Science and Technology Quiz: Revision |14 Mar, 2021

The world’s largest aircraft took off over the Mojave Desert in California, the first flight for the carbon-composite plane built by Stratolaunch Systems Corp, started by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, as the company enters the lucrative private space market.

The white airplane called Roc, which has a wingspan the length of an American football field and is powered by six engines on a twin fuselage, took to the air shortly before 7 a.m. Pacific time (1400 GMT) and stayed aloft for more than two hours before landing safely back at the Mojave Air and Space Port as a crowd of hundreds of people cheered.

Source: ForumIAS Factly

Scientists in Israel unveiled a 3D print of a heart with human tissue and vessels, calling it a first and a “major medical breakthrough” that advances possibilities for transplants.

· The heart marked “the first time anyone has successfully engineered and printed an entire heart replete with cells, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers,” said Tel Aviv University’s Tal Dvir, who led the project.

· People have managed to 3D-print the structure of a heart in the past, but not with cells or with blood vessels.

Source: The Hindu

Black holes are not radiant and will not be visible through any telescope.

· However, as first suggested by Albert Einstein, if by chance, a tiny primordial black hole eclipses a distant star, light rays of the star will bend around the black hole due to gravitational effect, resulting in the star appearing to be brighter than it originally is for a short while. Called `gravitational lensing’, this rare phenomenon can occur only when the star, the black hole and the observer on the Earth are aligned in a straight line.

· When the black hole is in alignment with a distant star, due to gravitational attraction, light rays are bent inwards like a lens, making the star appear brighter.

Source: ForumIAS factly

Secretary Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), launched the website and mobile application [Learn to Protect, Secure and Maximize Your Innovation] on Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) today in New Delhi.

· The website and app have been developed by Cell for IPR Promotion and Management (CIPAM)-DPIIT in collaboration with Qualcomm and National Law University (NLU), Delhi.

· The modules of this e-learning platform [L2Pro India IP e-learning Platform and the L2Pro India Mobile App] will aid and enable youth, innovators, entrepreneurs and small and medium industries (SMEs) in understanding IPRs for their ownership and protection, integrate IP into business models and obtain value for their R&D efforts.

· The L2Pro has been successfully implemented in Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and France, benefiting immensely from close collaboration with respective IP organizations and public research institutions.

· The learning app has been customized for India in order to ensure that innovation which is fundamental to startups are protected, managed and commercialised.

Source: ForumIAS factly

The Mission, launched in 2015, envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high performance computing facilities.

· The mission would be implemented jointly by Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) through two

organizations the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

· The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.

Source: Agrahari

Data localisation laws refer to regulations that dictate how data on a nation’s citizens is collected, processed and stored inside the country.

· Among reasons supporting data localisation put out by the Justice Srikrishna Committee report last year, a few key ones are: Data localisation is critical for law enforcement.

· Access to data by Indian law agencies, in case of a breach or threat, cannot be dependent on the whims and fancies, nor on lengthy legal processes of another nation that hosts data generated in India.

· A key observation of the report is that it is ideal to have the data stored only locally, without even having a copy abroad, in order to protect Indian data from foreign surveillance.

· Currently, the only mandatory rule on data localisation in India is by the Reserve Bank of India for payment systems. Other than this, there are only reports or drafts of bills that are yet to be signed into law.

· Among material available in the public domain on data localisation is the white paper that preceded the Jusitce Srikrishna Committee report, inviting public comments.

· The second piece is the Draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 itself which has specific requirements on cross-border data transfers. This is seen as being more restrictive than the recommendations of the Srikrishna Committee.

· The draft e-commerce policy also has clauses on cross-border data transfer. For example, it suggests that if a global entity’s India subsidiary transfers Indian users’ data to its parent, the same cannot be transferred to a third party even with the user’s consent.

Source: ForumIAS factly

The first-ever “World Food Safety Day” adopted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in collaboration with WHO, will be celebrated on 7th of June 2019 under the theme “Food Safety, Everyone’s Business”.

Source: ForumIAS factly

With over one million reported cases in 2017, malaria still continues to be a burden for India and most countries of south-east Asia.

· Now, a group of researchers from IIT Guwahati has developed a simple detection method that uses an instrument when in the lab or a piece of chromatographic paper when in the field.

· The kit can be used to detect Plasmodium parasite, which causes malaria and also specifically detect Plasmodium falciparum, a notorious species.

· Using an ordinary syringe fitted with a small magnet, magnetic beads and few chemicals inside, the researchers were able to specifically capture the antigen released by the parasites in the blood of malaria patients.

· When the captured antigens interact with specific substrates inside the syringe, the blue dye turns pink. The dye is then adsorbed over a modified chromatographic paper.

· The formation of pink colour on the paper is a direct indication of the presence of parasites in the blood serum.

· The intensity of the colour increases when the concentration of antigen is high

Source: The Hindu

In scram-jet technology, combustion of fuel takes place in a chamber in the missile at supersonic speeds.

This is different from a ram jet system where the system collects the air it needs from the atmosphere during the flight at subsonic speeds and the propellants burn in the combustion chamber.

Source: ForumIAS factly

For the first time since it started functioning, the gravitational wave observatories at LIGO scientific collaboration have detected a merger of two unequal-mass black holes.

· The event, dubbed GW190412, was detected nearly a year ago, and this is almost five years after the first ever detection of gravitational wave signals by these powerful detectors.

· Subsequent analysis of the signal coming from the violent merger showed that it involved two black holes of unequal masses coalescing, one of which was some 30 times the mass of the Sun and the other which had a mass nearly 8 times the solar mass.

· The actual merger took place at a distance of 2.5 billion light years away.

Source: The Hindu