General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - March 2018

Mar 2018

Sep 11, 2019

Chandrayaan-2 Lander Vikram Intact, But Tilted

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is yet to reestablish contact with the Vikram lander, three days after the lunar probe made a "hard landing" during its final descent to the moon.
The Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, which has eight instruments on board including a high-resolution camera that can take pictures as small as 0.3 metres across, has captured images of Vikram on the lunar surface.
The lander was found 'tilted' close to its designated landing spot in the lunar south pole region, raising concerns that its communications equipment could have been damaged.

Sep 10, 2019

China's Giant Telescope Picks up Signals from Deep Space

Chinese astronomers have detected repeated fast radio bursts (FRB), mysterious signals believed to be from a source about 3 billion light years from the Earth, with the largest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built.
Scientists detected the signals with the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) and they are carefully cross-checking and processing them.
FRBs are the brightest bursts known in the universe. They are called "fast" because these blips are very short, only several milliseconds in duration. But there is no reasonable explanation for their origin.

Scientists Unearth Largest Dinosaur Fossils

Researchers from Japan have unearthed a new species of dinosaur which measured eight-metres long and weighed close to five tonnes.
After studying around 350 bones and 70 taxa, researchers from Hokkaido University found out that the skeleton once belonged to a herbivorous dinosaur known as 'hadrosaurid'.
Initially, in the year 2013, they found a tail in northern Japan and thereafter excavated the whole skeleton, which was underneath 72 million-year-old marine deposits in the town of Mukawa.
Researchers named the dinosaur as 'Kamuysaurus japonicus,' which comes from "kamuy," the language of the indigenous people of northern Japan.
The duck-billed dinosaur, which weighed almost as much as an Asian elephant, is believed to be a nine-year-old adult who lived in coastal areas, known to be a rare habitat for those diverse groups of reptiles.

Sep 08, 2019

IFA 2019: Lenovo Launches New Thinkbook, Yoga Laptops

Lenovo is promising in its premium range of Yoga series and Thinkbooks that it unveiled at the annual tech industry event "IFA 2019".
A sleek workstation that sits comfortably on a table or your lap when you are on the move, keeps pace with every finger tap and when you relax, streams movies and videos to give you a theatre-like experience and what's more, it also comes with an enviable battery life.
The Chinese technology major showcased a new range of slim and stylish ThinkBook 14 and ThinkBook 15 aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), while its Yoga series flexible laptops included the Yoga C940 (14/15 inch), S740 (14/15-inch), C740 (14/15-inch) and C640 (13-inch).

Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter Locates Lander Vikram On Surface Of Moon

In a significant development relating to the lunar mission Chandrayaan-2, the Lander Vikram has been located on the surface of the moon.
The Chairman of the national space agency ISRO, Dr K Sivan has said, a thermal image of the Lander has been captured by the Orbiter of Chandrayaan-2. However, he has clarified that there is no communication yet from the Lander, adding, efforts are on to restore contact with it.
The Lander lost its contact with the ISRO's Mission Control Centre in Bengaluru in the wee hours, just minutes before its scheduled soft-landing. During its final leg of the crucial powered descent near the lunar South Pole, it went silent after reaching up to 2.1 kilometres above the surface.
A senior scientist of the ISRO told that the thermal image has been captured by the 'Imaging Infra-Red Spectrometer' that is fitted on the Orbiter.
It was made by detecting the naturally occurring infrared waves from the Lander.
The spectrometer is one of the eight scientific instruments that are onboard the Orbiter.
The Orbiter is meticulously revolving around the moon and has eight important payloads on it including the Infra-Red device.

First IoT In Mini Piped Water Scheme Launched At Amingaon

The IoT pilot project was launched by senior officials of the PHED and Piramal Sarvajal.
The Internet of Things, or IoT, is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
The solution is a maiden pilot project not only in Assam but all over India. This is derived using state-of-the art sensors for accurate measurement, micro-controller based control unit and remote monitoring dashboard.
The control unit converts signals from sensors to digital data and sends it to a centralised server.
A remotely managed dashboard helps Government and local administration in tracking the scheme's geo-location with its functional status for monitoring various parameters graphically, such as volume of water extracted from the ground, volume of water distributed to the village, water quality and ground water level.
This integrated solution will help the PHED in taking necessary corrective or preventive action and thereby help in good governance.
In the programme, Dr Siddhartha Singh, Secretary of PHED, Mission Director SBM, Easther Kathar DDC Kamrup, Nayan Das, Chief Engineer PHED, Diganta Baruah, Executive Engineer and Ruchi Agarwal, senior manager of Piramal Sarvajal were present.

Sep 07, 2019

Rakhigarhi Skeletal DNA Largest Source Of Ancestry For South Asians

The lead authors of a new study on DNA findings from skeletal remains excavated from Rakhigarhi, an Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) site in Hisar district of Haryana, claimed that their findings "completely reject the theory of Steppe pastoral or ancient Iranian farmers as source of ancestry to the Harappan population", setting off a debate on the origin of Indians.
The study — 'An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Pastoralists and Iranian Farmers'— was published in the journal 'Cell' on September 5, 2019, and was conducted by a team of archaeologists and geneticists from India and abroad.
The team included Shinde of Deccan College (Pune), Vageesh Narasimhan and David Reich of Harvard Medical School, and Rai of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow, among others.
Iranian related ancestry in South Asia split from Iranian plateau lineage over 12,000 years ago, says study.

ISRO's Chandrayaan-2 Vikram lander Goes Silent Seconds Before Touchdown

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has lost contact with Vikram Lander of Chandrayaan-2.
The mission suffered a technical glitch moments before Vikram's scheduled landing on Moon's surface.
ISRO chief Dr K Sivan said everything was normal till the time Vikram lander was 2.1 km above Moon's surface.
He said the communication between Vikram Lander and the ground station was lost thereafter. Data is being analysed.

Sep 06, 2019

YouTube To Pay USD 170M Fine After Violating Kids' Privacy Law

Google agreed to pay USD 170 million to settle charges that it illegally collected and shared data from children on its YouTube video service.
The company agreed to work with video creators to label material aimed at kids and said it will limit data collection when users view such videos, regardless of their age.
Some lawmakers and children's advocacy groups, however, complained that the settlement terms aren't strong enough to rein in a company whose parent, Alphabet, made a profit of USD 30.7 billion 2018 on revenue of USD 136.8 billion, mostly from targeted ads.
Google will pay USD 136 million to the Federal Trade Commission and USD 34 million to New York state, which had a similar investigation.
The fine is the largest the FTC has levied against Google, but it's tiny compared with the USD 5 billion fine against Facebook in 2019 for privacy violations.

Chinese Shoppers Adopt Facial Payments in Cashless Drive

No cash, no cards, no wallet, and no smartphones: China's shoppers are increasingly purchasing goods with just a turn of their heads as the country embraces facial payment technology.
China's mobile payment infrastructure is one of the most advanced in the world, but the new systems -- which require only face recognition -- being rolled out nationwide could make even QR codes seem old-fashioned.
Customers simply make a purchase by posing in front of point-of-sale (POS) machines equipped with cameras, after linking an image of their face to a digital payment system or bank account.

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