The Science & Technology Weekly – 9 May – 14 May, 2016

Starting 4th April, 2016 we have a started a new initiative to post Science and Technology Compilation of all articles coming in leading news daily on a weekly basis. We look forward to simplify the preparation of aspirants by easing out their task in one of the most vague topics in UPSC preparation. The compilation will make aspirants aware with day to day happenings in the field of science and technology as well list out basics in brief.
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1. Starspots on nearby star give fresh insight into Sun’s infancy
2. Navy to bid adieu to Sea Harriers on Wednesday 
3. Noise net could save birds, aircraft 
4. Exotic heat-resistant gel: a spinoff from ISRO 
5. SDGs: big agenda, big opportunities for India 
6. Second Exomars mission in 2020 
7. Mercury’s moment with the Sun
8. World’s first holographic flexible smartphone developed
9. Gene that gives carrots their colour identified 
10. SpaceX Dragon departs space station, heads home with cargo
11. NASA’s official exoplanet count more than doubles
12. Einstein is bang right even 13 billion light years from Earth
13. Virtual heart tool to predict sudden cardiac death risk

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[1] Starspots on nearby star give fresh insight into Sun’s infancy

News

• Studying a nearby star has given scientists a fascinating insight into how the Sun may have behaved billions of years ago.
• A team of astronomers, used cutting-edge techniques to create the first direct image of surface structures on the star Zeta Andromedae, found 181 light years from Earth.
• In order to image the star’s surface during one of its 18-day rotations, the researchers used a method called interferometry where the light of physically separate telescopes is combined in order to create the resolving power of a 330 m telescope.
• The star showed signs of “starspots” the equivalent of sunspots found within our own solar system. The pattern of these spots differs significantly from those found on the Sun.
• The researchers suggest these results challenge current understandings of how magnetic fields of stars influence their evolution.
• They believe that the findings offer a rare glimpse of how the Sun behaved in its infancy, while the solar system was first forming.

[2] Navy to bid adieu to Sea Harriers

Issue

• The Indian Navy has retired the Sea Harrier fleet that operated from its aircraft carrier INS Viraat, and plans to replace them with MiG- 29Ks that India has bought from Russia.

From where India brought this

• The Indian Navy bought 30 British-made Sea Harriers in 1983 but only 11 now remain. The Navy once considered upgrading  the Sea Harriers but abandoned the plan.

The Sea Harrier pilots are now being trained to fly the Russian MiG 29K fighter aircraft. India had planned to replace the Sea Harriers with the homemade Light Combat Aircraft (Naval) version but the program is more than 15 years behind schedule, said an Indian Navy official.

Why it is being retired

• State-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. conducted a limited upgrade to the Sea Harriers in 2009 but acquisition of spares has become a problem because BAE Systems has stopped manufacturing the aircraft. The limited upgrade included mounting of Israeli Elta-made multimode fire control radars and Derby beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles.
• In 2006, the Navy planned to purchase retired Sea Harriers from the Royal British Navy but the Ministry of Defence later abandoned the program.

Air Defence

• The principal role of the subsonic Sea Harrier was to provide air defence to naval fleet by operating from their aircraft carriers.
• The Sea Harrier was fitted with anti-ship Sea Eagle missile providing the best stand-off range anti ship capability to the fleet.

[3] Noise net could save birds, aircraft

Issue

• Introducing a noise net around airfields that emit sound levels equivalent to those of a conversation in a busy restaurant could prevent collisions between birds and aircraft, saving lives and billions in damages, new research has found.

Mechanism

• In this birds are stopped from hearing one another by playing a noise that is at the same pitch as the alarm calls or predator noises they are listening out for.
• By playing a noise at the same pitch, sounds are masked, making the area much riskier for the birds to occupy. The birds don’t like it and leave the area around the airfields, where there is potential for tremendous damage and loss of life.

[4] Exotic heat-resistant gel: a spinoff from ISRO

What is Exotic heat-resistant gel

• A near-invisible silica gel that would serve as a thermal barrier in cryogenic fuel tanks, boot soles and sun films.
• The yet to be christened product, the hydrophobic silica aero gel as it is known now, is supposed to have low thermal conductivity and density and high specific surface area and can be applied on any surface.

How it works

• As air fills the gel up to 95 per cent of its size, it comes as super lightweight material. The air molecules trapped inside the gel would act as insulators, and its heat conductivity is close to zero.

