General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - December 2018

Dec 2018

Aug 18, 2021

Regional Dust Storms Enhance Martian Water Loss to Space

Individual regional dust events can boost planetary water loss by a factor of five to ten and represent an important driver of atmospheric evolution on Mars, according to an analysis of data collected by a trio of spacecraft: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), ESA's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiter.
Dust storms heat up higher altitudes of the Martian atmosphere, preventing water vapor from freezing as usual and allowing it to reach farther up.
In the higher reaches of Mars, water molecules are left vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation, which breaks them up into their lighter components of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen, which is the lightest element, is easily lost to space, with oxygen either escaping or settling back to the surface.
Planetary scientists have long suspected that Mars has lost most of its water largely through this process, but they didn't realize the significant impact of regional dust storms, which happen nearly every summer in the planet's southern hemisphere.

IIT Guwahati Researchers Make Breakthrough in Computer Memory Architecture

Researchers from IIT Guwahati have developed methods to evenly distribute accesses across computer systems' overall memory capacity to reduce the wear-out pressure on heavily-written locations.
The researchers have made fundamental contributions to memory architectures by preventing redundancy in data values and improving slow and frequent writes in the multi-core processor systems.
The research is being led by Professor Hemangee K. Kapoor from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the IIT Guwahati, and her team comprises research scholars Sukarn Agarwal, Palash Das, Sheel Sindhu Manohar, Arijit Nath, and Khushboo Rani.

Aug 17, 2021

Hubble Looks at Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1385

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have taken a picture of a spiral galaxy called NGC 1385.
NGC 1385 is located approximately 68 million light-years away in the constellation of Fornax.
NGC 1385's home, the Fornax constellation, is not named after an animal or an ancient deity, as are many of the other constellations. Fornax is simply the Latin word for a furnace.
The constellation was named Fornax by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, a French astronomer who was born in 1713.

OPPO Sets up Camera Innovation Lab at its R&D Centre in Hyderabad

Smartphone brand OPPO announced that it has set up a camera innovation lab at its R&D centre in Hyderabad.
The lab is designed to develop localised features, camera solutions using AI and focus on developing imaging software for a better user experience.
The camera lab will focus on building new solutions to resolve issues such as night videography, different surrounding light and light temperatures, and more.
The lab will also work towards developing solutions for video, still photography, and research on Full Dimension Fusion (FDF) Portrait Video System technology.

Aug 16, 2021

India's First Drone Forensic Lab Comes up in Kerala

India's first Drone Forensic Lab and Research Center has come up in Kerala. The Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan was inaugurating the State police department's 'Drone Forensic Laboratory' at the Kerala State Police CyberDome. Cyberdome is a technological research and development centre of the Kerala Police Department.
The centre will help in keeping a watch over unauthorized drones and also for the production of drones for the use of the police force. This lab-cum-research centre will look into both utility and threat aspects of a drone.
The police have forayed strongly into the relatively new field of drone forensics. It had recently analysed a drone brought down by the Border Security Force (BSF) near the international border in Kathua district in Jammu and Kashmir and helped the local enforcement zero in on its illegal operator.

Aug 14, 2021

NASA Research Facility in Ohio Named for Native Son Neil Armstrong

A NASA research facility in Ohio has been renamed after astronaut Neil Armstrong, who was born in the state and returned shortly after he became the first man to walk on the moon.
Ohio's U.S. senators led the efforts to change the name of the NASA Plum Brook Station in Sandusky to the Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility.

Aug 13, 2021

ISRO's Chandrayaan 2 Orbiter Discovers Water Molecules on Moon's Surface

India's ambitious Chandrayaan-2 moon mission may have made a hard landing on the lunar surface in 2019, but the orbiter accompanying it has been providing useful information to scientists back on Earth. And earlier this week, a research paper revealed that the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter confirmed the presence of water molecules (H2o) and hydroxyl (OH) on the surface of the moon.
The discovery was made by the orbiter's imaging infrared spectrometer (IIRS).
Plagioclase-rich rocks have been found to have higher OH or possibly H2O molecules when compared to the mare regions, which were found to have more dominance of OH at higher surface temperature.

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