Category Science & Technology

Around 90 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Antarctica housed swampy rainforests. Scans of a sediment layer collected from the Antarctic seabed near the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers revealed forest soil, dense network of well-preserved fossil roots revealing individual cell structures, and countless traces of pollen and spores from plants, including the first remnants of flowering plants ever found at these high Antarctic latitudes.

Analysis of this soil content showed that even during months of darkness, swampy temperate rainforests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than expected. Average temperatures in is region were around 12 degree C; average summer temperatures may have been and 19 degree C and water temperatures in the rivers and swamps around 20°C, with moderately abundant rainfall (41inches).

According to climate models run by scientists, these conditions could have existed if there was dense vegetation across Antarctica with little or no ice sheet present and higher carbon dioxide levels than previously thought.

The findings illustrate the powerful effect that carbon dioxide has on the Earth and the importance of polar ice sheets in cooling the planet.

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A bright green light-emitting mushroom has been discovered at Mawlynnong in East Khasi Hills district and at Krang Shuri in West Jaintia Hills district of Meghalaya. The tiny mushrooms were found sovering dead bamboo in the forest Local residents use the glowing hamboo sticks as natural torches to navigate the forest at night.

The mushroom is a new species from the genus Roridomyces — and the first fungus in this genus to be discovered from India. It is named phyllostachydis, after the genus of the bamboo tree on which it was found. It is now one among the 97 known species of bioluminescent fungi in the world.

Roridomyces phyllostachydis’ uniqueness lies in the fact that it is the only member in its genus to emit light from its stipe (stalk). The pileus (cap) is not bioluminescent, the reason for which is still a mystery.

Bioluminescence attracts insects, which helps in dispersing spores or it may also be a mechanism for protection against frugivorous (fruit eating) animals.

Light emits when the compound luciferans is catalysed by the enzyme luciferase in the presence of oxygen…. several unstable, intermediate products are released as excess energy that makes them visible as light,” a researcher said.

These findings could pave the way for the development of glowing plants for use in organic architecture and street lighting.

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The Nobel Prize, which is awarded to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”, is presented across a number of categories. Even though it recognises specific work done by people, the individuals receiving it more often than not make telling impressions in other ways too.

Take the case of Karl Ferdinand Braun, for instance. A German electrical engineer, Braun was a winner of the Nobel Prize. While he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi “in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy”, he contributed handsomely in other fields as well.

First big contribution

Born in 1850 at Fulda, where he was educated, Braun showed an early aptitude for mathematics. While his name is a homophone of brawn, a word that means physical strength, Braun had less to do with that and more to do with his brains. After studying at the Universities of Marburg and Berlin, Braun graduated in 1872. Along the way, he started focussing on physics.

He didn’t have to wait for long to make his first big contribution as he discovered the point-contact rectifier effect in 1874. The unipolar conduction (current flows freely only in one direction) of metal semi-conductor junctions that he discovered is even seen by many as the beginning of solid-state electronics.

Teaching career

Between his 1874 discovery and his invention of cathode-ray tube in 1897, Braun moved from strength to strength in his teaching career. Having started out as a teacher at a Gymnasium (school) in Leipzig, Braun went on to teach Physics at Marburg, Strasbourg, Karlsruhe and Tubingen in a little over 10 years. He returned to Strasbourg in 1895 as principal of the Physics Institute and remained there, even though he got other offers as well.

Braun’s invention of the cathode-ray tube, also known as the Braun’s tube, in 1897 built on the research done by fellow German physicist Heinrich Geissler and British chemist William Crookes. In order to study high-frequency, alternating-current electricity, Braun came up with the tube that now bears his name.

Short and slick paper

By removing air from a glass tube that contained an anode and a cathode, rays were emitted from the cathode on application of a voltage to both electrodes. Braun then found out not only how to focus these rays such that they struck a phosphor-coated screen on the opposite side, but also how to change the beam’s direction by placing an electromagnetic coil near the neck of the tube.

In a short, slick paper that was published in Annalen der Physik (one of the oldest scientific journals on physics now) on February 15, 1897, Braun clearly described the design and realisation of his tube. He didn’t stop there though, for, he also presented its application as an oscilloscope.

Recalls in Nobel Lecture

Braun dedicated his later years to research pertaining to radio and telegraphy, and it was his work in this field that eventually led to him winning the Nobel Prize. He didn’t forget his past though, as he recalled his invention in the following manner in his Nobel Lecture in 1909: “…I might perhaps recall an accessory which was of great use to me and other experimenters. I mean the cathode-ray tube which I described in 1897”.

While Braun died in 1918, the concept of using an electron beam for generating an image on a screen was made into a practical television system years later. In the middle and late 20th Century, TVs and other electronic display units with picture tubes based on Braun’s cathode-ray tube became commonplace everywhere. It stayed that way until they met their demise early in the 21st Century, when they were eventually replaced by other technologies.

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Images from space that show Earth as nothing more than a blur of blue tug at our hearts in a way that can’t be put into words. The ones that you see here, while evoking such emotions, are also iconic in their own right. This is because they show the first human ever to walk untethered in space. The subject of these photographs is NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II.

Born in Boston in 1937, McCandless did his schooling at Long Beach, California and received his Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1958. He then obtained his Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1965, and eventually also ended up with a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Houston in 1987.

Communicator role

A retired U.S. Navy captain, McCandless was one of 19 astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966. He served as the mission control communicator for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their famous 1969 Apollo 11 mission, which included the first human landing on the moon. McCandless, in fact, famously felt let down by Armstrong as the latter hadn’t revealed ahead what he had planned to say while setting foot on the moon.

McCandless flew as the mission specialist on two space shuttles, STS-41B in 1984 and STS-31 in 1990. While the 1984 mission saw him become the first human to perform an untethered spacewalk, he helped deploy the Hubble Space Telescope during the 1990 mission.

Helps develop MMU

Apart from these, McCandless also served as a member of the astronaut support crew for the Apollo 14 mission and was a backup pilot for the first crewed Skylab mission. For the M-509 astronaut manoeuvring experiment that was flown in the Skylab programme, McCandless was a co-investigator. He collaborated on the development and helped design what came to be known as the MMU – manned manoeuvring unit.

The STS-41B was launched on February 3, 1984. Four days later, on February 7, McCandless stepped out of the space shuttle Challenger into nothingness. As he moved away from the spacecraft, he floated freely without any earthly anchor.

“Heck of a big leap for me”

“It may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me,” were McCandless’ first words. If the mood at mission control had been apprehensive before, the raucous laughter that followed this comment certainly reduced the tension – a fact that was confirmed by his wife, who was also at mission control. McCandless would later say that his comment was consciously thought out and that it was his way of saying things were going okay, apart from getting back at Armstrong for not revealing his words in 1969.

The images that were shot then, showing McCandless spacewalking without tethers, gained widespread fame. The spacewalk was the first time the MMU that he helped develop was used. These nitrogen-propelled, hand-controlled devices afforded much greater mobility to their users as opposed to restrictive tethers used by previous spacewalkers.

Fellow astronaut Robert L. Stewart later tried out the MMU that McCandless first used. Two days later, both of them tried another similar unit with success. By February 11, the STS-41B mission was complete as the Challenger safely landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre.

In one of his last interviews, before his death in December 2017, McCandless told National Geographic what he had probably told countless others who wanted to know how it was out there.

Fun, but cold

While he always maintained that it was fun, he also adds that the single thing that disturbed him as he moved away from the shuttle was that he got extremely cold, with shivers and chattering teeth.

The reason for that is pretty straightforward. While he had prepared for that moment for years, he wasn’t prepared for the temperature in the suit. As the suit was designed to keep astronauts comfortable while working hard in a warm environment, even the H (hot) position on the life support system actually provided minimal cooling. Considering that McCandless wasn’t really performing strenuous labour during the first hours of his untethered spacewalk, he felt cold. That’s a small price to pay for becoming the first-ever human to walk freely in space.

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Plastic pollution from discarded fishing gear in the Ganges River poses a threat to wildlife such as the critically endangered three-striped Ganges river dolphin. The fishing nets – all made of plastic – were the most common type of gear found.

“Ingesting plastic can harm wildlife, but our threat assessment focussed on entanglement, which is known to injure and kill a wide range of marine species,” said Sarah Nelms, University of Exeter, UK.

The researchers used a list of 21 river species of “conservation concern” identified by the Wildlife Institute of India in Uttarakhand.

They combined existing information on entanglements of similar species worldwide with the new data on levels of waste fishing gear in the Ganges to estimate which species are most at risk.

The findings offer hope for solutions based on “circular economy” where waste is dramatically reduced by reusing materials. A high proportion of the fishing gear found was made of nylon 6, which can be used to make products including carpets and clothing. Collection and recycling of nylon 6 has strong potential as a solution because it would cut plastic pollution and provide an income.

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Animals that that have a magnetic ‘sixth sense include sea turtles, birds, fish, and lobsters, Specific species use this ability as a navigation tool, such as sea turtles that are, impressively, able to return to the location of their birthplace.

Researchers propose that the magnetic sense comes from a symbiotic relationship with magnetotactic bacteria, a special type of bacteria whose movement is influenced by magnetic fields, including that of Earth’s.

Magnetotactic bacteria are associated with many animals, including a penguin species, loggerhead sea turtles, bats and Atlantic right whales. It is still not known where in these animals the bacteria would live, but it may well be associated with nervous tissue, like the eye or brain.

Learning how organisms interact with magnetic fields can improve humans’ understanding of how to use Earth’s magnetic fields for their own navigation purposes.

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Researchers have named a type of burrowing frog Sphaerotheca Bengaluru to highlight the gap in the documentation of amphibians from non-forested areas and the need to restore frog habitats in Bengaluru.

The discovery of the new species in an unexpected location not only indicates that the city is home to other uncatalogued species, but has also come as a warning on the pollution of water bodies.

The frog was found outside normal habitats, in a barren tract of land near Rajankunte where there is no permanent source of water. “This genus of frog is generally located around freshwater areas or in forested landscapes. Water is vital to the completion of their life cycle,” said Dr K. P. Dinesh of the Zoological Survey of India. The presence of the new frog, which has not been found in or around any of the city’s water bodies, suggests that they could have become uninhabitable for the new species. “They are the first to be affected by water pollution and their behaviour tells us about the quality of an ecosystem,” Dr Dinesh added.

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Hominids are any of a family (Hominidae) of erect bipedal primate mammals, including extinct ancestral forms. To put it simply, any member of a group that consists of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, or an early form of any one of these is known as a hominid. So while Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin remain the buzz words when we are talking about astronauts (as they were the first to land on the moon), and Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin was the first human ever in space, none of them can claim to be the first hominid in space.

That record goes to Ham, a chimpanzee. While other animals, including dogs, monkeys, mice, rabbit and fruit flies, had been sent to space from late in the 1940s, Ham became the first hominid when he achieved the feat on January 31, 1961.

Chimps turn astrochimps

Born in 1957 in the French Cameroons (now part of Cameroon) in West Africa, Ham was captured by trappers and the male chimpanzee was then sent to the Miami Rare Bird Farm in Florida, the U.S. He was sold to the U.S. Air Force in 1959, who then transferred him to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

Ham (after Holloman Aerospace Medical Center), who was merely “Number 65” at that time, was one among 40 chimpanzees chosen for the space programme that was to serve as the springboard for human spaceflight. The fact that both chimps and humans are hominids and that humans share more DNA with chimpanzees than any other animal meant that they were much more closely related, and hence chosen for the task.