Uses of this

• They could be used for coating the windows of houses and vehicles as they would let in 95 per cent of the light that falls on the surface and fully deflect the heat.

• As the gel acts as a thermal barrier, it could be used as a protective component of clothes and boots of soldiers stationed in extremely cold regions such as Siachen and Kargil. The weight of military clothes could be brought down to ordinary dresses after applying the gel over it thus giving the much required freedom of movement for the soldiers. To coat a jacket may require around 500 grams of gel.
• Besides apparel for soldiers, the gel could also be used for heavy duty dresses used by researchers working in Arctic/Antarctic expeditions. For insulating cryogenic fuel tanks, 2.8 kg of gel is required.
• The other applications of the material include acoustic insulations, building and pipeline insulation and window facades as translucent panels which allow natural light but not heat for hot areas where air conditioners are and trapping heat in cold places.
• It would also be used for controlling oil spills and vibration. Other applications include acoustic damping materials and insulation in refrigerators, fillers or additives in paints, sealants, adhesives, cement, coatings, foams, and for increasing the heat resistance of the material, according to VSSC sources.

[5] SDGs: big agenda, big opportunities for India

Issue

• The year 2016 marks an end of the era of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which drove the global development agenda since the new millennium.
• The MDGs have paved the way for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that the world will strive to achieve over the next fifteen years.

Lessons learnt

• First, high-level political commitment globally and nationally drove much of the progress towards MDGs. We need nothing less for the SDGs.
• Second, while MDGs helped improve the overall health of nations, the focus was on the aggregate targets, ignoring inequities within countries. To understand the real progress and challenges there is a need to disaggregate data by gender, economic status and geographical area.
• Thirdly, neither the economic benefits of good health nor the direct financial consequences of ill-health were sufficiently captured by MDGs. We know that nations require a healthy population to prosper. When people do fall sick, high out-of-pocket expenditures on healthcare lead to financial hardship and diminish the ability of the population to contribute to the economy. In India, nearly 60 million people fall into poverty just paying for healthcare, while many more abstain or delay seeking healthcare due to financial difficulties.
• Fourthly, MDGs did not capture the importance of prevention, early detection and response to disease threats. The growing non-communicable disease (NCD) epidemic and consequent premature deaths could be prevented by reducing lifestyle risk factors, specifically tobacco use, food intake, inactivity, and alcohol consumption. In addition, diseases like SARS, Ebola, MERS and Zika pose threats to global health security and have the potential to cripple countries. MDGs missed this important issue.
• Lastly, it is not only about ‘more money for health, but also more health for money’; the MDGs focused on addressing specific disease and symptoms, which led to fragmentation, duplication and inefficiencies in the health systems. WHO estimates that nearly 20-40 per cent of all health resources are wasted.

The way forward

• Unlike MDGs, which had three dedicated health goals, the SDG agenda has only one health goal (SDG-3) which aims to ‘ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all in all ages’. The 13 broad targets under health goal are in-tune with current global epidemiological reality. Besides the unfinished MDG agenda of reducing maternal and child mortality and tackling the communicable disease, the SDG-3 also aims to tackle the epidemic of NCDs, substance abuse and ill-effects of environmental hazards. Health is also interlinked to several other SDGs related to poverty, gender equality, education, food security, water sanitation etc.

Towards sustainable development

India can progress towards sustainable development in health if it follows the following five steps.

• First, health must be high on the national and state agenda, as it is the cornerstone for economic growth of the nation. The proposal in India’s draft National Health Policy 2015 to raise public to health expenditure to 2.5 per cent of the GDP by 2020 is commendable.
• Second, India should invest in public health and finish the MDG agenda through further improvements in maternal and child health, confronting neglected tropical diseases, eliminating malaria, and increasing the fight against tuberculosis.
• Third, accelerate the implementation of universal health coverage. UHC is important to prevent people slipping into poverty due to ill health and to ensure everyone in need has access to good quality health services. UHC is at the core of SDGs and in the interest of people and governments.
• Fourth, build robust health system in all aspects and strengthen both the rural and urban components, with comprehensive primary health care at its centre.
• Finally, develop a strong system for monitoring, evaluation and accountability. It is absolutely essential to regularly review and analyse the progress made for feeding into policy decisions and revising strategies based on the challenges.

