India’s capital may use artificial rain to tackle worsening air pollution

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Pollution is bad in much of northern India. If you travel through it, you get dust all over your car’s windshield, dust between your teeth, and dust covering your clothes. India’s capital, Delhi, is a dusty megacity. Its 34 million people die years sooner than they otherwise would, due to air pollution.

Delhi may resort to an unusual remedy to curb air pollution: artificial rain.

“India’s capital territory of Delhi is keen to use artificial rain to fight air pollution this year, its Environment Minister Gopal Rai said on Tuesday, as deteriorating air quality in the region led to an increase in respiratory illnesses,” reports a south Asian newspaper:

Large swathes of north India battle pollution each winter as cold air traps dust, vehicle emissions and smoke from farm fires in the breadbasket states of Punjab and Haryana, shrouding the national capital and its suburbs in a toxic haze.

Cloud-seeding — the method of triggering rain by seeding clouds with salts — was considered to curb pollution in 2023 too but the plan did not materialise due to unfavourable weather conditions….

Doctors at private hospitals in Delhi and its suburbs said they had seen a spike in patients with respiratory illnesses… “We are seeing more patients due to pollution related flare up of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and bronchitis. There is an approximately 20 per cent-30pc increase in patients,” said Prashant Saxena….At C K Birla Hospital in industrial hub Gurugram, doctors are seeing more than 50 patients with pulmonary complaints every day, some of whom also need hospitalisation…

Rising air pollution can cut the life expectancy of each person in South Asia by more than five years,…Swiss group IQAir rated Delhi the world’s second most polluted city on Tuesday, after Lahore in Pakistan, where authorities also took emergency measures following Sunday’s unprecedented pollution levels.

An Indian mission to the sun recently gathered information about the sun’s outer layers.

Over 700 languages are spoken in India, the world’s most populous country. Artificial intelligence is being used to developed chatbots for dozens of those languages. So computer programs and devices will soon communicate in humanlike prose in many of those languages, reported The Hindustan Times.

Artificial intelligence is advancing in other areas as well. Researchers have also developed robots to pick cotton. That may eliminate the need for cotton farmers to buy mechanical harvesters that cost $1 million and weigh 30 tons, compressing soil and thus sometimes harming soil health.

Robots with artificial intelligence are spreading on Japanese farms. In the U.S., farming robots now use artificial intelligence to kill 100,000 weeds per hour. Drones with artificial intelligence will make farming easier. A robot is saving Dutch tulip fields by quickly detecting diseased tulips before the disease can spread.

Artificial intelligence is detecting cases of prostate cancer and breast cancer that radiologists overlook.

Robots are also being use for food preparation, such as the salad-making robot used by the Sweetgreen restaurant chain. Robot waiters are increasingly being used in South Korean restaurants, which are facing a labor shortage.