The 40 chimpanzees chosen were put through the paces as they received their astrochimp training. They were taught to pull levers in response to light and sound and were awarded (with banana pellets) or punished (with mild electric shocks on their feet) based on their responses. Just like their human Mercury 7 counterparts who were training for years, these chimps too were subjected to g-forces and microgravity.

As the training progressed, the number of chimpanzees was first brought down to 18 and then to six – four females and two males. With their training complete, the Air Force sent the six finalists to Cape Canaveral in Florida on January 2, 1961.

The chosen one

The six were split into two groups of three in order to ensure that germs do not spread to everyone in case one of them became ill. The training sessions continued, and all six of them remained in contention until the day before the scheduled launch on January 31. Ham, who was said to be particularly feisty and in good humour, got the nod along with another female chimp, who served as backup.

Those traits probably served him well as Ham went to space aboard the Mercury spacecraft, boosted by a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket. The flight didn’t go exactly as planned as the Mercury capsule unintentionally carried him to an altitude of 157 miles (252 km) and a speed of 5,857 mph (9,425 kmph) as opposed to the original targets of 115 miles (185 km) and 4,400 mph (7,081 kmph).

Ham experienced weightlessness for 6.6 minutes during his 16.5-minute flight. Even though there was a partial loss of air pressure as well, there was no damage done as he remained encased in his pressurised capsule. The lever-pulling exercise was also a success, as Ham performed only mildly slower than how he had during training. This success was significant as it showed that human beings too could perform physical tasks while out in space.

Instant popularity

Ham’s capsule splashed down in the ocean a little over 16 minutes after it was launched. Ham was calm and in good spirits when retrieved by the recovery ship and was only agitated later on when he had to pose for the photographers and TV crews after returning to the hangar.

Fatigue and dehydration apart, Ham was fine according to the medical examination that followed. He instantly gained celebrity status as he featured in numerous documentaries, articles, magazine covers, television shows and cartoons.

After living at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, DC until 1980, he was moved to the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro. Following his death in 1983 aged 25, his skeleton was sent for further investigation, while his other remains were buried at the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, New Mexico. A plaque at the grave site in New Mexico reads “Ham proved that mankind could live and work in space.”

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A box, room, or device (a darkened enclosure) that has a small hole (an aperture, maybe with a lens) through which light from external objects enters to produce an image on an opposite surface is called a camera obscura. Also referred to as pinhole camera at times, the basic optical principles of these have been known for a long time. While the earliest written observations can be dated back to over 2,000 years, the oldest known published drawing of a camera obscura is found in a 1545 book De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica.

The author of this book was a physician by the name Gemma Frisius. Apart from being a practising physician, he was also a mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, astronomer and instrument maker.

Teaches medicine and mathematics

Born Jemma Reinierzoon in Dokkum, Friesland, a town in modern Netherlands, in 1508, he lost his parents at a young age. While Gemma is a Latinised onomatopoeic version of his birth name, Frisius is the toponym for Friesland. Despite the fact that he was born into a poor family and was also orphaned early in his life, he not only earned a medical degree while studying at Leuven (a city in Belgium), but also stayed on to study mathematics and astronomy.

After he had obtained his MD degree in 1536, he practised medicine in the city for the rest of his life. He also remained in the faculty at Leuven’s University and as one of the leading theoretical mathematicians of the time, also taught mathematics.

Triangulation for surveying

Even before he got his MD degree, he had probably made one of his finest contributions. In 1533, Frisius described for the first time using triangulation for map-making. Even though the technique of triangulation (formation of or division into triangles) had been known since antiquity, it was Frisius who proposed to employ it for the purpose of surveying lands.

In this technique, one chooses a base line of known distance and from its endpoints the angles of sight to remote points are measured. Using basic trigonometry, the distance to this point from either endpoint can now be calculated. The two distances measured are then used as base lengths and the process is repeated until the entire area to be surveyed is broken down into a network of triangles. This method proposed by Frisius is still widely used for surveying.

Gemma’s rings

As a cartographer, Frisius built and improved a number of instruments. He had set up his workshop to produce globes and mathematical instruments while he was still a student and went on to create terrestrial and celestial globes that became famous.

He even designed astronomical instruments and one of them, astronomical rings, is also called as Gemma’s rings. Frisius is also credited with a method of determining differences of longitude by transporting an accurate clock or time-pieces.

As an astronomer, Frisius observed natural phenomena with gusto. It was during an annular solar eclipse, which took place on January 24, 1544, that Frisius utilised a camera obscura to study it.

He then described his method of using camera obscura to study the solar eclipse along with an illustration in his 1545 book De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica. This diagram is the first known picture of a camera obscura.

Frisius died in 1555, aged 46, at Leuven. By then, he had left his influence in a number of fields, some of which lasts even now, over 400 years later.

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When returning from their famed moon mission in 1969, the astronauts of Apollo 11 returned with samples, including rocks, from our natural satellite. For decades after that, the only new material from space that geologists looked at came from meteorites reaching us. It was only in 2006 that a spacecraft sent material, including cometary and interstellar dust, back to Earth.

The Stardust mission was the first one to send back cometary samples and extraterrestrial material that came from outside the orbit of our moon. Launched in 1999, the Stardust spacecraft consisted of two solar arrays along with a sample return capsule that weighed 46 kg. It carried dedicated scientific and engineering instruments, which included the Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA), Dust Flux Monitor Instrument (DFMI), aerogel collector grid and navigation camera.

Substance called aerogel

Of these, the aerogel dust collector was of particular interest. The substance called aerogel was responsible for collecting the comet and interstellar dust. A silicon-based solid with a porous, sponge-like structure, it largely comprised empty space. Such a configuration enabled it to capture particles with minimum changes due to heat or chemical alteration, something impossible with conventional collection materials.

Before heading to the comet whose samples the spacecraft was scheduled to collect, it first visited an asteroid, 5535 Annefrank (named after Anne Frank, the Dutch-German diarist whose writings were published as The Diary of a Young Girl), in 2003. Flying within 3,300 km of the asteroid and clicking images of it, the flyby was seen as a preliminary run of what lay ahead for Stardust.

Wild encounter

By December 2003, Stardust was near its destination, comet 81P/ Wild, commonly known as Wild 2 (named after Swiss astronomer Paul Wild and pronounced “vilt 2”). It extended its tennis-racquet shaped collector, and after collecting all the material that was possible, sealed it in a vault in the re-entry capsule. It clicked a number of photographs as well and made its closest approach to the comet on January 2, 2004, flying within 250 km.

Two years later, in January 2006, Stardust released its conical capsule into the Earth’s atmosphere. The descent was stabilised by releasing a drogue parachute when 32 km out and the main parachute of the capsule opened up at a height of three km. After it touched down in the Utah desert helicopters arrived at the scene, picked up the capsule and transferred it to NASA’S Johnson Space Center in Houston within a couple of days. The search for signs of tiny little particles comic and interstellar dust – in the aerogel soon began.

What’s next?

Stardust, which was placed in hibernation after this phase of the mission was marked completed on January 16, 2006, got a new lease of life with an extended mission. Funding allowed for New Exploration of Tempel 1 (NEXT). after NASA’S Deep Impact had successfully observed the comet Tempel 1 in 2005 and also crash landed a probe on it.

The Stardust-NEXT mission was to continue mapping the comet and study how the impact crater changed. It reached its second comet target, Tempel 1, on February 14, 2011. While it became the first spacecraft to visit two comets in the process, Tempel 1 became the first come to be visited by two spacecraft.

The images and samples returned by Stardust helped us better understand comets, allowed researchers to discover a new class of organics more primitive than those found in meteorites and also helped identify irregular particles known as calcium-aluminium rich inclusions (CAIs) that are among the oldest solar system particles. A handful of interstellar particles too have been discovered and the search for more is still ongoing. Stardust’s extended mission ended on March 25, 2011 after which the spacecraft continues to orbit the sun. According to NASA’s predictions, it will never get closer than 2.7 million km to Earth’s orbit.

Ready to search for interstellar dust?

The sample returned by the Stardust spacecraft not only contained particles of various sizes collected from the comet Wild 2 but also rare and tiny interstellar dust particles.

While there are thousands of particles from the comet, the number of particles of interstellar dust are expected to be only in the 10s.

While this makes them incredibly rare and precious, it also makes the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack look easy.

As the search for interstellar dust would probably take researchers and scientists several years if they alone are involved in it they have started a Citizen Science Project Standust@home to crowdsource the search.

Through this project, they are seeking the support of talented volunteers from across the globe. If you are interested, you can also participate. You would. however, have to go through a web-based training session and pass a test before qualifying to register and participate.

If a volunteer discovers an interstellar dust particle, they appear as a co-author on scientific papers announcing the discovery, and also get the privilege of giving the particle its common name. Even if not that lucky, there is a ranking system based on the amount and quality of searching done with the top-ranked volunteers invited to visit the lab in Berkeley, the U.S.

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How do you feel when you are in on a secret that your friends do not know yet? How do you feel when your parents ask you to keep a secret before the planned big reveal to the extended family? Keeping answers to those questions in mind, imagine how it would be if you are keeping a secret for your country. And add to it the fact that you are among the select few who know the complete truth…

Clarke’s idea

The idea of space satellites for communication was first proposed in 1945 by popular English science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even though technology wasn’t as advanced, he believed that a group of Earth-orbiting satellites could securely send information to even remote locations. With transatlantic cables and radio signals incapable of achieving that, the need was definitely there. But it wasn’t until the end of the 1950s that his ideas became reality.

The Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment (SCORE) project was a top-secret mission that went on to become the world’s first successful demonstration of a long-range satellite radio-relay system. It started off as a routine suborbital mission test for the outsiders, before going on to reveal its secrets.

Strict orders for secrecy

Shrouded in secrecy, only 88 people were informed of its existence, with strict orders not to reveal anything to the media, colleagues, or even their own families. The idea was to inform the world if the mission was successful or to keep it a secret forever if it failed.

Apart from the burden of secrecy, there were other challenges too that had to be surmounted. The communication system had to be developed, the payload had to be within a certain weight and ground stations had to be established. On top of these, the SCORE communication package was to be built into the Atlas launch vehicle’s side pods, and not as a discrete spacecraft as was the norm back then. And all of this had to be done within a few months.

By the time SCORE project’s Atlas B was launched on December 18, 1958, the Soviets had already launched three successful Sputnik satellites into orbit. With the pressure on them, the Americans were not only trying to look further from their past failures, but also boost their national image once again.

Safety hazard? Not really!

The observing engineers noticed that the Atlas veered off its course considerably, prompting a safety hazard. This led to a signal to the Range Safety Officer to destroy it, who, however, ignored the message and let the rocket surge forward.

This was because the Range Safety Officer was among the 35 people in the entire world with knowledge of what Project SCORE’s motives were. Among the original 88, 53 were misled to believe the mission was cancelled and that this was simply another missile test. Far from being a routine test, however, it was to send an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into low Earth orbit and also launch the world’s first communication satellite.

