General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - August 2015

Aug 2015

Apr 15, 2019

World's Largest Plane

The world's largest aeroplane, with two fuselages and six Boeing 747 engines, made its first test flight in California.
The mega jet, called Stratolaunch, carried out its maiden voyage over the Mojave Desert.
It is designed to carry into space, and drop, a rocket that would in turn ignite to deploy satellites.
It is supposed to provide a more flexible way to deploy satellites than vertical takeoff rockets because this way all that is needed is a long runway for takeoff.
The aircraft is so big that its wing span is longer than a football field, or about 1.5 times that of an Airbus A380.
Specifically, the wing span is 117 metres while it is just under 80 metres for an Airbus A380.
The plane flew for about two-and-a-half hours.
It hit a top speed of 304 km per hour and reached an altitude of 17,000 feet (5,182 metres).

Apr 12, 2019

A Pile of Solar E-waste

According to a study, by 2050, India will likely stare at a pile of a new category of electronic waste, namely solar e-waste.
Currently, India's e-waste rules have no laws mandating solar cell manufacturers to recycle or dispose waste from this sector.
India's PV (photovoltaic) waste volume is estimated to grow to 200,000 tonnes by 2030 and around 1.8 million tonnes by 2050.
India is among the leading markets for solar cells in the world, buoyed by the government's commitment to install 100 GW of solar power by 2022.
So far, India has installed solar cells for about 28 GW and this is largely from imported solar PV cells.

SpaceX's Conducts First Commercial Flight

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launched its first commercial mission from Florida in a key demonstration for billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk`s space company in the race to grasp lucrative military launch contracts.

New Species of Tiny Early Humans

Scientists have discovered the remains of a tiny, previously unknown species of humans that roamed the Earth nearly 67,000 years ago.
Researchers said that the findings represent a major breakthrough in our understanding of human evolution across Southeast Asia.
The team uncovered the remains of at least two adults and one juvenile within the same archaeological deposits in the Philippines, proving the region played a key role in hominin evolutionary history.
The new species, Homo luzonensis is named after Luzon Island, where the more than 50,000 year old fossils were found during excavations at Callao Cave.

Israeli spacecraft Crashes onto Moon

The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed onto the moon after a series of technical failures during its final descent, shattering hopes of a historic controlled landing on the lunar surface.
The unmanned robotic lander suffered periodic engine and communications failures during the 21 minutes or so of the landing sequence.
Beresheet, whose name is Hebrew for the biblical phrase "In the beginning", had travelled through space for seven weeks in a series of expanding orbits around Earth before crossing into the moon's gravity last week.
So far, only three nations have succeeded in carrying out a "soft" landing on the lunar surface: the United States, the Soviet Union and China.

Apr 11, 2019

Google Unveils Anthos

Google has introduced a new open platform called "Anthos" to run and manage apps from anywhere.
Based on the Cloud Services Platform that Google announced in 2018, "Anthos" lets users run applications on existing on-premise hardware investments or in the Public Cloud.
Anthos not only allows customers to deploy Google Cloud in their own data centres but also gives them the flexibility to build, run and manage their workloads within their data centre, on Google Cloud, or other cloud providers (Multi-Cloud), without making any changes.
Anthos will also let users manage workloads running on third-party clouds like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

First Image Ever Made of a Black Hole

Scientists revealed the first image ever made of a black hole, depicting its hot, shadowy edges where light bends around itself in a cosmic funhouse effect.
Assembling data gathered by eight radio telescopes around the world, astronomers created the picture showing the violent neighbourhood around a supermassive black hole, the light-sucking monsters of the universe theorized by Einstein more than a century ago and confirmed by observations for decades.
It looked like a flaming orange, yellow and black ring.

Apr 08, 2019

First Picture of a Black Hole Set to be Unveiled

The world, it seems, is soon to see the first picture of a black hole. On 10 April, 2019, astronomers across the globe will hold "six major press conferences" simultaneously to announce the first results of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which was designed precisely for that purpose.

Apr 07, 2019

IIT-B researchers find bacteria that may help remove pollutants

While carrying out a routine experiment on degradation of pollutants, researchers from IIT-Bombay have stumbled upon an organism which preferentially feeds on hazardous aromatic pollutants over glucose.
The discovery of this strain of bacterium, called Pseudomonas putida CSV86, can help in eliminating a diverse range of aromatic pollutants such as naphthalene (in household insect repellents), benzoate (in food preservatives), plastics and industrial chemicals.
The findings of the study, which was published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, will not only help in getting rid of pollutants in waste water by breaking them down into safer chemicals, but further gene study could have implications in the field of agriculture too.

India working on star wars arsenal

After successfully testing an anti-satellite (ASat) missile in March,, India is working to develop other counterspace capabilities like directed energy weapons (DEWs) and co-orbital killers as well as the ability to protect its own satellites from electronic or physical attacks.
The A-Sat missile that destroyed the Microsat-R satellite at an altitude of 283-km in the low-earth orbit (LEO) on March 27 was a "direct-ascent, kinetic kill" weapon.
It's "feasible" to target multiple satellites with multiple launches of the three-stage interceptor missile, which can go up to 1,000 km into space.
A co-orbital weapon is basically a satellite equipped with some explosive, weapon or DEW device, which is first put into orbit and then later manoeuvred to target the enemy satellite.
Apart from these kinetic kill weapons, other ASAT weapons like lasers, jammers, EMP and high-powered microwaves are being developed by China, which first tested an A-Sat missile against a Leo weather satellite in 2007.
India's long-term aim is to develop A-Sat weapons against satellites in both LEO and GEO-synchronous orbits as a credible deterrence against emerging threats to its growing space-based assets.
DRDO for long has also been running programmes on a wide variety of DEWs like highenergy lasers and high-powered microwaves capable of destroying aerial and ground-based targets, but whether they can be successfully developed into ASat weapons remains to be seen.

Amazon Plans Constellation of 3,000 Sats for 'Inclusive' Internet

Tech giant Amazon is planning to set up a network of more than 3,000 satellites in order to provide a high-speed broadband internet service from space.
In his latest space venture, Jeff Bezos plans to establish 3,236 satellites that will provide high-speed internet access to people around the world.
In recent weeks, Amazon has been posting job adverts for the project, named Project Kuiper, after a part of the distant solar system believed to contain many comets, asteroids, and other small bodies.
It was discovered by the late Dutch American astronomer Gerard Kuiper.
Project Kuiper is a new initiative to launch a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that will provide lowlatency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world.
This is a long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet.
Amazon is joining several other major players already seeking to provide the nextgeneration broadband service from space.

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