General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - December 2018

Dec 2018

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.

May 31, 2022

US-built 'Frontier' Now World's Fastest Supercomputer

US-built supercomputer titled 'Frontier' dethroned Japan's 'Fugaku' (developed by the Riken Institute and Fujitsu), as the world's fastest machine with 1.1 exaflops of performance on the 59th TOP500 list published by an international conference of computer experts. The Frontier supercomputer at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is the first to achieve an unprecedented level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second. Frontier features a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops, or two quintillion calculations per second, making it 10 times more powerful than ORNL's Summit system.
More than 100 members of a public-private team worked around the clock, from sourcing millions of components to ensuring deliveries of system parts on deadline to carefully installing and testing 74 HPE Cray EX supercomputer cabinets, which include more than 9,400 AMD-powered nodes and 90 miles of networking cables.

May 29, 2022

Two Indian Satellites to be Part of BRICS 'Virtual Constellation'

India and China are a step closer to working together in space after a joint commission on space cooperation for the BRICS bloc was established at a meeting of the top space agencies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Two orbiting Indian satellites Resourcesat-2 and 2A will be part of the "virtual constellation of remote sensing satellites", a data sharing mechanism among the BRICS countries.
The BRICS remote sensing constellation will be made up of six existing satellites contributed by the space agencies of BRICS countries including the CBERS-4, jointly developed by Brazil and China, Russia's Kanopus-V-type and China's Gaofen-6 and Ziyuan III 02.

May 28, 2022

NASA's Latest Mars Craft Nears Landing for Unprecedented Seismic Mission

NASA's first spacecraft built to explore the deep interior of another world streaked toward a landing scheduled on a vast, barren plain on Mars, carrying instruments to detect planetary heat and seismic rumblings never measured anywhere but Earth. After sailing 301 million miles (548 million km) on a six-month voyage through deep space, the robotic lander InSight was due to touch down on the dusty, rock-strewn surface of the Red Planet. If all goes according to plan, InSight will hurtle through the top of the thin Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,310 kilometers per hour).
The stationary probe, launched in May from California, will then pause for 16 minutes for the dust to settle, literally, around its landing site, before disc-shaped solar panels are unfurled like wings to provide power to the spacecraft.
InSight will spend 24 months - about one Martian year - using seismic monitoring and underground temperature readings to unlock mysteries about how Mars formed and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets of the inner solar system.

May 27, 2022

NIT-T Commissions Param Porul Super Computer Centre, Becomes part of NSM

A supercomputer named Param Porul was inaugurated at NIT Tiruchirappalli under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The NSM is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST). Param Porul supercomputing facility is established under phase two of the national supercomputing mission to facilitate computational research.
The Param Porul is based on direct contact liquid cooling technology to obtain high-power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost. Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. have been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.

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