Only as the rocket veered off its presumed course towards low Earth orbit was its primary objective revealed. While an Atlas ICBM achieved orbit for the first time in history, the second objective proved a little more elusive.

The communications system was designed such that it would not only transmit pre-recorded messages that could be heard by anyone in Earth, but also send and receive messages from the SCORE ground stations. The pre-recorded messages included one from the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower.

During the first few orbits, the ground station signalled the communication package to broadcast President Eisenhower’s message. But it wasn’t until the 13th orbit, on December 19, that it finally responded as the ground station commanded the back-up system.

Eisenhower’s message

“This is the President of the United States speaking,” the recording said. “Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one. Through this unique means, I convey to you and to all mankind America’s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere.”

Despite being developed and launched at almost break-neck speed, Project SCORE ticked off a lot of boxes for the Americans. It was the world’s first communication satellite, even though its batteries died 12 days after launch and it burned up as it reentered the Earth’s atmosphere on January 21, 1959. It was the first successful trial of an Atlas launch vehicle, which would go on to be used for Project Mercury (taking the first Americans to space). It was the heaviest object until then to be launched into orbit and also the first time a missile-guidance system was used to put a satellite into orbit.

As for Eisenhower’s message, it was added to the National Recording Registry (a list of sound recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States”) by the Library of Congress over 50 years after it was delivered. With that, SCORE’s message has been saved for generations to come.

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Discarded cucumber peels may soon find their way back to your kitchen in the form of eco-friendly food packaging developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur.

Cucumber peels have greater cellulose content (18.22%) than other peel waste. The research showed that cellulose nano crystals derived from cucumber peels possess modifiable properties due to the presence of abundant hydroxyl groups, which resulted in better biodegradability and biocompatibility.

In India, cucumber finds wide use in salads, pickles, and also in the beverage industry, leading to a large volume of peel bio-waste. This non toxic, biodegradable and biocompatible product has no adverse effects on health and environment and hence could have a huge market potential by rendering management of organic waste with high cellulose content profitable.

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Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, which is fast becoming the next big destination in planetary research, may actually glow in the dark.

The findings are a result of Earth bound experiments at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, which recreated Europa and Jupiter’s interactions. The researchers found that Europa possibly glows blue-white and blue-green through its ice and water interior, even at night.

Indian-origin NASA scientist Murthy Gudipati, and his team, were working on experiments to understand how Jupiter’s incessant radiation affects Europa. Jupiter emits the strongest radiation after the sun and is surrounded by the biggest planetary magnetic field in the solar system, which accelerates charged particles to high energies. This enormous magnetosphere spans over 1 million km in radius, engulfing Europa and many other moons.

Moons are normally visible at night because of sunlight that reflects off their surfaces or atmospheres. Europa, however, seems to be illuminated through the night, even with no sun, because of charged particles from Jupiter and its interior. “If Europa weren’t under this radiation, it would look the way our moon looks to us dark on the shadowed side,” Gudipati said. “But because it’s bombarded by the radiation from Jupiter, it glows in the dark.”

Europa’s night-side glow could provide information on its surface composition and whether it has conditions suitable for life. It is covered with a solid crust made of water ice and is thought to hold an ocean of liquid water underneath. Water is one of the strongest indicators of potential habitability.

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The total amount of Covid-19 infecting humans around the world would fit into a teaspoon, claims Australian mathematician Matt Parker. The microscopic size of coronavirus means its total volume is a minuscule 8 ml, he added.

Parker started his calculation with an estimate of the number of cells in each coronavirus patient. The mathematician based this on the viral load measured from swabs. He calculated the number of people infected with coronavirus on the assumption that each person was infected for two weeks and at least 300,000 new cases are recorded daily.

The size of coronavirus is so small that you cannot see the virus with naked eyes. The size of a human cell is about 100 micrometers, which is equal to the width of a hair found on our heads. The size of human cells is 10 million times the size of the Covid-19 virus.

Covid-19 has infected over 55 million people across the world and has caused the death of 1.34 million people.

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On November 29, 1961, Enos, a chimpanzee, flew into space. While the spaceflight made Enos the first chimpanzee to orbit the Earth, it also subjected the animal to terrible equipment malfunction.

It is well established that the Space Age was essentially a two-horse race to begin with, with Soviet Union and the U.S. being the two protagonists. And while Soviet Union did have the early lead, the Americans caught up and achieved the first human landing on the moon, which was at the forefront of both countries’ objectives.

The annals of human spaceflight, however, aren’t occupied only by human beings. For, before we human beings ventured into space, we needed assurance that it was indeed possible. And for that, we turned to animals.

While some of them enjoy celebrity status, some others are merely footnotes in history. Enos, a chimpanzee, was among those that convinced biologists (on the American side in this case) that animals’ bodies and minds could function even while out in space.

Intense training

Brought from the Miami Rare Bird Farm in April 1960, Enos clocked up over 1,250 hours of training, far more intense than that which Ham, another chimpanzee and the first hominid in space, went through. His selection for the Project Mercury flight that he went on to be a part of, however, happened just days before the eventual launch.

Hours before the launch, Enos, weighing 39 pounds (17.69 kg) underwent a physical examination, was connected to sensors while he stood still, allowed himself to be secured onto a couch built for the purpose and rode the transfer van that took him to the launch vehicle area, before being moved inside the spacecraft.

Relaxed despite delay

Enos’ condition was monitored inside the Mercury capsule. Even though the holds during the countdown lasted for hours due to various faults, Enos was largely relaxed, save for an occasion when the hatch was opened and closed to allow a switch to be correctly positioned.

Walter Williams, the mission director, was referred to by his peers as a “master in imparting a need for orderly urgency”. He did just that during the countdown for this mission, driving from his usual position at the mission control centre to the pad to personally express his desire for things to move in an orderly manner.

Despite losing a lot of time, weather, however, remained favourable, meaning that they could go ahead with the launch of Mercury Atlas 5 (MA-5) on November 29, 1961. Minor discrepancies apart, the spacecraft, including the control, tracking and communications systems, performed satisfactorily, putting Enos into orbit.

Enos, the first chimpanzee to orbit the Earth, was more than merely a passenger. His training included avoidance conditioning, which meant that electrical shocks were administered to the feet when the animal responded incorrectly while carrying out tasks.

Enos performed well in a variety of tasks, receiving many a drink of water and banana pellets as rewards. But in what scientists called the oddity problems, where Enos had to pick the odd one out among three options (say if two triangles and a circle are displayed, then the circle is the odd one out), he was also penalised due to faulty equipment.

A lever fails

Apart from receiving shocks when performing mistakes, Enos started getting shocks even when he answered correctly as one of the levers that he used for answering malfunctioned. Enos was shocked and frustrated, but kept pulling the levers and performing the tasks and remained at rest between problems, as he had been trained to.

The spacecraft, meanwhile, experienced trouble while about to complete two of its scheduled three orbits around the Earth. The operations team realised that the attitude control system was erratic and the cooling equipment also gave trouble. While the physicians felt the mission could continue after monitoring Enos’ parameters and finding that they had stabilised, the operations team wasn’t so sure.

This meant that only two orbits were completed before Enos’ spaceflight ended and he landed back on Earth. A little more than three hours after launch, the capsule containing Enos descended without incident and the chimpanzee was retrieved.

Even though the mission was largely successful, the avoidance conditioning tests and the fact that the chimpanzee had to suffer further because a human-made device failed make it rather unpopular. In November 1962, a little less than a year later, Enos died of dysentery, with no symptoms that could be directly attributed to his training or spaceflight.

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Today, the kinds of robots that are designed and made available to the public are nothing short of amazing. Listed here are some of the craziest robots made and what they are capable of doing.

Tag-along suitcase bot

Any time you travel, one of the biggest hassles is pulling along or carrying your suitcases and luggage while weaving past crowds without going crazy. You wish you could have your own pet mule, but that’s nearly impossible…or is it? Gita cargo both works the seemingly impossible by being a large suitcase that can lug around your items and follow you along while you walk ahead like a boss. Now that’s a suitcase no one would mind owning!

A friend for everyone

For young kids and old adults without companions, Zenbo might be able to offer the right company Looking like a vacuum cleaner with a digital face capable of displaying emotions, this robot whizzes around taking commands, singing songs, playing games, dance and generally always be cute and at your disposal without a frown.

A cute, furry cure

You’ve probably heard that animals like dogs and cats are ideal as therapy for sick But a dog might bite accidentally or a cat might scratch, and there is that problem with them shedding fur. The solution? In Japan, patients get to pet and interact with a cute, furry robotic seal PARO. With touch-sensitive fur and whiskers, it’ll let you pet and cuddle, without expecting any care from you.

100% winner

What makes rock-paper-scissors fun is the fact that it is a totally random and unpredictable way to pass time! Enter Janken, a robot that takes the game a bit too seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it has a 100 per cent winning rate. How on earth does it do that? Equipped with a high-speed camera and hand shape recognition, it can apparently guess what shape you’re going to make so quickly that you’ll never know. Cheater!

ATLAS to the rescue

ATLAS is among the many humanoid robots in the make that is capable of performing different tasks. Unlike many robots that can move well only on smooth floors, ATLAS can power its 6-foot frame through forest paths or even snow. That’s not all – it can open doors, climb ladders, use tools, turn on or turn off valves and probably other tasks. In the future, be prepared to not be shocked by seeing one or ATLAS humanoids rushing past you to tackle emergencies.

What a help!

Finally, a robot we’d rush to buy if only they became available to the public! FoldiMate Inc. is designed to tackle the most annoying among all household chores and the one that Mom assigns to you most often folding clothes. Think of merely feeding one piece of cloth after another on top of FoldiMate and the good robot dutifully deposits them into a bin, ready for you to use!

A robotic smartphone

One day, our boring old rectangular smartphones will be replaced by miniature robot-shaped phones that will do much more. RoBoHoN is one such robot in the making. How can it be better than your faithful smartphone that you own? For instance, you probably go hunting for your smartphone if you keep it somewhere, but ROBOHON is capable of moving in search of you. How awesome is that?

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A solar probe built by the European Space Agency and NASA has delivered the closest photos ever taken of the sun’s surface, revealing a landscape rife with thousands of tiny solar flares that scientists dubbed “campfires” and offering clues about the extreme heat of the outermost part of its atmosphere.

The Solar Orbiter snapped the images using the probe’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager as it orbited nearly 77 million km from the sun’s surface or roughly halfway between the sun and earth,

The “campfires” are believed to be tiny explosions, called nanoflares, and could explain why the sun’s outer shield, the corona, is 300 times hotter than the star’s surface.

Scientists typically have relied upon Earth-based telescopes for close-ups of the sun’s surface. But Earth’s atmosphere limits the amount of visible light needed to glean views as intimate as those obtained by the Solar Orbiter.

