General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - February 2016

Feb 2016

Jun 07, 2022

China Launches Six-month Space Mission

China successfully launched three astronauts on a six-month mission to complete the construction of the country's space station currently orbiting the Earth. The Shenzhou-14 spacecraft carrying astronauts Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe was lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China.
The Shenzhou 14 crew will spend six months on the Tiangong station, during which they will oversee the addition of two laboratory modules to join the main Tianhe living space that was launched in April 2021.
The station will operate in low-Earth orbit at an altitude between 340 to 450 kilometres. Once completed, it will have a lifespan of 10 years, but experts believe it could last more than 15 years with appropriate maintenance and repairs.

Jun 05, 2022

Astronomers Discover 116,027 New Variable Stars

Variable stars are celestial objects whose brightness waxes and wanes over time, especially if observed from our perspective on Earth. In the study, Dr. Christy and colleagues analyzed data from ASAS-SN as well as from ESA's Gaia mission, the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) and the AllWISE catalog. They used a machine learning algorithm to generate a list of 1.5 million candidate variable stars from a catalog of about 55 million isolated stars. Afterward, they whittled the number of candidates down even further. Of the 1.5 million stars they studied, 378,861 turned out to be real variable stars.
More than half were already known to the astronomy community, but 116,027 of them proved to be new discoveries, including over 111,000 periodic variables and 5,000 irregular variables.

Jun 04, 2022

Indian-origin Engineer's UK Team Creates E-skin that Can Feel 'Pain'

A team of researchers led by an Indian-origin engineer in the UK has created an electronic skin capable of feeling "pain" and according to them it could help create a new generation of smart robots with human-like sensitivity. The discovery marks a real step forward in work towards creating large-scale neuromorphic printed e-skin capable of responding appropriately to stimuli. The development of the electronic skin is described as the latest breakthrough in flexible, stretchable printed surfaces from the University of Glasgow's Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) Group.
Scientists were working for decades to build artificial skin with touch sensitivity. One widely-explored method is spreading an array of contact or pressure sensors across the electronic skin's surface to allow it detect when it comes into contact with an object.

Instagram's New Feature to Help Find Missing Children

Instagram launched an 'alert' feature to help find missing children. The photo-sharing app has partnered with various organisations globally to set up the feature. The feature will display details about missing children on users' Instagram feed if they are in a specific area where an active search is taking place. The alerts on the Meta-owned platform will include details such as a child's photo, description, and location of the abduction. Instagram will show users alerts based on information like their IP address and location services (if it is turned on).
In addition to the photo and video sharing platform, Amber Alerts are available on Facebook since 2015. Instagram has started rolling out the alerts feature, and it will be available in 25 countries in the coming weeks, it said, adding that it is working to bring them to more countries.

Jun 03, 2022

The First Liquid Mirror Telescope in the Country and the Largest in Asia - Commissioned Atop Deva...

India commissioned a unique liquid-mirror telescope atop a mountain in the Himalayan region that will keep a watch on the skies to identify transient or variable objects such as space debris, asteroids, supernovae and gravitational lenses. It is the country's first and Asia's largest liquid-mirror telescope. The telescope, built by astronomers from India, Belgium and Canada, is located at an altitude of 2,450 metres at the Devasthal Observatory campus of Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) in Nainital district, Uttarakhand.
The telescope will help in surveying the sky, making it possible to observe several galaxies and other astronomical sources just by staring at the strip of sky that passes overhead.

ISRO Chairman Inaugurates New Spacecraft Manufacturing Facility

Dr. S. Somanath, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), inaugurated ANANTH Technologies' spacecraft manufacturing unit at Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board (KIADB) Aerospace Park. The new state-of-the-art spacecraft manufacturing facility can conduct assembly integration and testing of four large spacecraft simultaneously.
This is a first of its kind facility in India, adding that since its establishment in 1992, Ananth Technologies has contributed to the manufacturing of 89 satellites and 69 launch vehicles built/launched by ISRO.

Jun 01, 2022

Super Hygroscopic Polymer Film Can Harvest Water from Arid Air

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin developed a low-cost polymer film made of renewable biomass and hygroscopic salt that can extract atmospheric water in arid environments; these materials cost a mere $2 per kilogram, and a single kilogram can produce more than 6 liters of water per day in areas with less than 15% relative humidity and 13 liters in areas with up to 30% relative humidity.
This new work is about practical solutions that people can use to get water in the hottest, driest places on Earth. This could allow millions of people without consistent access to drinking water to have simple, water generating devices at home that they can easily operate.

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