General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - December 2016

Dec 2016

Mar 09, 2021

Astronomers Discover Most Distant Known Cosmic Jet

Astronomers using several ground-based telescopes have spotted the most distant cosmic jet discovered so far.
Its source is PSO J172.3556+18.7734, a radio-loud quasar located some 13 billion light-years from Earth and seen as it was when the Universe was only 780 million years old.
While more distant quasars have been discovered, this is the first time astronomers have been able to identify the telltale signatures of radio jets in a quasar this early on in the history of the Universe.
Astronomers think that there's a link between the rapid growth of supermassive black holes and the powerful radio jets spotted in quasars.
The jets are thought to be capable of disturbing the gas around the black hole, increasing the rate at which gas falls in.

Microsoft Starts Testing Chromium-powered Edge Browser

Microsoft has started testing its Chromium-powered Edge browser on the newly-launched Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S consoles.
Xbox testers in the Alpha Skip-Ahead group can now access the new Microsoft Edge on Xbox One or Xbox Series S / X consoles.
However, full mouse and keyboard support is still missing.
The new browser on Xbox will give users access to websites they want to surf on the controller.
The current test version also supports many of the same features from the desktop version of Edge that includes extensions and vertical tabs.

Mar 08, 2021

Nita Ambani Launches Social Media Platform Her Circle

Reliance Foundation chairperson Nita Mukesh Ambani launched a social media platform 'Her Circle' aimed at empowering women.
Her Circle is envisioned to be a one-stop destination to provide women-related content that is engaging and upliftment-oriented even as it connects women through a social platform.
With the Digital Revolution enabling round the clock global networking and collaboration, Her Circle welcomes ideas and initiatives of women from all cultures, communities and countries.
Her Circle subscribers will be able to watch videos, read articles with solution-oriented life strategies covering living, wellness, finance, work, personality development, community service, beauty, fashion, entertainment, creative self-expression and active participation in public life through women-led NGOs and other organisations.

Mar 07, 2021

Researchers Find Organic Matter and Water in Sample from Asteroid Itokawa

An international team of scientists has studied both the water and organic contents from a dust particle recovered from the surface of the near-Earth S-type asteroid 25143 Itokawa by JAXA's Hayabusa mission, which was the first mission that brought pristine asteroidal materials to Earth.
In 2010, the Hayabusa mission successfully recovered over thousands of regolith particles, with sizes ranging 10-200 μm, from the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa.
Itokawa is considered a rubble-pile asteroid that was re-accreted from materials of a formerly large, thermally metamorphosed, collisional-disrupted precursor planetesimal.

Mar 06, 2021

NASA's Perseverance Rover Drives on Mars for First Time

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover performed its first drive on Mars, covering 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) across the Martian landscape.
The drive served as a mobility test that marks just one of many milestones as team members check out and calibrate every system, subsystem, and instrument on Perseverance. Once the rover begins pursuing its science goals, regular commutes extending 656 feet (200 meters) or more are expected.
The drive, which lasted about 33 minutes, propelled the rover forward 13 feet (4 meters), where it then turned in place 150 degrees to the left and backed up 8 feet (2.5 meters) into its new temporary parking space.
To help better understand the dynamics of a retrorocket landing on the Red Planet, engineers used Perseverance's Navigation and Hazard Avoidance Cameras to image the spot where Perseverance touched down, dispersing Martian dust with plumes from its engines.

Mar 04, 2021

Union Minister Thaawar Chand Gehlot Launches 'Sugamya Bharat' App

- Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment Thaawar Chand Gehlot launched the 'Sugamya Bharat' App and a handbook titled 'Access - The Photo Digest' through a video conference in New Delhi.
- The App and the handbook have been developed by the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities.
- The App provides for five main features out of which four are directly related to enhancing accessibility.
- They include registration of complaints of inaccessibility across the broad pillars of the built environment, transportation sector and Information and Communication Technology ecosystem, positive feedback of examples and best practices worth emulating being shared by people as Jan-Bhagidaari.
- They also include Departmental s and guidelines and circulars related to accessibility. The fifth feature is a special feature meant only for Divyangjan for COVID-19 related issues.

Indigenously Developed "Spectrograph" Commissioned in Nainital

Indian Scientists at Aryabhatta Research Institute of observational sciences (ARIES), Nainital, have indigenously designed and developed a low-cost optical Spectrograph named as Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC). It has been commissioned on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), in the Nainital district of Uttarakhand.
The ADFOSC spectroscope is the largest of its kind among the existing astronomical spectrographs in India.
The ADFOSC spectrograph can locate sources of faint light from distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, and cosmic explosions.
So far, spectroscopes were imported from abroad at high costs. The 'Made in India' optical spectrograph is about 2.5 times less costly compared to the imported ones and can locate sources of light with a photon-rate as low as about 1 photon per second.
The ARIES is an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. It is the largest reflecting telescope in India, as well as in Asia.

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