Meghalaya: Average annual rainfall: 11,777mm

1. In a scene played out every weekday morning, students of the RCLP School in Nongsohphan Village, Meghalaya, India, cross a bridge grown from the roots of a rubber tree. In the relentless damp of Meghalaya's jungles, wooden structures rot away too quickly to be practical. For centuries the Khasi people have instead used the trainable roots of rubber trees to "grow" bridges over the region's rivers.
 
2. The village of Mawsynram, claiming to have the highest average rainfall on Earth. Perched atop a ridge in the Khasi Hills of India's northeast, the village receives 467 inches of rain per year - thirteen times that of Seattle. The heavy rainfall is due to summer air currents sweeping over the steaming floodplains of Bangladesh, gathering moisture as they move north. When the resulting clouds hit the steep hills of Meghalaya they are "squeezed" through the narrowed gap in the atmosphere and compressed to the stage they can no longer hold their moisture, causing the near constant rain the village is famous for.


3. Rain hammering down on a roof in the village on July 6, 2014. In the two peak monsoon months of June and July Mawsynram is hit with an average 275 Inches of rain - New York receives 60 inches in a year.

4. The weather station on the outskirts of Mawsynram. Measurements from the station are taken monthly, but by the end of 2014 an automated digital measurement system will replace this station.


5. Three laborers walk into Mawsynram under the traditional Khasi umbrellas known as knups. Made from bamboo and banana leaf, the knups are favored for allowing two-handed work, and for being able to stand up to the high winds which lash the region during heavy rainstorms.


 
6. An elderly Khasi woman is the first arrival to Sunday mass in Mawsynram's Catholic church. Around 70% of Khasi are Christian, largely due to the Reverend Thomas Jones who, in 1841 clambered up into the hills from the plains of Bangladesh and established the region's first church in the neighboring town of Cherrapunji.
 
7. The entrance to Mawsynram Village. Like most villages in the Meghalaya region of India's northeast, the people here are Khasi, an indigenous minority numbering about 1.2 million within India.

Brain Hacking Technology

There's been a lot of hype coming out of Silicon Valley in recent months about technology that can meld the human brain with machines. But how will this tech help society, and which companies are leading the charge?
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made waves in March when he announced his latest venture, Neuralink, which will design so-called brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Initially, the BCIs will be used for medical research, but the ultimate goal is to prevent humans from becoming obsolete, by enabling people to merge with artificial intelligence.
While these may seem like lofty goals, Musk is not the only one who's trying to bring humans closer to machines. Here are five companies that have doubled down on hacking the brain. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Neuralink

According to Musk, the main barrier to human-machine cooperation is communication "bandwidth."
This means that using a touch screen or a keyboard is a slow way to communicate with a computer. Musk's new venture aims to create a direct "high-bandwidth" link between the human brain and machines.
What that system would actually look like is not entirely clear yet. Words like "neural lace" and "neural dust" have been bandied about, but all that has really been revealed is a business model. Neuralink has been registered as a medical research company, and Musk said the firm will produce a product to help people with severe brain injuries within four years.
This will lay the groundwork for developing BCIs for healthy people, thus enabling humans to communicate by "consensual telepathy," which could be ready within five years, Musk said. Some scientists, particularly those in the neuroscience community, are skeptical of Musk's ambitious plans.

Facebook

Not to be outdone, just a few weeks after Musk launched Neuralink, Facebook announced that it is working on a way to let people type with their thoughts.
The goal is to build a device that would allow people to "type" up to 100 words per minute, according to Regina Dugan, head of the company's secretive Building 8 research group. Dugan also suggested that the device could work as a "brain mouse" for augmented reality (AR), removing the need to track hand movements to control cursors, The Verge reported.
Facebook has also been light on the details of its plans. The company has said it does not think implants are feasible in the long term, so it's focusing on developing some kind of cap that could track brain activity noninvasively, most likely using optical imaging.
But this technology doesn't exist yet. So, in the meantime, Facebook said that, within two years, it plans to create a prototype medical implant that would pave the way for future devices.