[6] Second Exomars mission in 2020

• Exomars is a Joint Mars mission by Russia and Europe.
• The second mission will be now launched in 2020 instead of 2018.
• Like the first mission, the second Exomars mission will also be launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan with the help of a Proton rocket. It involves a Russian-led surface platform and a European-led rover.
• The successful implementation of both missions will allow Europe and Russia to jointly explore and validate cutting-edge technology for Mars entry. It will also help in descent and landing, control of surface assets and to develop more systems that can be used in other missions to explore the solar system.

[7] Mercury’s moment with the Sun + Mercury makes a rare move across the Sun

Issue:

• Mercury’s transit across the Sun

What is a transit?

• When an inner planet (Venus or Mercury) passes between the Sun and Earth, it is called a transit.

How does it look?

• Mercury appears like a small dot on the surface of the Sun. As the transit progresses, the dot-like silhouette of Mercury moves from the left edge of the Sun to the right, appearing to move down across the sun’s disc. Somewhat counterintuitively, it is called “ascending transit.”

Importance of the transit

• An accurate measurement of transits can contribute to checking formulas involving planetary dynamics. So it has educational value.

Historical significance

• Until the end of the 17th century, there was no mechanism for calculating the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
• The relative distances between planets were known, for example, that Jupiter is about five times as far from the Sun as the Earth is.
• To calculate this, at least one absolute distance was needed, namely, the Earth-Sun distance.
• Sir Edmund Halley observed a mercury transit in 1677 and realised that if the time taken for the planet to transit were measured from two different spots on Earth, this could be used to measure the Earth-Sun distance, which could be used to calculate the distances of other planets, absolutely.

How often does transit of Mercury take place?

• Unlike solar eclipses, Transits of Mercury are somewhat rare. In a century, there are about 13-14 transits of mercury. They happen in pairs separated by about three years.

Who first predicted it?

• Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), the astronomer who discovered the laws obeyed by celestial bodies, was the first one to predict, using these laws, that there would be a Transit of Mercury on November 7, 1631.

[8] World’s first holographic flexible smartphone developed

News:

• Scientists claim to have developed the world’s first holographic flexible smartphone that lets users interact with 3D videos and images without any headgear or glasses.

The device

• It is capable of rendering 3D images with motion parallax and stereoscopy to multiple simultaneous users without head tracking or glasses.
• HoloFlex offers a completely new way of interacting with smartphone.
• It allows for glasses-free interactions with 3D video and images in a way that does not encumber the user.
• HoloFlex features a 1920×1080 full high-definition Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diode (FOLED) touchscreen display.
• Images are rendered into 12-pixel wide circular blocks rendering the full view of the 3D object from a particular viewpoint.
• These pixel blocks project through a 3D printed flexible microlens array consisting of over 16,000 fisheye lenses.
• The resulting 160×104 resolution image allows users to inspect a 3D object from any angle simply by rotating the phone.
• HoloFlex is also equipped with a bend sensor, which allows for the user to bend the phone as a means of moving objects along the z-axis of the display.
• Vertegaal envisions a number of applications for the new functionality of the HoloFlex technology.
• A first application is the use of bend gestures for Z-Input to facilitate the editing of 3D models, for example, when 3D printing.
• Using the touchscreen, a user can swipe to manipulate objects in the x and y axes, while squeezing the display to move objects along the z-axis.
• Due to the wide view angle, multiple users can examine a 3D model simultaneously from different points of view.
• By employing a depth camera, users can also perform holographic video conferences with one another.
• When bending the display users literally pop out of the screen and can even look around each other, with their faces rendered correctly from any angle to any onlooker,” he said.
• HoloFlex also can be used for holographic gaming. In a game such as Angry Birds, for example, users would be able to bend the side of the display to pull the elastic rubber band that propels the bird.When the bird flies across the screen, the holographic display makes the bird literally pop out of the screen in the third dimension.

[9] Gene that gives carrots their colour identified

News:

• Scientists unveiled the gene in carrots that gives rise to carotenoids
  • Which is a critical source of Vitamin A and that turns some fruits and vegetables bright orange or red.

Gene code?

• ‘DCAR_032551’, emerged from the first complete decoding of the carrot genome.

What is the benefit?

• Vitamin A deficiency is a global health challenge. Its plentiful carotenoids make carrot an important source of provitamin A in the human diet.
• Carrot’s genetic secrets will make it easier to enhance disease resistance and nutritive value in other species.
• These results will facilitate biological discovery and crop improvement in carrots and other crops.