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Researchers from Pune and Kerala have rediscovered a rare and critically endangered plant species called Globba andersonii from the Sikkim Himalayas after a gap of 135 years. The plant, commonly known as ‘dancing ladies’ or ‘swan flowers’ was thought to have been extinct until its “re-collection for the first time since 1875 when the British botanist, Sir George King, collected it from the Sikkim Himalayas. Globba andersonii are characterised by white flowers and a “yellowish lip”. The species is restricted mainly to the Teesta River Valley region which includes the Sikkim Himalayas and Darjeeling hill ranges. The plant usually grows in a dense colony as a lithophyte (plant growing on a bare rock or stone) on rocky slopes in the outskirts of evergreen forests.

Globba andersonii are characterised by white ?owers, non-appendaged anthers (the part of a stamen that contains the pollen) and a “yellowish lip”. Classified as “critically endangered” and “narrowly endemic”, the species is restricted mainly to Teesta River Valley region which includes the Sikkim Himalays and Darjeeling hill ranges.

“As no live collections were made for the last 136 years, it was considered as presumably extinct in the wild. E?orts made by us for the rediscovery of the taxon for the past several years were in vain. However, Dr. Punekar could locate some specimens during his visit to Sevoke in July 2011, which was used to make a detailed description,” said Mr. Thachat.

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Scientists have developed a new way to create “sight” for blind people. The approach bypasses the eyes and delivers a sequence of electrical signals to the brain, creating the perception of a glowing light that traces a shape. The method might one day restore aspects of vision to people with damaged eyes or optic nerves.

The team “drew” letters of the alphabet on blind people’s brains by giving them specific patterns of electrical stimulation. Tiny jolts of electricity to the visual cortex, a span of neural tissue at the back of the brain, can make a person “see” small bursts of light called phosphenes. When electrical stimulation was used to dynamically trace letters directly on patients’ brains, they were able to see the intended letter shapes and could correctly identify different letters. They described seeing glowing spots or lines forming the letters. Researchers said their inspiration for this was the idea of tracing a letter in the palm of someone’s hand.

So far, only simple shapes, such as the letters C, W and U, have been tested. But outlines of common objects, such as faces, houses or cars, could be traced using the same idea, they said.

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Google, Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard (HP) and Amazon are names that are synonymous with the word tech giant. But could you ever imagine that these billion-dollar American companies started their journey from a garage?

HP was the first company among the giants to have commenced its journey from a rented garage in Palo Alto, California. In 1938, Bill Hewlett and David Packard began part-time work at a rented garage with their mentor Frederick Terman, a professor at Stanford University. In 1939, they formalised their partnership, and the rest is history.

Google, co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started its journey from the garage of Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California in September 1998. Susan Wojcicki is currently the Chief Executive Officer of YouTube.

Apple too started out in the garage of co-founder Steve Jobs’ parents in Los Altos, California. Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne worked on the first Apple Computer in the garage in 1976.

Microsoft meanwhile saw its ideas come to life in a garage at Albuquerque, New Mexico. Co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a version of the BASIC programming while working out of the garage. During their garage stint, the two stayed at a most nearby.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rented out a house with a garage in Bellevue, Washington and developed the company’s online bookstore website there in 1995.

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On November 22, 1927, American Carl J E Eliason received a patent for what he called the motor toboggan. The patent, titled “Vehicle for snow travel”, changed human relationship with winter forever. 

Do you live in a place that has a snowy climate? Or have you made a trip to such a place for a winter holiday? If you answered yes to either of the questions, then chances are that you have played with snow, making your own snowman or throwing snowballs at others. While those activities are inarguably fun, you would also know that travelling by foot in deep snow is no easy task.

If the majority of us with two reliable legs find it hard to tread our way through snow, you can imagine how difficult it would be for those with disabilities to their feet. And yet, it was this disability that prompted American Carl J E Eliason to work on an invention for travelling in the snow.

Difficulties posed by snow

The beginning of the 20th Century saw vast improvements in the way people travelled. Apart from automobiles, which quickly became an important part of people’s lives, airplanes too made their way, shortening distances like never before. But even the best of automobiles were of limited use in places where the winter saw heavy snowfall, making it difficult to get from one point to another.

Eliason, who lived in Sayner, Wisconsin, the U.S., was far too used to these. Raised in such climes, Eliason loved to hunt, fish and trap – just like every other young outdoors men of the locality. But owing to his foot disability, Eliason often found himself lagging behind others, unable to keep up with his friends during the treks through the snow.

This prompted Eliason to try and come up with a vehicle that would enable him, and others, to overcome the challenges of snow travel. He began by working with a Model T Ford – one of the most popular automobiles of the time – and adapting it to skis, but it neither worked in the deep snows and unploughed roads, nor was it easy to handle in the woods.

Two years of tweaking

He began work on what he called the motor toboggan in the winter of 1924 and it took him the better part of two years to realise what he saw as the most practical means of travelling in the snow. Eliason’s invention was made up of a wooden toboggan that was fitted with two skis and steered by ropes. Pushed along by an endless steel-cleated track with slide rails and powered by an outboard motor, the motor toboggan was the precursor to the modern snowmobile.

Eliason applied for a patent for a “Vehicle for snow travel” in March 1927 and received it on November 22 the same year. Even though Eliason wasn’t the first to conceive a motorised vehicle for travelling in snow, his motor toboggan was easily the most reliable from a rider’s perspective and also the first such vehicle that went on to be mass-produced.

Challenge to opportunity

Eliason didn’t stop there as he continued to redesign and improve his machine in the decades that followed. He chose better motors and materials and constantly strove for better performance while personally supervising the assembly of each unit that he sold.

The challenges of winter soon became opportunities as these vehicles enabled travel like never before. The enhanced mobility between certain remote villages and towns, even during severe snowfall, meant that communication too improved manifold. What’s more, travelling this way was so easy and enjoyable that the experience even turned out to be a kind of recreational activity.

Eliason’s motor toboggan remained ahead of its time, so much so that the bulk of the design and fabrication of early snowmobiles replicated many of its features. This, in a roundabout sort of way, implies that most of the current snowmobiles can be traced back to the motor toboggan.

As for Eliason himself, he surely did make the most of his invention. As long as there was snow to go about, he was always ahead of the game. While the rest huffed and puffed on foot, he would ride his motor toboggan and get to the destination in the woods at least an hour before his hunting mates.

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At any given point of time, there is only about 25 g of astatine that occurs naturally on our planet. If that doesn’t wow you, then it’ll help to nudge you along by mentioning that that is less than two tablespoons of naturally occurring astatine on Earth at any given instant!

When there is so little of something around, it surely is difficult to find it – even when its existence has been revealed. For astatine, it was the periodic table of elements created by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869 that predicted its existence. It would be over 70 years later that the element is first successfully discovered.

Properties predicted

Mendeleev’s periodic table predicted properties of what was then an unknown element. It was to fill in the blank space left for element number 85 on the periodic table. Positioned right below iodine in the halogen group, Mendeleev called it eka-iodine.

Among the first claims for the discovery of this element came in November 1931. A physicist with controversial methods, American Fred Allison at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute said that he found the element. He even called it alabamine (after Alabama), but as his results couldn’t be replicated and his equipment and methods were shown to be faulty, his claim bit the dust.

Breakout of WWII

Two groups next came close to discovering the element in mineral samples in the 1930s. Horia Hulubei and Yvetter Cauchois were researchers at the Sorbonne in Paris and they used a high-resolution X-ray apparatus to analyse mineral samples. They believed they detected the as-yet-undiscovered element, but World War II put paid to their research.

The other group to suffer a similar fate was headed by Swiss chemist Walter Minder. After observing the radioactivity of radium, Minder suggested that it appeared to have another element present. The chemical tests that he undertook suggested properties like iodine for the element, but he was never able to categorically make a claim.

Produced, finally!

The first recognised discovery of astatine finally came about in 1940. It wasn’t identified in nature, but instead was successfully produced at the University of California Berkeley by researchers Dale R. Coson, Kenneth Ross Mackenzie and Emilio Segre.

Using a particle accelerator, this group of scientists bombarded bismuth with alpha particles to produce an isotope of astatine. Noting that the element produced was both highly radioactive and unstable, they named it astatine – derived from the Greek word astatos meaning unstable.

Even though they reported their discovery, they weren’t able to continue their research much further. This was owing to the demands of World War II, which diverted all the resources devoted to the study of radioactive materials towards the making of nuclear weapons.

Found in nature

Astatine was found in nature for the first time a few years later by Austrian physicist Berta Karlik and her assistant Traude Bernert. While the war was still raging, Karlik was able to identify astatine as an intermediate in radioactive decay chains.

With news not flowing freely during the war, Karlik was under the impression that they were the first to discover element number 85, and they even reported their results along with a name for the element. When made aware of the results from the Berkeley group, Karlik continued to study astatine and was able to expand on the subject of decay chains that form the element.

Astatine, with the symbol At, is the heaviest-known halogen, and is also the least reactive and most metallic within the halogen group. Decades have now passed since astatine was finally discovered, but the element continues to be steeped in mystery. With the longest-known isotope having a half-life of eight hours and only tiny amounts of the element ever produced, studying the element hasn’t been easy.

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There are two areas of advanced industrial processes that China still fails to master:

Chip Making and Jet Turbine Blades.

Indeed there are several Chinese-designed Chips, yet to produce them you need one of these:

It can easily be argued that this is the most advanced piece of machinery in the world. To function it combines laser, radio and EUV optics, semiconductors, robotics, advanced material engineering, industrial chemistry, applied quantum physics.

While Chinese companies are indeed able to engineer their chip-sets, to manufacture them to the last standards they have to lease the technology from European or American companies. Chinese made machines are still about two generations back.

The Chinese aviation industry is indeed making great progress, yet it is nowhere near to be able to manufacture one of these: which in turn means that their jet engines are at least 20 years behind current GE or Rolls-Royce engines. Indeed China has yet to be able to manufacture a single reliable passenger jet despite purchasing Western Engines and avionics, as the Comac C919 project is still riddled with issues.

Once China masters these processes we can definitely state that the “catch-up” phase is complete.

Credit : Quora

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Is it an asteroid? Is it a planet? Is it a comet? If there is a solar system object that neither gives a resounding yes nor a certain no to these questions, then chances are that they belong to a class of celestial objects called centaurs. While estimates for the number of centaurs in the solar system are now placed anywhere above 44,000, they still remain mysterious with secrets to be revealed.

Despite their current count being in the thousands, we have been aware of their existence for less than half-a-century. And it all started in 1977, when Chiron, the first-identified member in what was then a new class of objects, was discovered.

Blink and you miss it

American astronomer Charles Kowal, who had already discovered one of the moons of Jupiter, was searching for peculiar objects in the solar system. Working at the Hale Observatories in California, the U.S., Kowal photographed the skies with telescopes and then examined them on a blink comparator – the device that had enabled American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh to discover Pluto in 1930.

The blink comparator holds two photographic plates and alternates them rapidly. While stars, which are fixed, remain steady as the plates alternate, any moving object – be it a comet, planet or asteroid – appears to jump from one plate to another. Using photographic plates of the sky in the constellation Aries on October 18 and 19, 1977, Kowal was able to discover Chiron on November 1.

How to classify

While media organisations were ready to call it the most distant asteroid discovered or even the 10th planet (Pluto was still classified as a planet in 1977), the astronomers realised that they had a question in their hands as classification wasn’t proving to be straightforward. It eventually became the first centaur, named after the half-human, half-horse being in Greek mythology, a new class of objects.