Kernel

Musk wasn't the first wealthy entrepreneur to dive into the underdeveloped neurotechnology space. Last August, Bryan Johnson, founder of the online payments company Braintree, invested $100 million into the startup called Kernel.
The company's initial goal was to develop a chip that could record memories and redeliver them to the brain, based on research by Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. But six months later, the two parted ways due to the long timescales involved, reported MIT Technology Review, and the company is now focusing on technology similar to Neuralink.
Kernel plans to build a flexible platform for recording and stimulating neurons, with the goal of treating diseases such as depression and Alzheimer's. But like Musk, Johnson is not afraid to discuss the prospect of using the technology to augment human abilities and merge with machines.
"There's this huge potential to co-evolve with our technology," Johnson told CNBC.

Emotiv

Unlike some other companies in this burgeoning industry, Emotiv actually makes products — electroencephalography headsets that record brain activity noninvasively.
The technology is lower fidelity than the kinds of neural implants other companies, such as Neuralink, are considering, but it is more established. The company has a research-grade device, called EPOC+, which sells for $799. But it also produces a more consumer-oriented headset, called Insight, which retails for $299.
Emotiv also produces a variety of software products that allow users to visualize their brain activity in 3D; measure their brain fitness; and even control drones, robots and video games, reported The Daily Dot. The company was selected to be part of the Disney Accelerator program in 2015, with the aim of creating a "wearable for the brain."

DARPA

Although it's not a company itself, the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a $60 million program last year to develop an implantable neural interface in collaboration with a consortium of private companies.
The project, which is a part of former President Barack Obama's BRAIN Initiative, is ambitious. DARPA wants a device that can record 1 million neurons simultaneously and stimulate at least 100,000 neurons in the brain. DARPA also wants the device to be wireless, the size of a nickel and ready in four years, which is an incredibly aggressive deadline, according to MIT Technology Review.
Potential applications include compensating for sight or hearing problems because the device could feed digital auditory or visual information directly into the brain. The exact technological approach is unclear at this stage, but the project has the heft of some major engineering giants, such as Qualcomm, behind it,  Quartz reported.

Have you ever thought of trying a new business or which field of business would be the most difficult to enter ?? Hopefully you must have thought about it at least once, not only you but many people think about making big in this world but only some who have the patience and courage to go all in and make it big. Well we have 2 very such people in this post i.e. Caleb Bradham founder PepsiCo and  John Pemberton founder Coca-Cola.


PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are the 2 biggest beverage companies present in this world at this time. These mammoths gained their position slowly and steadily with very less sales, absence of today's refrigeration tech added to their difficulties, but they overcame all the hurdles that came in the way to become what they are.

There are many factors which make them the best of best and unbeatable kings some of them are :

1. They are simply everywhere, which literally means everywhere, even the places where government has no reach are not inaccessible for them. You can find their products everywhere in the remotest places to the metropolis. You can have a chilled coke or pepsi even a place where water scarcity is killing thousands.

2. The distribution network of these mammoths is also exceptional, and these are connecting the remotest places on the globe and as said you can have a chilled beverage in places where people are dying of thirst. They have enhanced their distribution to such a level that some of the African countries are dependent on them for medicines and vaccines in remote areas.

3. High Bottling cost has made it difficult for a noob to enter the market, as no one would invest such a huge amount in the market when the future is not promised.

4. Profit margins in the financial year 2016 for Coca Cola is 60.67% and for PepsiCo is 55.08%, this provides a strong base for investments and gain them trust of their investors by providing a return equity of about 29%.

5. At last, being each others biggest rivals have not made them loose each others respect, one such incident is when Williams, 41, of Norcross, Ga., Ibrahim Dimson, 30, of New York and Edmund Duhaney, 43, of Decatur, Ga., were charged with wire fraud and unlawfully stealing and selling Coke trade secrets, PepsiCo alerted Coca Cola of the deal and thus gained respect of their rival, "Competition can sometimes be fierce but must be fair and legal " said PepsiCo spokesperson Dave Dececco.

As quoted in the movie Rush (2013), "A Wise man learns more from his enemies than a fool learns from his friends".