volt batteries. We hope that the project leads to a real product and an extra bridge between the deaf and the rest of us, but in the meantime, we’ll be happy that at least one form of powered glove is being put to the noblest use possible.

Dubai Underwater Hotel

Skylines are so passed. In an attempt to give travelers better—or at least closer—ocean views, Dubai-based construction company Drydocks World and Swiss consulting, engineering, and brokerage firm BIG Invest Consult will build the Water Discus Hotel, a luxury underwater hotel in Dubai.

Poland’s Deep Ocean Technology designed the hotel, surrounded by a coral reef, to have 21 two-person rooms with huge windows and an underwater diving center. Rooms will be as deep to 10 meters below the surface and diving training will be offered. The hotel can also rotate. A large disc-shaped structure above the water will have a spa, garden, and upper-terrace swimming pool–presumably for guests of an underwater hotel who don’t actually want to be in the ocean.

A painted wall of a Mayan site

Here’s what’s not going to happen this year: the earth won’t end on Dec. 12; it won’t be swallowed by a black hole, consumed by the sun or get taken out by a collision with the imaginary planet Nibiru. Here’s what will happen: as of today, more people than ever will believe that those calamities will occur on precisely the day they’re predicted to. The reason: a new discovery — just reported in the journal Science — of the earliest known Mayan astronomical calendar, featuring elaborate and detailed work by one of the most impressive civilizations that ever lived.

It was earlier interpretations of other Mayan calendars that gave rise to the Internet-fueled doomsday scenarios of the past few years — mostly because one calendar cycle the Mayans computed ends Dec. 12 (though no one paid much attention to the fact that another one was supposed to begin immediately after that). If people can stay focused on the science this time though, they’ll find a lot to be impressed by in the new findings.

Ranveer-Sonakshi

Ranveer Singh’s injury had a long-term ripple effect on his film Lootera, co-starring Sonakshi Sinha. The producers Phantom Films and Balaji Motion Pictures lost several dates as Ranveer was advised bed rest. With Sonakshi having a packed schedule – she is shooting for Joker, Rowdy Rathore, Dabangg 2 and Son Of Sardar – it was tough to get combination dates again. As a result, Lootera’s shoot got delayed. The film’s release was pushed to February 2013, but then hit a roadbloack yet again.

If the film was to release in February, Ranveer would have to promote the movie in January. However, he had already given those dates to Sanjay Leela Bhansali for his film Ram Leela, co-starring Kareena Kapoor. Lootera director Vikramaditya Motwane is Bhansali’s protégé and there was no way he would cut in to his mentor’s shooting schedule. The release date has now been pushed again to March 29, 2013 instead. This will give Ranveer ample time to promote Lootera without hampering Bhansali’s schedule.

The unexpected delays need not worry the producers as the film has a lot going for it. It is a period romance by the director of the highly acclaimed Udaan and features the Ranveer-Sonakshi pair for the first time. It will now release during the Easter weekend which is quite a favourable time for movies at the box office.