Chiron was named after the centaur Chiron in Greek mythology, believed to be the wisest and most just among all centaurs. The names of other centaurs in mythology were to be reserved for other objects that were to fall into this type.

The first centaur to be discovered, in fact, was 944 Hidalgo in 1920. It wasn’t until 2060 Chiron was discovered that astronomers realised that these belonged to a distinct group unlike any other in the solar system. Chiron, too, has been identified in images going back to 1895 following its discovery, which enabled us to determine its orbit more accurately.

Many things at once

Centaurs are now known to be a little bit of everything – asteroids, planets and comets. Small solar system bodies orbiting the sun between the outer planets, they usually have unstable orbits and are too small to be observed. Most centaurs inhabit the complex, dynamic region between Jupiter and Neptune.

Observations of 10199 Chariklo, the largest confirmed centaur so far, have revealed that it has a system of rings, akin to the ones popularly associated with Saturn, and also seen with Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. There is a possibility that Chiron too has rings like Chariklo.

While the rings enable centaurs to draw parallels with planets, their colour and composition gives them a different identity. Most of them are either reddish or blue to blue gray in colour. We now know that the blue and blue gray centaurs are dark objects like comets and ones that are red are more like asteroids, having an organic surface.

Blue centaurs are composed of ice and are covered by a layer of dust, much like comets. This, along with highly elliptical orbits, suggests that some centaurs either are, or could become, comets.

Astronomers and astronomical organisations worldwide are involved in both classifying and cataloguing centaurs, whose numbers have been ever-increasing since they were identified to be a separate class of objects. These centaurs, like their namesake, are for now seen to be many things at the same time. They might, however, well be holding clues to some of the questions regarding our solar system for which we are still searching for answers.

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Surat schoolgirls Radhika Lakhani (14) and Vaidehi Vekariya (15) discovered the asteroid, which they named HLV2514. The asteroid is currently close to the orbit of Mars – but in 1 million years, it will change its orbit and move closer to Earth.

The girls were participating in a project by Space India and International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC), a NASA-affiliated citizen scientist group. Students across India were taught how to spot celestial bodies using software which analyzes images collected by NASA’s PAN Star telescope positioned at the University of Hawaii.

Paul Chodas of the Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said that it’s unusual for human eyes to discover asteroids. Algorithms typically do the hard work of spotting an unexpected object moving across the frame.

Asteroids and comets pose a potential threat to Earth. In 2013, an asteroid heavier than the Eiffel Tower exploded over central Russia, leaving more than 1,000 people injured from its shockwave.

Vekariya said, “This was a dream. I want to become an astronaut”, while Lakhani added: “I don’t even have a TV at home so that I can concentrate on my studies.”

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Megalogomphus superbus Fraser, endemic to the Western Ghats, has been photographed for the first time in nine decades by naturalists Ravindran Kamatchi and S. Gopala Krishnan during a birding outing near Coimbatore.

When they posted the photo grass-green, yellow and reddish-brown colour dragonfly with bottle-green eyes on the WhatsApp group ‘Odonates of the Western Ghats’, they learnt that it was a rare discovery. Scottish botanist Fraser F.C. had described it as the most beautiful species in the book, Fauna of British India.

“Fraser spotted it in 1931 an 1934 at the Boluvampatti forest range near Siruvani, Walayar (Kerala-Tamil Nadu border) and Kallar near Mettupalayam. The dragonfly belongs to gomphidae family which has six dragonflies – two in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, one in Sri Lanka and three others in the North East,” says Kalesh Sivadasan of Travancore Natural History Society. “As aerial predators, they play a crucial role in pest control. It is an aquatic water species that thrives in fresh water, and feeds on mosquitoes and insects that are harmful to humans.”

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With schools remaining shut due to the pandemic, they were left with no choice but to take classes online. Schools across India ensured students did not have to miss a year or lag behind in terms of syllabus by asking them to attend classes online.

While this was a bold move. It brought to the fore India’s unpreparedness for online learning. Most school teachers are not trained to take classes online. Teaching online is a different ball game compared to a physical class. It requires a different, more interactive and practical approach than the theoretical approaches followed in a physical class.

Meanwhile, children too are not prepared for an online class as their attention span is short. Long hours in front of the screen can drain them out apart from affecting their eyesight. The connection with the teacher is also lost as all the other students are logged in simultaneously.

But the biggest problem faced by schools and students alike is the lack of infrastructure and the digital divide. Many parents don’t even own a smartphone that their children can use for classes. Moreover, many households, especially those in rural India, do not even have internet connectivity. This has led to several students missing out on classes, on their parents having to sell whatever they can to afford a smartphone with an internet connection.

What’s the update?

On September 19, 2020, the Delhi High Court directed private as well as government schools to provide gadgets and an internet package to poor students for online classes. The court noted that not doing so amounts to “discrimination” and creates a “digital apartheid.”

It further stated that separated such students from the class can create a sense of inferiority which may affect their hearts and minds.

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With the government and the World Health Organization advising people to maintain six feet distance and wear mask to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, hospitals and businesses took to robots to tend to people’s needs.

From robots patrolling the road and making announcements, to serving as a nurse, and connecting people with their loved one. These machines have stood with our country in the fight against the virus.

Zafi, an interactive robot was developed at COVID-19 isolation wards at Stanley Medical College and Hospital in Chennai. The robot was designed and developed by the SASTRA University and Propeller Technologies, Trichy to help doctors and nurses maintain social distance while caring for their patients.

Zafi Clean and Zafi Sterlise designed to help maintenance workers of COVID-19 wards in government hospitals.

This coronavirus-themed ground robot is used to spray disinfectant at residential areas in Chennai.

Robots check body temperature and collect basic information about people at a private hospital in Bengaluru.

A robot nurse developed to combat COVID-19 and care for patients by Coimbatore-based startup Dotworld Technologies.

ROBO-COP, a robot used by the Chennai police to make announcements about COVID-19 and importance of staying indoors.

Mitra, a robot used by COVID patients to communicate with their relatives, is seen inside an elevator of the Yatharth Super Specialty Hospital in Noida.

Cobots are here

While many are worried about robots replacing humans in the workplace, there has been an increase in the use of cobots in workplaces. Cobots or collaborative robots are robots that work alongside humans than replace them. They are said to improve productivity, helping humans focus on essential tasks. Take Amazon for example – the company has been using robots to do the heavy lifting while humans can direct them.

Cobots are being used by some companies in a pandemic scenario to mitigate the spread of the virus.

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Launched on September 27, 2003, the lunar probe named SMART-1 was the European Space Agency’s (ESA) first mission to the moon. Apart from investigating the moon and studying its surface composition, the spacecraft was used to demonstrate techniques pertaining to navigation and mission control. A.S. Ganesh takes a look at the mission and its success

We might have over 200 natural satellites in the solar system, but our own moon is rather special to us. And it has to be, for it is the only one our Earth has. Naturally then, it has been studied extensively – probably only next to the Earth itself among celestial bodies.

While the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th Century probably saw the most funds being spent in a single window towards moon missions, it wasn’t the be all and end all. There have been several missions since then, and there will be many more as well, that will have our moon as its target. Its position – both in terms of importance and in terms of space – make it an ideal destination for testing out new technologies as well.

Missions of all scales

The ESA prides itself in having a science programme that encompasses missions of all scales and sizes. The SMART – short for Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology – programme was envisioned to cater to small relatively low-cast missions. One such mission that looked to test solar-electric propulsion and other deep space technologies was launched on September 27, 2003. Its destination, as you might have rightly guessed, was the moon.

With a French-built Hall effect thruster derived from a Russian ion propulsion system, SMART-1 was European in almost every sense, even before it became the first European spacecraft to enter orbit around the moon. The thruster, which used a xenon propellant, generated just enough thrust – comparable to the weight of a postcard. Solar arrays powered the engine which generated the power needed for the ion engines.

Slowly expanding orbit

Following its launch, it was put in a geostationary transfer orbit. From here, SMART-1 used its electric propulsion system for a hugely efficient mission profile. Spinning slowly, the spacecraft moved onto higher and higher elliptical orbits. With mission controllers in Darmstadt, Germany forcing calculated, repeated burns of the ion engine, the spacecraft’s spiral orbit expanded step by step.

When SMART-1 was around 2,00,000 km out from Earth, the influence of the moon’s gravity started increasing. By November 2004, the spacecraft had reached a point where the moon’s gravitational force was dominant.

Closer views, better data

The ion engines were still fired gradually, even after SMART-1 attained a polar orbit around the moon. This allowed the spacecraft to now decrease the orbit and hence achieve significantly better and closer views of the lunar surface.

During its time orbiting the moon, SMART-1 improved on data returned from various previous missions to the moon. It studied lunar topography, learnt more about the moon’s surface texture and also mapped the minerals’ surface distribution.

Mission extended

Even though the mission was designed to end in August 2005, it was extended further with new plans for a lunar impact in 2006. Having exhausted the propellant, the spacecraft’s ion engine was fired one last time in September 2005, after which it was in a natural orbit based on the gravitational effects of the moon, Earth and sun, with occasional altitude control. SMART-1’s ion engine had fired for over 4,900 hours, a record at that time for an engine of this type.

As per the revised plan, the spacecraft crashed onto the moon’s surface on September 3, 2006. Earth-based telescopes observed the impact, which produced a dust cloud. The near three-year existence of SMART-1 not only confirmed technical competence, but also provided valuable scientific insights about our moon.

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Do you know what the meaning of pre-term birth is? A human child birth that occurs before the 37th week of pregnancy is referred to this way. While a full-term pregnancy normally lasts 40 weeks, not all children are born that way. Premature babies – babies born pre-term – often need longer and more intense nursery care. While this is the norm now with Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU), it wasn’t always the case. We have Martin Couney, a pioneer of early neonatal technology, to thank for that.

A little history before we take a look at what Couney did. By the end of the 19th Century, it was pretty clear to doctors that babies born pre-term needed extra care and often had complications. Incubators had been built and the first one to care for an infant was operational in 1888. On September 7 that year, Edith Eleanor McLean became one of the first babies to be placed in an incubator in a hospital in New York. These incubators, however, were seen more as medical curiosities and not much was done in terms of adoption.

First encounter

In that same year, French physician Pierre Budin, who had been wondering why more hospitals weren’t investing in incubators, began experimenting with the technology. Facing financial difficulties in terms of funding, Budin decided to display his incubators at the Berlin’s World Fair in 1896.

It was at this fair that Couney, Budin’s protege, was drawn towards what was to become a lifetime’s obsession. Budin’s display included premature babies acquired on loan from a hospital and Couney immediately realised that it would work. He was certain that the public would pay to see babies in incubators and that he would in turn be able to save the babies’ lives.

Couney travelled with his ideas to the U.S. and put it into practice. He picked the right place to serve as America was severely lagging behind European nations, which had France at the forefront, in neonatal care. He married Annabelle Segner, one of his nurses, in 1903 and his commitment to the cause was furthered when they had a pre-term daughter in 1907. Hildegarde, who was six week premature and weighed just 1.36 kg at birth, later joined her father’s business after training as a nurse.

