General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - August 2015

Aug 2015

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.

Jan 19, 2019

772 million email IDs outed in what could be largest data breach ever

In what could be the biggest data breach in recent times, over 772 million email addresses and 22 million unique passwords have been outed in a collection of files uploaded to cloud service MEGA.
Calling it Collection #1, Microsoft's regional director and MVP for developer security Troy Hunt, who revealed the breach first, said the dump was a "set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows". Also, in total, this adds up to "1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords".

India ranks third in research on artificial intelligence

India ranks third in the world in terms of high quality research publications in artificial intelligence (AI) but is at a significant distance from world leader China, according to an analysis by research agency Itihaasa, which was founded by Kris Gopalakrishnan, former CEO and co-founder of Infosys.
India, while third in the world with 12,135 documents, trailed behind China with 37, 918 documents and the United States with 32,421 documents.
However, when parsed by another metric 'citations'— or the number of times an article is referenced — India ranked only fifth and trailed the United Kingdom, Canada, the U.S. and China.

Jan 18, 2019

AI helps find new human ancestor

An artificial intelligence system has identified a previously unknown human ancestor that roamed the planet tens of thousands of years ago and left a genomic footprint in Asian individuals.
By combining deep learning algorithms and statistical methods, researchers from the University of Tartu in Estonia, Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Spain and found that the extinct species was a hybrid of Neanderthals and Denisovans and cross bred with modern humans in Asia.
The finding, published in 'Nature Communications', would explain that the hybrid found last year in the caves of Denisova — the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father — was not an isolated case, but rather was part of a more general introgression process.
Researchers used deep learning for the first time ever to account for human evolution, paving the way for the application of this technology in other questions in biology, genomics and evolution.

India To Train 45 Nations In Nano-Satellite Making

India will train 45 countries in nano-satellite making through a new capacity building programme.
The programme named Unispace Nanosatellite Assembly and Training(UNNATI) by Isro was flagged off by Isro chairman K.Sivan and junior minister of space Jitendra Singh at UR Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru.
The first batch course started this month and will be completed by March 2019.

India To First Send a Humanoid Into Space

India will not use animals to test systems for the Gaganyaan project. The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) will have a humanoid — robot resembling a human — conducting experiments in space twice before actually sending humans by 2022.
As per ISRO Chairman, K Sivan, the humanoid is almost ready. The mission should serve a purpose beyond displaying our ability to send humans and bring them back safely.
The robot will be able to do whatever a man can do, although not as extensively as them. Even the first flight will not go empty and utilise the opportunity to the maximum.

Jan 17, 2019

New super-Earth exoplanet may harbour alien life

The recently discovered cold super-Earth exoplanet orbiting around the red dwarf Barnard — the second closest star system to Earth — has the potential to harbour primitive life, says a study.
Barnard b (or GJ 699 b) is a super-Earth with a minimum of 3.2 Earth masses.
It orbits its red star every 233 days near the snow-line, a distance where water freezes. Although likely cold (-170 degrees centigrade), it could still have the potential to harbour primitive life if it has a large, hot iron or nickel core and enhanced geothermal activity.

ISRO Works on Tech to Reuse 1st & 2nd Rocket Stages

In a bid to cut the cost of satellite launchers, Isro is working on reusable launch technology for using the first and second stages of a rocket multiple times.
To master the technology, Isro is going to hold a test on the advanced version of reusable launch vehicle (RLV) in June-July.
The first rocket stage will be recovered on a vertical landing spot on the sea like Space X has been doing with Falcon rocket. Recovering the second stage is not easy.

Jan 16, 2019

Novel smart home robot may help older adults live independently

Scientists have created a robot that could help elderly people with dementia and other limitations live independently in smart homes.
The Robot Activity Support System uses sensors embedded in a smart home to determine where its residents are, what they are doing and when they need assistance with daily activities.
It navigates through rooms and around obstacles to find people on its own, provides video instructions on how to do simple tasks and can even lead its owner to objects like their medication or a snack in the kitchen.

Chinese seed sprouts on moon

A small green shoot is growing on the moon in an out-of-this-world first after a cotton seed germinated on board a Chinese lunar lander.
The sprout has emerged from a lattice-like structure inside a canister since the Chang'e-4 lander set down earlier this month.
This is the first time humans have done biological growth experiments on the lunar surface.
Scientists from Chongqing University, who designed the "mini lunar biosphere" experiment, sent an 18-cm bucket-like container holding air, water and soil.

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