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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - August 2015

Aug 2015

Jan 26, 2019

NASA's Opportunity Rover Completes 15 Years on Mars

NASA's Opportunity rover that went into hibernation after a dust storm swept over the region and blocked sunlight from reaching it, has completed 15 years on the Red Planet.
The rover landed in a region called Meridiani Planum on January 25, 2004, sending its first signal back to Earth from the surface at 12.05am.
The golf-cart-sized rover was designed to travel 1,006 metres and operate on the Red Planet for 90 Martian days (sols). It has travelled over 45 km and logged its 5,000th Martian day last February.
Opportunity's last communication with Earth was received June 10, 2018, as a planet-wide dust storm blanketed the solar powered rover's location on the western rim of Perseverance Valley, eventually blocking out so much sunlight that the rover could no longer charge its batteries.
Although the storm eventually abated and the skies over Perseverance cleared, the rover has not communicated with Earth since then.

Jan 25, 2019

Bezos's Blue Origin Rocket Makes 10th Flight Test

With an eye on launching the first tourists to space by year's end, Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, blasted off the 10th test flight of its New Shepard rocket.
The rocket, carrying no people on board but eight science experiments for Nasa, soared skyward from a launchpad in Texas. A few minutes into the flight, the capsule separated from the booster and reached its peak height of 106km.
The frontier of space is internationally agreed to be 100km above Earth, known as the Karman Line.
Eight minutes after blast off, the rocket booster fired its engines and made a controlled, upright landing back on Earth, marking the fourth flight for this particular rocket, and the 10th flight test for New Shepard overall.

China Clones 'Insomniac' Monkeys

Monkeys cloned from a macaque that was genetically engineered to have a sleep disorder at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai.
Researchers found that the five new monkeys — born over the past six months — showed signs of mental problems associated with sleep disorders, including depression, anxiety and behaviour linked to schizophrenia.
The findings could aid research into human psychological illnesses because scientists would be able to create animals with specific disorders

Boeing's Flying Car Takes off

A Boeing flying car designed to whisk passengers over congested city streets and dodge skyscrapers completed its first test flight, offering a peek into the future of urban transportation the aerospace giant and others are seeking to shape.
A prototype of its autonomous passenger air vehicle completed a controlled takeoff, hover and landing during the test conducted in Manassas, Virginia.
Propelled by electricity, the model is designed for fully autonomous flight, with a range of 50 miles.
The Chicago-based plane maker and rival Airbus are among a slew of companies racing to stake a claim on flying cars, which has the potential to be the next disruption to sweep the aerospace industry.
Boeing's push was boosted by a 2017 acquisition of Aurora Flight Sciences, whose projects include a new flying taxi it is developing with Uber.

Jan 24, 2019

'Roshni' to help visually impaired identify notes

The Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, has come to the aid of visually impaired, who have been facing difficulty in identifying the new currency notes introduced by the Reserve Bank of India, post demonetisation.
The application "Roshni" is free of cost.
"Roshni" was the first Android app that worked successfully with new INR currency notes.
The user after downloading "Roshni" from the Play Store has to bring the currency note in front of the phone camera and the app will provide audio notification intimating the currency note's denomination.
If the image is not clear or not focussed, or the desirable minimum prediction accuracy is not achieved, the user is provided aural notification to "try again".
The usability aspects were considered in designing this app and it worked in a broad range of light conditions and holding angles.

Isro Set to Launch Key Mission

An Isro mission will rocket into the record books at 11.37 pm on 24 January.
The rocket will be launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. It will carry Microsat-R, a 700-kg imaging satellite of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, and SKI Kalamsat V2, a 1.2kg satellite developed by students of Space Kidz India (SKI), Chennai.
The flight will set a record for two reasons. It will be the first time that the fourth stage of a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) will not be discarded as usual.
It will be converted into an orbital platform to carry out experiments by students.
The PSLV is also being flown with two strap-on motors (called PSLC-DL) for the first time. It usually employs six.