Couney’s magic at Coney

If we had visited Coney Islands during the turn of the 20th Century, we would have been spoilt for choice. We could have tried out a roller-coaster, witnessed the re-enactment of the Boer War or simply waded in the water while eating an ice cream. Yet, one of the most popular permanent exhibits was Couney’s facility.

With signs so large they could be seen from the other end of the island, Couney’s facility played host to a life-and-death exercise. People, however, were willing to witness this freak show as they paid the 25-cent entrance fee to see the display of premature babies placed in incubators. A guard rail prevented over-enthusiastic visitors from getting too close.

The entrance fee allowed Couney to cover all his costs as he went about his task admirably. At a time when hospitals across the country were turning away from their responsibility of caring for premature babies, Couney welcomed them with open arms.

The incubator doctor

He not only hired the best doctors and nurses to take care of the babies, but he also accepted babies from all backgrounds. He never once saw their colour or class, nor did he ever accept payments from parents. Distressed, desperate parents were soon flocking to “the incubator doctor”, who then worked his magic.

Despite the fact that Couney wasn’t a trained medical practitioner, his methods started gaining traction. His facility in Coney Islands ran from 1903-1943 and he was able to replicate his success in other facilities he established as well.

Even though doctors were sceptical about Couney’s ways and even tried to discredit him, there was no denying that it was working. While there is no way to authenticate the numbers, there is reason to believe that Couney took in around 8,000 babies during the course of his career and was able to save about 6,500 of them. By the 1940s, neonatal care started becoming mainstream.

Incubators have come a long way since the time Couney had to showcase babies in them in carnivals. NICUs are now state-of-the-art in many hospitals, providing exclusive care for babies. Incubators these days protect preterm babies from infections, excessive noise or light. They also provide automatic adjustments based on the baby’s temperature and photo-therapy using special lights to treat neonatal jaundice, which is becoming increasingly common. And it all started with one man who believed he could make a difference.

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Paleontologists have revealed a new species of marsupial lion in Australia. The now-extinct species, Lekaneleo roskellyae or Leo, once roamed the Riversleigh area in the north-west highlands of Queensland over 23 million years ago. It is one of the smallest lions ever discovered, and was about the size of a domestic cat.

Paleontologists from the University of New South Wales discovered the remains of the small lion at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area, where scientists have been finding fossils for decades.

Despite its small size, Leo would have been feared by other animals in the Riversleigh ancient rainforest. It had elongated, ‘bolt-cutting’ premolar teeth that were capable of easily slicing through the bones of its prey. This is the most extraordinary adaptation or evolution that a carnivorous mammal has ever developed anywhere in the world.

Marsupial lions died out 35,000 years ago, and are not closely related to modern lions that roam Africa or the endangered Asiatic lion in India.

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Scientists have discovered an animal that does not need oxygen to produce energy needed for its survival. The tiny, less than 10-celled parasite, Henneguya salminicola, lives in salmon muscle. As it evolved, the animal, a relative of jellyfish and corals, gave up breathing and consuming oxygen – or became anaerobic – to produce energy.

Mitochondria, a.k.a. the powerhouses of the cell, capture oxygen to make energy through aerobic respiration – but researchers found that H. salminicola lacks mitochondrial genes. Salmon muscle is a low-oxygen environment, making the ability to breathe oxygen useless to the organism. “Living in an oxygen-free environment, it has shed unnecessary genes responsible for aerobic respiration and became an even simpler organism,” said Prof. Dorothee Huchon from Tel Aviv University (TAU) in Israel. “Our discovery shows that evolution can go in strange directions. Aerobic respiration is a major source of energy, and yet we found an animal that gave up this critical pathway.”

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Earth has acquired a second ‘mini-moon’ about the size of a car, according to astronomers who spotted the object circling our planet. The mass – roughly 6-11 feet in diameter – was observed by researchers Kacper Wierzchos and Teddy Pruyne at the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona (U.S.).

This is the second asteroid known to orbit Earth. The only other asteroid, 2006 RHI20, rotated around Earth from September 2006 to June 2007.

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Minor Planet Center, which collects data on minor planets and asteroids, said “no link to a known artificial object has been found,” implying it was likely an asteroid captured by Earth’s gravity.

Earth’s new neighbor is not in a stable orbit around the planet and is unlikely to be around for very long. It is already heading away from the Earth-moon system, and was likely to escape in April.

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You might still be too young to ride your own motorcycle, but that surely wouldn’t have stopped you from riding along with elders in your family, older cousins and friends. The feeling of the wind gushing against your face (do wear your helmet!) could well have you fantasizing the days when you would be allowed to ride these vehicles yourself. While that might not be too far away in the future, we will have to be content now with learning about how the first such ride panned out.

Gottlieb Daimler, a German mechanical engineer, is a huge figure in the early history of the automotive industry. After studying engineering and learning about engines while working with various firms, he started to work for Nikolaus Otto, a German engineer who had invented the four-stroke internal combustion engine, in 1872.

Experimental workshop

A decade later, Daimler left this company along with his co-worker – another German engineer – Wilhelm Maybach, to start their own experimental engine building workshop. They were successful in developing a compact, high-speed single-cylinder engine that they called grandfather clock engine and patented it in 1885.

Once they had their engine, it was important for Daimler and Maybach to offer proof on wheels and show that an engine was capable of powering a vehicle. Even though their objective was not to build a motorcycle, they ended up designing one as the engine prototypes at their disposal wasn’t powerful enough for a full-size carriage. The result was the Daimler Reitwagen or “Riding Car”, which was patented in August 1885.

Paul rides it

The design included a wooden bicycle frame with the pedals removed and a single-cylinder Otto cycle four-stroke engine mounted on rubber blocks. Apart from the two iron tread wooden wheels, there were two outrigger wheels to help its stability. With an engine output of 0.5 horsepower at 600 rpm, the Reitwagen could attain a top speed of about 11 kmph.

It was in November (some accounts say November 10, while others say November 18) 1885 that the Reitwagen made its first journey of real length in public. It was Daimler’s son Paul who rode the vehicle and he covered the distance of around 5 km between Cannstatt to Unterturkheim in Stuttgart, Germany, achieving speeds of 5-12 kmph during the process. The ride not only showed that such an engine could power such a vehicle, but also that a human being could completely control it.

Is it the first motorcycle?

Not everyone agrees with the notion of Reitwagen being the first motorcycle as there were other steam-powered vehicles that also lay a claim. The fact that the Reitwagen sports auxiliary wheels for stabilisation further dents its case. What the Reitwagen has going for itself, however, is that it is the first gasoline internal combustion engine motorcycle and a forerunner of all vehicles that came after it and used this common engine type.

Daimler and Maybach went on to use their engines on a four-wheeled carriage and a boat, before eventually building a four-wheeled vehicle that was designed from scratch as an automobile. Even though building the Reitwagen was never his ultimate goal, inventing it meant that Daimler is often called “the father of the motorcycle.”

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Have you heard of rocket planes? No, not the planes we make with paper in our classrooms, letting them fly around during a free hour. Rocket planes or rocket-powered planes are aircraft propelled by rockets, sometimes in addition to jet engines.

These planes are capable of achieving much higher speeds than similarly sized jet aircraft and are also suitable for flying in very high altitudes. Propulsion through rocket engines implies that these aircraft can also achieve shorter take-offs and much higher acceleration.

The first of these aircraft that was used in a public demonstration came about late in the 1920s. It turned out to be a reality, thanks to the work done by three men, who brought in their individual skill sets together for this project.

Meet Valier, Opel & Sander

The first among these was Max Valier, an Austrian rocketry pioneer. Valier worked tirelessly to popularise rocketry and wrote many popular articles and books that brought this technology closer to the layperson. He was also among the earliest to experiment with rocket-powered vehicles and dreamt of rocket-powered flights that will not only cut down the flying time between cities, but also eventually take human beings into space.

Fritz von Opel, a German engineer and industrialist, was the second person. Grandson of Adam Opel, the founder of the Opel company that now manufactures automobiles, Fritz was a racing driver and entrepreneur with an eye for detail, both technically and organisationally. German engineer Friedrich Wilhelm Sander completed the trio. A manufacturer and expert in pyrotechnics, Sander owned a company, which he expanded to produce rockets.

Together for the project

While Valier was drawn towards rocketry as early as 1924 after reading physicist Hermann Oberth’s research on the idea of rockets carrying humans to space, Opel was sucked into it after meeting Valier in 1927. The fact that Opel decided to get actively involved in the rocket research project also meant that he brought with him his financial clout. Believing that the Opel brand would have a positive impact through such an involvement, he next brought Sander into the project. As Sander’s company made solid fuel signal rockets, Opel was hoping for faster implementation of the rocket motor through this move.

As early as March 1928, the trio of Valier, Sander and Opel started seeing the fruits of their labour. Rocket-propelled prototypes of automobiles were launched behind closed doors, and by April, the automobile RAK 1 was test-driven. Opel decided to drive the RAK 2 automobile himself and on May 23, 1928, he fired the 24 solid fuel rockets fitted to his futuristic car and pushed it to a maximum speed of 238 km/hour! The feat, performed in front of nearly 3,000 people including celebrities, earned him the nickname “Rocket Fritz”.

From cars to aircraft

Spurred on by their success, the trio turned their focus towards aviation. Despite setbacks, including the explosion of one of their test flights, they carried on and were ready for their demonstration next year. On September 30, 1929, Opel piloted the RAK 1 (sometimes referred to as RAK 3 to distinguish it from the automobile), the first such public rocket-powered flight, in front of a large crowd.

Opel flew at an altitude averaging about 50 feet and covered nearly two km in less than 100 seconds. Even though the plane was wrecked during landing, Opel was able to escape unhurt and wrote that it was “marvelous to fly like this” in an article in The New York Times after the flight. The Great Depression that came about at that time, however, put an end to these rocket experiments, pushing Opel’s company to focus instead on vehicle development.

In the decades that followed, rocket-powered aircraft were initially deployed in warfare and a number of models were built during World War II. Rocket planes were the first to break the speed of sound in level flight and they continue to be built for experimental usage, owing to the fact that there are practical difficulties while operating rockets.

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You might know about comets – cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, dust and rock that orbit the sun. But have you heard about sungrazing comets? A class of celestial objects, sungrazing comets are comets that pass extremely close to the sun at its perihelion or point of closest approach. When we say extremely close, we refer to a few thousand kilometres from the sun’s surface – a small distance on a cosmological scale.

These sungrazing comets have been observed for many hundred years and there is reason to believe that ancient Greeks – philosopher Aristotle and historian Ephorus amongst them – might well have spotted these during their times. sungrazing comets, however, do not lend themselves exactly to be easily observed.

Space-based approach

It is for this reason that only a few sungrazing comets had ever been spotted from ground-based observatories. It was a whole new snowball game altogether from 1979, however, when satellites and space-based observatories started doing our bidding.

The P78-1 satellite, which carried a white-light coronagraph known as SOLWIND, was launched in February 1979 by the U.S. Air Force. Out there to observe and give us insights into solar physics and operational for about five years, SOLWIND’s most important discovery turned out to be a comet.