Carotenoids were first discovered in carrots (hence the name).

• The researchers sequenced the genome of a bright orange variety of the vegetable called the Nantes carrot, named for the French city.

Complete genomes sequence:

• Daucus carota now joins a select club of about a dozen veggies — including the potato, cucumber, tomato and pepper.

Carrots are loaded with beta-carotene, a natural chemical that the body can transform into Vitamin A.

• The deeper the orange colour, the more beta-carotene.
• Carotenoids are also antioxidants, which are thought to protect against heart disease and some forms of cancer by neutralising so-called “free radicals”, single oxygen atoms that can damage cells.
• Some of these compounds can prevent disease.
• Carrots are an interesting crop to work on because of their wide range of diversity.
• They are familiar to everyone, and generally well-regarded by consumers, but like most familiar things, people don’t necessarily know the background stories.
• Interestingly, carrots — along with many other plants — have about 20 per cent more genes than humans.

[10] SpaceX Dragon departs space station, heads home with cargo

• A SpaceX capsule is headed back to Earth with precious science samples from NASA’s one-year spaceman.
• Nearly 4,000 pounds of items are packed into the Dragon, including blood and urine samples from astronaut Scott Kelly’s one-year mission. Kelly returned to Earth in March and has since retired from NASA. The space agency is eager to get the last of his medical specimens. It’s SpaceX’s first return trip for NASA in a year.

[11] NASA’s official exoplanet count more than doubles

• NASA on Tuesday announced 1,284 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, called exoplanets. That’s on top of the approximately 1,000 previously authenticated exoplanets detected by the Kepler Space Telescope since its launch in 2009.
• The first step in answering the question whether we are alone in the universe is to detect and understand the population of planets around other stars.
• The old process for confirming planets among the Kepler-identified candidates involved slow and laborious follow-up observations by ground telescopes.
• This new batch of planets comes from a statistical analysis led by Princeton University researcher Timothy Morton. Princeton’s method using a fast and automated software system called Vespa puts the likelihood of true planethood for each confirmed planet at more than 99 percent. Vespa relies on thousands of incoming signals from Kepler’s candidate planets. A periodic dip in a star’s brightness is the telescope’s tip-off of a potential planet.
• Of the 1,284 newly verified planets, nearly 550 of them are thought to be of the size of the Earth or super Earth-sized and quite possibly rocky, according to NASA. This includes more than 100 new planets estimated to be 1.2 times the radius of Earth or smaller.
• Nine of these close-to-Earth-sized planets appear to orbit in the habitable zone of their stars. The tally for this Goldilocks zone of not too hot and not too cold, allowing for liquid water, now stands at 21 exoplanets.

[12] Einstein is bang right even 13 billion light years from Earth

News:

• Scientists have made a 3D map of 3,000 galaxies 13 billion light years from Earth, and found that Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is valid even far into the universe.
• Since it was discovered in the late 1990s that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, scientists have been trying to explain why.

Dark energy

• The mysterious dark energy could be driving acceleration, or Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which says gravity warps space and time, could be breaking down.

To test the scientific genius’s theory, researchers used data on more than 3,000 distant galaxies to analyse their velocities and clustering.

 

• Einstein was bang right

• Their results indicate that even far into the universe, general relativity is valid, giving further support that the expansion of the universe could be explained by a cosmological constant, as proposed by Einstein in his theory of general relativity.

 

Einstein’s theory holds: period

• No one has been able to analyse galaxies more than 10 billion light years away, but the team managed to break this barrier thanks to the FMOS (Fibre Multi-Object Spectrograph) on the Subaru Telescope, which can analyse galaxies 12.4 to 14.7 billion light years away.

[13] Virtual heart tool to predict sudden cardiac death risk

News:

• Scientists have developed a non-invasive, personalised 3-D virtual heart assessment tool to help doctors determine whether a patient faces a risk of life-threatening arrhythmia, a condition when the heart rhythm is irregular or abnormal.
• To save the life of a patient at risk, doctors currently implant a small defibrillator to sense the onset of arrhythmia, and jolt the heart back to a normal rhythm
• It is difficult to decide which patients truly need the invasive, costly electrical implant.
• But Doctors and researchers are developing a tool to identify patients who genuinely need it.