STEM Blogs with Ram

When I say the word AI, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Is it Cortana from Halo or Replicants from Blade Runner? The phrase "robots will take your jobs" is inferred to be a while away, but for many people, that phrase could be much closer to reality than we think. And spoiler alert: it might not be a humanoid robot that takes your place. Recently, there’s been a massive influx of AI-generated content and websites. We’ve all seen the humorous pictures from DALL-E mini (now called Craiyon) that take prompts from the user and create pictures from them, often to wild and hilarious results. These results are often in the uncanny valley, as the AI used in DALL-E mini isn’t quite good enough to make the pictures realistic, causing distorted body parts and the picture to look quite off. But DALL-E mini’s older (and original) brother, DALL-E makes many more realistic pictures with its more established algorithm.  With the hype around DALL-E, a surge of AI content gene...

  Introduction Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has relied on fossil fuels to power increasing energy demands, but the climate crisis is forcing countries to reduce emissions. Nuclear energy might not be renewable energy, but it lasts for a long time and is clean for the environment, releasing very few greenhouse gases while still producing a significant amount of energy for our power grid. So why hasn’t this fuel replaced every other energy source? It’s because of a combination of economic issues that we are yet to fix as well as countries’ split opinions on it. The longer we use fossil fuels, the more harm we cause to the Earth, which means we need to find clean energy sources that can phase them out and nuclear energy could be one. While nuclear energy can’t be a viable energy source on its own, we should try to find out if it can accompany other energy sources to create a sustainable energy grid. The political duality of nuclear energy Despite European countries’ posi...

From the 11th to the 16th of July, I took part in OBAP's (Organisation of Black Professionals) Ace Academy in Fort Worth, hosted by Lahcen Armstrong and Cory Glenn. American Airlines were the sponsor for the camp and most of the pilots and volunteers were working for American Airlines. To apply to join it, you have to pay a $100 fee and send in an application. I highly recommend this camp if you are looking to get into the aviation industry, especially if you want to be a pilot. Before we started, we were sent some homework to learn, which was composed of memorising some Airport designation codes, outlines of planes, important American aviation figures and some of the parts of an aeroplane. We were tested on these throughout the week and got points for correct questions. The top 10 people at the end were given some rewards, like a model plane or a military unit badge (which is what I got). Food was also given by sponsored restaurants, which changed every day. We got to meet and s...

Today, I learned a crazy fact; most people use the default option on their phones in the US. This seemed pretty crazy to me, as someone who routinely likes to mess around with my settings and switch out my defaults pretty regularly. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hardcore customizer, but I always assumed that everyone at least dug around in the settings a bit when they got a new device to make it function to its fullest. However, it seems like most people just assume that whatever the manufacturer set as the default is probably the best option. Outside America, countries aren’t as iPhone-dominated and people use apps like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Telegram more than text messaging, but here, text messages are the standard. For iPhones, that’s Messages and for Android, it’s the manufacturer messaging app, like Samsung Messages or Google Messages. However, iPhone and Android use different technologies to power their messaging apps. Fun fact, your messaging app on iPhone isn’t calle...

 During my summer holidays, I sent an application to join the 2 weeklong Honors Aggie STEM Camp at Texas A&M. I was interested in this camp because I’m interested in going to A&M for my University degree and I wanted to have a challenge and be with people like me. My experience was with Honors, so it was pretty challenging to get in. Some of the requirements were having a recommendation from a STEM teacher, writing an essay and taking a stem-based test. The test, in particular, was incredibly difficult because I hadn’t learned any of the topics covered in it, but since the courses in the camp were a lot easier, I assume the test was to see how good all the students were at choosing the best of them. There were around 20 something slots in the camp, but only 17 were filled because we were the best. Therefore, if you’re trying out for this camp, you probably need to be pretty smart since the competition is tough. This was the longest time I had ever been away from home, so I ...

On the 9th of April 2019, the first picture of a black hole was revealed to be taken, which is a historic and monumental milestone. The black hole in question is in the middle of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light-years away, and the other black hole the team observed, Sagittarius A* in our own galaxy, is 26,000 light-years away (Landau). But how has it taken this long to get a picture of a black hole? Well, the way the EHT Project managed to get this picture was by linking up 8 radio telescopes around the world to get a telescope the size of Earth. The reason black holes have been incredibly hard to picture until now is that they’re extremely small on a galactic scale and they don’t emit their own light.  Firstly, black holes can be very evasive to see because they are very small. For example, the event horizon of Sagittarius A* is smaller than the distance between the Sun and the Earth, and as well as that, there is a lot of stuff between us and a black hole, since they are ...