Jan 23, 2019

IIT-M Develops AI Technology to Predict Stone Pelting in J&K

A group of students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)- Madras, has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology for predicting crowd behaviour and offered it to the Indian Army for possible use in Jammu and Kashmir to deal with stone pelters who attack security forces.
Using action recognition algorithms, crowd density maps and analysis of live images coming in from CCTV cameras, it is possible to predict abnormal events including stone pelting.
Stone pelters have interfered in army operations in Kashmir, seeking to distract their attention to help militant gunmen escape.
Four IIT students involved in the crowd analysis project recently travelled to Delhi from Chennai to take part in the Army Technology Seminar-2019, an army initiative that seeks to bring the military, academia and industry on a common platform to find indigenous solutions to the force's requirements.
The Army Design Bureau, inaugurated in August 2016, is the force behind the initiative. It has been tasked with promoting research and development and acting as a bridge between the army and the private sector to meet the army's requirements.
Other IITs have also come up with solutions to the army's problems. For instance, IIT-Delhi has developed hygiene products that will allow soldiers deployed on the Siachen glacier to clean themselves properly.

AI Can Predict the Movement of a Tennis Ball

Scientists say they have created an algorithm that can predict where a tennis player will hit the next ball by analysing data of thousands of shots played by Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer in Australian Open.
The finding by researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia could lead to new ways for professional tennis players to predict their opponent's moves.
The algorithm called Semi Supervised Generative Adversarial Network architecture can also be used in virtual reality games, offering people the chance to go head-tohead with world's best players in an accurate but artificial grand slam.
The researchers created the algorithm using Hawk-Eye data from the 2012 Australian Tennis Open, provided by Tennis Australia.
They narrowed their focus to study just the shot selection of Djokovic, Nadal and Federer because they had the complete data to input into the system on how the players' shot selection changed as the tournament progressed.
The researchers analysed over 3,400 shots for Djokovic, nearly 3,500 shots for Nadal and almost 1,900 shots by Federer, adding context for each shot such as whether it was a return, a winner or an error.

Gene-edited Chickens to Resist Flu

British scientists are developing gene-edited chickens designed to be totally resistant to flu in a new approach to trying to stop the next deadly human pandemic.
The first of the transgenic chicks will be hatched later this year at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
The birds' DNA has been altered using a new gene editing technology known as CRISPR. In this case the "edits" are to remove parts of a protein on which the flu virus normally depends, making the chickens totally flu-resistant. The idea is to generate poultry that cannot get flu and would form a buffer between wild birds and humans.
In research published in 2016 in the journal Nature, Barclay's team found that a gene present in chickens called ANP32 encodes a protein that all flu viruses depend on to infect a host. Laboratory tests of cells engineered to lack the gene showed they cannot be infected with flu.
Roslin Institute scientists gained fame in 1996 as creators of "Dolly the sheep", the world's first cloned animal. They have also created gene-edited pigs to make them resistant to a virus.

Jan 21, 2019

Signs of life in India from 2.5bn years ago

A team of researchers from IIT Kharagpur has found evidence of life in India dating back at least 2.5 billion years — to the beginning of a time known to scientists as the Great Oxidation Event, which marked the entry of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere.
The first signs of life have been found in the form of microbial cells in the Deccan. It took the team four years of arduous work before the microbes were found at a depth of three kilometres.
The findings have been published in the December edition of "Scientific Reports: Nature", an online, open-access journal from the publishers of the prestigious scientific journal "Nature".
The search started in 2014, when the ministry asked the IIT biotechnologists to join a team of geologists at Koyna in Maharashtra, where a devastating earthquake had occurred in 1964.

Roberts to Deliver Drugs to Blood Vessels

Scientists have developed tiny, smart robots that can swim through blood vessels, paving the way for ingestible machines that could deliver drugs directly to diseased tissue in the future.
The researchers from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and ETH Zurich in Switzerland drew inspiration from bacteria to design the highly flexible biocompatible micro-robots.
Since these devices are able to swim through fluids and modify their shape when needed, they can pass through narrow blood vessels and intricate systems without compromising on speed or manoeuvrability.
They are made of hydrogel nanocomposites that contain magnetic nanoparticles, allowing them to be controlled via an electromagnetic field.

Nasa, China planning a lunar colony

Nasa is set to collaboratively work with China's space agency for Moon exploration, in a bid to prepare for setting up a human colony on the lunar surface, as well as future missions to deep space.
The US space agency held discussions with the China National Space Administration (CNSA) to explore the possibility of observing a signature of the landing plume of their lunar lander, Chang'e 4, which landed on the Moon earlier this month.
This approach will enable human expansion across the solar system and bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities.
Nasa's robotic lunar surface missions, which will begin as early as 2020, will focus on scientific understanding of lunar resources, and prepare the lunar surface for a sustained human presence, to include the use of lunar oxygen and hydrogen for future lunar vehicles.
The lunar surface may also serve as a crucial training ground and technology demonstration test site where we will prepare for future human missions to Mars and other destinations.

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