Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
Robot
Robot: _ Pepper (above), a humanoid robot developed by SoftBank Robotics, was launched in 2014 and can read human emotions. Over 2,000 companies around the world have adopted Pepper as an assistant to welcome, inform and guide visitors in an innovative way. ____ Section-1 Prologue: What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a robot? For many people it is a machine that imitates a human—like the androids in Star Wars, Terminator and Star Trek: The Next Generation. However much these robots capture our imagination, such robots still only inhabit Science Fiction. Science-fiction films and novels usually portray robots as one of two things: destroyers of the human race or friendly helpers. People still haven’t been able to give a robot enough ‘common sense’ to reliably interact with a dynamic world and the independent intelligent machines seen in science fiction are still a […]
ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE (AMR)
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR): ______ ______ Prologue: Within a few days of scraping his leg in a scooter accident in 2009, nine-year-old Brock Wade was in hospital fighting for his life with a methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection. Once the infection – caused by one of the bacteria most often resistant to antibiotics – has been diagnosed, doctors put him on five different antibiotics. After a month in the hospital, and against all odds, Brock recovered and was well enough to come home. Scenarios such as this case are increasingly being played out all over the world. But not all the thousands of patients that contract drug-resistant bacterial infections every year are as lucky as Brock. And the problem looks set to get worse. While infectious agents are becoming more and more resistant to the medicines that are currently in use, not enough drugs are being developed to combat them. WHO […]