Masks for corona

While certainly not the first space-based coronagraph, SOLWIND was surely an update on its predecessors. Designed to look at the solar atmosphere and thus monitor activity in the sun’s outer corona, the SOLWIND had a mask or occulting disk. Using this mask, it was able to create the effect of an eclipse artificially, hiding the bright disk of the sun to better observe its corona.

On August 30, 1979, SOLWIND spotted a comet approaching the sun – rather closely than usual – and recorded the data. Delay in analysing the spacecraft data, however, meant that these images were actually seen only a couple of years later.

Shock to surprise

When Naval Research Lab (NRL) scientists Russ Howard, Marty Koomen and Don Michels first looked at the images taken on August 30-31 1979, they were first horrified. On seeing the huge bright streak appear in the data, they first thought that something had happened to the camera, leading to a reflection inside it. Only on further study did they realise that they were actually staring at a feature that was moving and that it was indeed a comet.

It wasn’t long before they figured out that the satellite had captured a sungrazing comet. The Howard-Koomen-Michels comet was the first comet to be discovered by a space-based observatory – a satellite in this case.

Once the floodgates had been opened, it happened repeatedly as observatories in space made discoveries on a regular basis. In fact, they spot new asteroids and comets almost every week! SOLWIND itself was able to discover a number of other comets before it was eventually destroyed by a ground-based missile in 1985 during a planned Air Force exercise.

Naming convention changes

The flurry of discoveries also led to a change in the naming convention as the International Astronomical Union caught up with the fact that satellite discoveries were the norm and not the exceptions. So rather than naming it after the person who identified objects in the image, it is now named after the satellite or survey that found it in the first place. And this meant that comet Howard-Koomen-Michels officially became C/1979 Q1 (SOLWIND). Space observatories that came later have hundreds and thousands of comets named after them.

The Kreutz sungrazers

German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz studied comets that had been observed until then in the 1880s and 1890s.

Apart from figuring out that some of these were sungrazers and some were not, Kreutz was also able to deduce that many of the sungrazers actually follow the same path or orbit.

It was as if these comets were all broken up fragments of a much larger comet from the past. The original comet and its fragments likely broke up repeatedly as they orbited the Sun and approached it closely.

To honour Kreutz’s work, this group of comets was named as the Kreutz sungrazers.

The Kreutz sungrazers get to within about 50,000 km of the sun’s surface, meaning that they reach the lower layers of the solar atmosphere, or the corona.

All the comets discovered by Solwind, including comet Howard-Koomen-Michels, belong to the Kreutz group.

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Before landing humans on our moon, one of the important points of consideration, obviously, were the landing sites. In response to this need of obtaining detailed photographs of potential Apollo landing sites, NASA’s Lunar Orbiter program was born. The plan included a series of three-axis stabilized spacecraft to be inserted into lunar orbit, with each of them comprising a main engine and four solar panels.

The first of these was the Lunar Orbiter 1, designed primarily to photograph the smooth areas of the lunar surface. For this, it was fitted with a Eastman Kodak imaging system that weighed 68 kg.

Spy turns scout

The system, which employed both wide and narrow-angle lenses, had the ability to develop exposed films, scan the images and relay them back to Earth. The Eastman Kodak camera flown on the Lunar Orbiters, in fact, had been originally developed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and used in spy satellites – a truth that was revealed only after the Cold War ended.

While imaging was the primary objective, the spacecraft was also equipped with other instruments to collect data regarding radiation intensity and micro-meteoroid impact, among others. Launched on August 10, 1966, it was placed in an Earth parking orbit before being fired towards the moon.

Stumbling blocks

During its cruise to the moon, the spacecraft experienced failure to its Canopus star tracker (probably due to stray sunlight) and overheating. The former issue was resolved by navigating with the moon as the reference, and the latter was taken care of by orienting the spacecraft at a different angle off the sun.

On August 14, Lunar Orbiter 1 was injected into an orbit around the moon and began working on its objective of photographing nine potential Apollo landing sites, seven secondary areas and some sites on the far side of the moon. It successfully completed this work by August 28, with over 200 images to boast about.

Even though some of the early high-resolution images lacked quality due to smearing, the mission was largely successful as it was able to capture images covering over 5 million sq.km. of the moon’s surface. While the wide-angle images taken by this system showed resolutions up to 0.5 km, the narrow-angle pictures were accurate up to 60-80 m.

First Earthrise

Among these photos was that of the first Earthrise, captured unintentionally. During its 16th orbit around the moon on August 23, Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of our Earth taken from the moon. The image, which was shot just before the spacecraft was about to pass behind the moon, shows the crescent of the Earth. The image data was transmitted by Lunar Orbiter 1 and received at the NASA tracking station at Robledo De Chavela near Madrid, Spain.

Lunar Orbiter 1 continued working, turning its attention away from photography and focusing instead on engineering goals from September 16. The spacecraft’s condition, however, deteriorated by October 28, forcing the ground controllers to command it to impact onto the lunar surface.

On October 29, on its 577th orbit around the moon, Lunar Orbiter 1 crashed on the moon’s far side to prevent its transmission from interfering with the Lunar Orbiters to come. By the time the Lunar Orbiter program, which consisted of five orbiters, came to an end, 99% of the moon’s surface was photographed down to a resolution of 1m!

Old and new

As for the first Earthrise photo, it proved to be a remarkable image, despite the fact that the image released then was starkly black, wide and had poor resolution. The full resolution of the image wasn’t obtained from the mission data up until 2008.

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center went about their task then, obtaining original mission data from tapes and restoring it to an operational condition by combining modern electronics with 1960s era parts. The result was a beautiful high resolution image of the first Earthrise photograph, a touched up version of which has been used with this story.

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Every time you visit a shopping mall or a metro station (if your city has one), one aspect of it that you can’t fail to notice are the escalators that take you from one floor to another. These places are also provided with an elevator, but i bet most of you would rather be out there on an escalator, than inside an elevator.

A number of people have been involved in the development of what we see as escalators in the modern day. Even though the idea came about in the middle of the 19th Century, it was only by the end of the century that we had our first working models. The first working escalator, which came about as an amusement ride, was courtesy of American inventor Jesse W. Reno.

Reno’s idea

Reno was born in Kansas in 1861 and spent his early life in the mid-western and southern states of the U.S. After moving with his family to Georgia when he was 16, he started making his first plans of an inclined elevator.

He graduated from Lehigh University’s emergent engineering programme in 1883 and got to work with a mining company and then an electrical company. He moved to New York soon enough, the stage for his strong ambition and aptitude in engineering.

It was in the final decade of the 19th Century that Reno came up with his invention, which had a conveyor belt inclined at an angle of 25 degrees. The conveyor belt had planks of metal with a serrated surface and the design allowed for a smooth transition, especially in the top and bottom  landings where people had to get on and off. The overall contraption provided the passenger with an added sense of security by having handrails that moved with the conveyor belt.

Patents “inclined elevator”

Reno received the patent for his “inclined elevator” on March 15, 1892. He didn’t meet with success immediately though. He had a huge professional setback when his extensive plans to New York City officials were turned down. These plans included building a double-decker subway system beneath the city’s streets, with his inclined elevators transporting passengers from the street to the underground station and vice versa.

In the end, Reno had to agree to his inclined elevator appearing as an amusement ride. One of the world’s first working models of an escalator thus appeared at the Old Iron Pier, Coney Island, New York as a temporary amusement ride. With a vertical rise of 2.1 m (7 feet) and the belt moving at a rate of 22.8m (75 feet) per minute, the ride attracted an estimated 75,000 people during the fortnight-long installation.

Features still remain

Within years of showcasing it thus, Reno’s invention was finding its way into railway stations and department stores. Reno Started his own company to manufacture them after the turn of the century and it was later bought out by Otis Elevator Company, that also got the rights to Reno’s patents.

It was Otis that came up with the name “escalator” – combining the words “elevator” and “scala” (the Latin word for steps) – for their own invention that worked similarly. When the term turned out to be popular with the larger masses to refer to all such machines as a whole, it came into generic public use.

The strength of Reno’s invention lies in the fact that many features of his inclined elevator are still found in modern escalators. Be it the comb of projecting fingers at each end of the machine or the rubber-covered chain handrail that moves in sync with the steps, they were all envisioned by Reno for the very first working model of an escalator.

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When we speak about the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that took place in the second half of the 20th Century, we often focus on the moon missions. There were, however, various other missions during this time that had many different objectives as well. One of these was the Venera programme that corresponded to a series of probes developed by the Soviet Union – to better understand our neighbouring planet Venus – between 1961 and 1984.

Launched in 1961, Venera 1 lost radio contact before it flew by Venus. Venera 2 failed to send back any important data, but it did fly by Venus at a distance of 24,000 km in February 1966. Venera 3 too lost communication before atmospheric entry, but it did become the first human-made object to land on another planet on March 1, 1966.

With the planned mission including landing on the Venusian surface and studying the temperature, pressure and composition of the Venusian atmosphere, Venera 3 carried a landing capsule that was 0.9 m in diameter and weighed 310 kg. The atmosphere was to be studied during the descent by parachute.

Positive start

Venera 3 was launched on November 16, 1965, just four days after the successful launch of Venera 2. Things went fine for Venera 3 as ground controllers were able to successfully perform a mid-course correction on December 26, 1965 during the outbound trajectory and also conducted multiple communication sessions to receive valuable information.

Among these were data obtained from a modulation charged particle trap. For nearly 50 days from the date of launching, Venera 3 was thus able to give an insight into the energy spectra of solar wind ion streams, out and beyond the magnetosphere of our Earth.

A failure and a first

Just before Venera 3 was to make its atmospheric entry in Venus, on February 16, 1966, it lost all contact with scientists on Earth. Despite the communications failure, the lander was automatically released by the spacecraft.

At 06:56:26 UT (universal time) on March 1, 1966, Venera 3’s probe crash-landed on the surface of Venus, just four minutes earlier than planned. It wasn’t in a position to relay back any information as it had lost contact, but it was the first time an object touched by humans had struck the surface of a planet other than our own.

Success follows

Investigations revealed that both Venera 2 and 3 suffered similar failures owing to overheating of several internal components and solar panels. With regard to Venera 3, its impact location was on the night side of Venus and the site was put in an area between 20 degrees north and 30 degrees south latitude and 60 degrees to 80 degrees east longitude.

Venera 3 tasted success in what was largely a failure, but it did pave the way for several more successes as well. For, Venera 4 became the first to measure the atmosphere of another planet, Venera 7 became the first to achieve soft touchdown and transmit information from another planet, and Venera 13 and 14 returned colour photos of the Venusian surface, days within each other. Venera 13, in fact, transmitted the photos on March 1, 1982, exactly 16 years after Venera 3 had landed on Venus.

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Either now, or when you were younger, you would have surely played with jigsaw puzzles. But have you ever tried to piece together parts from different puzzles and see what you can end up with? What if the same thing actually happened on a celestial scale? The result probably would look something like Miranda.

One of Uranus’ five major moons, Miranda is the innermost and smallest among them. It was discovered by Gerard P. Kuiper on February 16, 1948 in telescopic photos of the Uranian system. Kuiper worked at the McDonald Observatory in western Texas and the photos were obtained using the Otto Struve Telescope at the University of Texas in Austin.

Shakespeare connect

Weeks within its discovery, Miranda’s motion around Uranus was confirmed, on March 1, 1948. With Uranus’ previous moons Ariel and Umbriel discovered in 1851, this made Miranda the first satellite of Uranus to be discovered in nearly 100 years.

Like Uranus’ other major moons Oberon, Titania, Ariel and Umbriel, Miranda’s name too was related to the works of English poet William Shakespeare. Miranda was named for the daughter of Prospero in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

At about one-seventh the size of our Earth’s moon, Miranda is among the smallest objects in the Solar System to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium. Taking 1.4 days to complete an orbit around Uranus and with an orbital period that is also 34 hours, it is tidally locked with Uranus and hence has the same side facing the planet at all times.

Five features

What makes Miranda mysterious, however, is the fact that it has one of the weirdest and most varied landscapes among all extraterrestrial bodies. Scientists agree upon at least five types of geological features on Miranda. These include craters, coronae (oval-shaped features), regiones (areas strongly differentiated in colour or albedo), rupes (scarps or canyons) and sulci (complex parallel grooved terrain).

There are younger, lightly cratered regions and older, heavily cratered regions on Miranda. There are three large coronae in the southern hemisphere, which are kind of unique among objects known in the solar system. These racetrack-like grooved structures are named Arden, Elsinore and Inverness, all locations in Shakespeare’s plays.

Largest cliff in Solar System

The largest known cliff in the Solar System is on Miranda and is known as Verona Rupes, named after the setting of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. With the cliff face estimated to be 20 km high, this rupees is as many as 12 times as deep as the Grand Canyon in the U.S.

As Miranda is almost invisible to most amateur telescopes, almost everything we know about it is through the Voyager 2 mission. The only flyby of the Uranian system so far was achieved by Voyager 2 in 1986, providing us with a sneak peek of Miranda’s geology and geography.

Considering only the southern hemisphere of Miranda faced the sun during Voyager 2’s flyby and the northern hemisphere was in darkness, only the southern hemisphere has been studied to some extent. Theories have been proposed and discussed as to what might be the reasons for Miranda’s varied geological features. But these mysteries will be solved only with more information and that might well require further missions to Uranus and its system.

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What all have you seen during a visit to a fuel station? You would have seen motorbikes and cars, and maybe even bigger vehicles on some occasions. You would have seen people attending to these vehicles, filling them up with the desired fuel. If you had noticed closely, you would have observed that the fuel station mainly provides two kinds of fuels – petrol and diesel.

While all the two-wheelers and some four-wheelers get their tanks filled up with petrol, other four-wheelers and certain bigger vehicles get their tanks filled with diesel. The type of fuel used by the vehicle is determined by the engine that it houses. While those with petrol engines use petrol, those with diesel engines use diesel as their fuel.

The “diesel” in these diesel engines comes from Rudolf Diesel, a German inventor and mechanical engineer. Born in Paris in 1858, Diesel decided on a career in engineering at the age of 14. He went to the Munich Technical University (Polytechnic Institute), and by the time he completed his studies there in 1880, he had received the highest grades the university had ever given in an examination since it was founded.

Inspired by Linde

Apart from his brilliant record as a student, Diesel was also drawn towards the thermodynamics lectures of German refrigeration engineer Carl von Linde during his time at Munich. This meant that Diesel not only went to work in the Linde refrigeration machine factory after his studies, but was also inspired to develop a new engine with increased thermal efficiency.

After a year of traineeship, Diesel was hired in Linde’s ice factory in Paris in 1881. By the end of the year, Diesel received his first patent – regarding the manufacture of transparent ice. As the years passed by, Diesel started devoting more time to his self-imposed task of developing a more efficient internal combustion engine.

By 1890, the year he moved to Berlin for a new post with the Linde firm, Diesel had conceived his idea for the engine. His concept of a “new, rational heat engine” was patented in 1892 and in the following year, on February 23, 1893, Diesel was granted the patent DRP 67 207 “on a principle of operation and construction for internal combustion engines”.

No external ignition

As opposed to the spark-ignition engine that requires an externally applied ignition to a mixture of air and fuel, Diesel’s compression-ignition engine relied on compressing air. The ignition was to be achieved by introducing the fuel to a cylinder full of air that is highly compressed, thereby reaching high pressures and hence, extreme heat.

Having built the first prototype of his engine in 1897, Diesel kept improving it over the years. Even though the engines he built never quite hit the efficiency he had predicted through his theoretical calculations, they were still way better than the peers. This meant that there were over 70,000 diesel engines – mainly in factories and generators- that were working by 1912.

Death remains a mystery

On September 29, 1913, Diesel disappeared from the steamship Dresden while travelling to Harwich, England from Antwerp, Belgium. A body floating in water and spotted on October 10 was identified to be Diesel. Even though Diesel’s continues to be a mystery, it was officially judged to be a suicide. Despite making a lot of money through his engines, Diesel was facing financial ruin during this voyage and was nearly broke. Conspiracy theories, however, suggest that Diesel’s death could well have been a murder.

In the year of his death, Diesel wrote that “I am firmly convinced that the automobile engine will come, and then I consider my life’s work complete.” He didn’t live to see it, but almost all vehicular diesel engines, till this day, continue to follow the basic principles that were set forth by Diesel.

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On May 20, 2019, the World Metrology Day, the measurement of a kilogramme was redefined. Earlier, the kilogramme was measured according to the weight of was measured according to the weight of a block of platinum-iridium alloy housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France. But post May 20, the weight of the kilogramme would be defined by the Planck Constant – a constant of nature that relates to how matter releases energy.

The main problem with using Big K as a universal standard for mass is that Big K, being a manmade object, is imperfect and subject to change over time. Indeed, it is estimated that Big K has lost about 50 micrograms since the time it was created.  Since 1 kilogram is defined as exactly the value of the mass of Big K, if Big K’s mass changes then the value of the kilogram must also change. Obviously, having a standard for mass that changes its mass is not a good idea for science. The ideal set of units should be static and unchanging.

Hence the reason for redefinition. The new definition of the kilogram ties the value of the kilogram to a fundamental constant of nature that will never change. Even billions of years from now when Big K has disintegrated into dust, this new constant the defines the value of the kilogram will be exactly the same—because the value of the unit is tied to a fundamental aspect of reality.

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In October 2019, Google claimed quantum supremacy (a point where quantum computers can perform any task that can’t be performed by classical computers) when its quantum computer ‘Sycamore’ performed a complex calculation in 200 seconds. The company claimed that it would take nearly 10,000 years for the world’s fastest supercomputer to perform the same calculation.

Computer scientists have seen quantum supremacy — the moment when a quantum computer could perform an action a conventional computer couldn’t — as an elusive, important milestone for their field. There are many research groups working on quantum computers and applications, but it appears Google has beaten its rivals to this milestone.

According to John Preskill, the Caltech particle physicist who coined the term “quantum supremacy,” Google’s quantum computer “is something new in the exploration of nature. These systems are doing things that are unprecedented.”

It sounds all very gee-whiz. And some scientists think these computers will one day lead to discoveries of new drugs and possibly whole new fields of chemistry. Others fear they’ll be used one day to crack the toughest security protocols.

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In 2018, scientists studying ancient DNA revealed to have found the first hybrid ancient human. The DNA, sourced from a 90,000-years-old bone, belonged to a teenage girl whose father was a Denisovan and mother was a Neanderthal.

This is the first time scientists have identified an ancient individual whose parents belonged to distinct human groups. The findings were published on 22 August in Nature.

“To find a first-generation person of mixed ancestry from these groups is absolutely extraordinary,” says population geneticist Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “It’s really great science coupled with a little bit of luck.”

The team, led by palaeogeneticists Viviane Slon and Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, conducted the genome analysis on a single bone fragment recovered from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Russia. This cave lends its name to the ‘Denisovans’, a group of extinct humans first identified on the basis of DNA sequences from the tip of a finger bone discovered2 there in 2008. The Altai region, and the cave specifically, were also home to Neanderthals.

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In August 2018, Apple became the world’s first- ever trillion dollar company, thereby becoming the richest company to ever exist. However, it quickly lost its top spot after poor iPhone sale and multiple controversies.

PetroChina, a state-owned oil giant, was the first company to hit this mark during its initial public offering in 2007, though its value has declined dramatically since then. Apple on the other hand is the first non-state-owned company to reach this stratospheric valuation on its own merits through a long, sustained upward climb without implicit government guarantees or backing.

It is a market development that has been in the pipeline for well over a year. Recent higher sales of the expensive iPhone X gave investors more confidence in the company and helped it to this watershed moment, leaving second-place Amazon and third-place Google well behind in the mid to high $800 billion value range.

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In July 2017, fossils of five early humans found in North Africa were unveiled by researchers. These fossils show that Homo sapiens emerged on Earth at least 100,000 years earlier than previously recognized. The finds also suggested that humans may have been evolving in the same direction all over the African continent.

Homo sapiens is part of a group called hominids, which were the earliest humanlike creatures. Based on archaeological and anthropological evidence, we think that hominids diverged from other primates somewhere between 2.5 and 4 million years ago in eastern and southern Africa. Though there was a degree of diversity among the hominid family, they all shared the trait of bipedalism, or the ability to walk upright on two legs.

When humans migrated from Africa to colder climates, they made clothing out of animal skins and constructed fires to keep themselves warm; often, they burned fires continuously through the winter. Sophisticated weapons, such as spears and bows and arrows, allowed them to kill large mammals efficiently. Along with changing climates, these hunting methods contributed to the extinction of giant land mammals such as mammoths, giant kangaroos, and mastodons. Fewer giant mammals, in turn, limited hunters’ available prey.

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At a time when it is difficult for humans to get citizenship of a particular country, Sophia, a humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong- based Hanson Robotics was conferred citizenship by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in October 2017. Sophia looks and talks like a human. From after, you can probably not even say she’s a robot!

She is fashioned after Audrey Hepburn, can walk, talk and emote too. And now, Sophia, the world’s first robot citizen who came calling here this week, can also draw sketches, contextualise a conversation and attach faces with names, say its makers.

The delicate looking woman robot with doe-brown eyes and long fluttering eyelashes, who mesmerised the world when she was activated in 2016, is getting smarter by the day.

Sophia, dressed in a black skirt and a grey metallic shirt, was part of several industrial and social robots, including ‘Professor Einstein’, exhibited at the 28th IEEE Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN2019) here.

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For four days in May, Portugal, the European country known for soccer and Cristiano Ronaldo, was powered by renewable energy. Yes, for four consecutive days the country’s electric usage was provided entirely by wind, solar and hydro-generated energy.

The country’s zero emission milestone was announced just days after Germany, another European superpower, announced that clean energy had powered almost all its electricity needs on May 15.

Overall, renewable energy is gaining ground on the world’s electric grids, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the world’s new electric capacity, according to the renewable energy research network REN21.

Still, wind and solar panels together account for just 4 percent of the total power supply. Though the coal industry has been on the decline in some places, the world is still largely reliant on fossil fuels to generate power. Efforts to cut planet-warming greenhouse gases depend markedly on the power sector, which accounts for about 42 percent of all energy-related carbon emissions. Nuclear plants can contribute to the clean-energy bottom line, but they face opposition over waste and safety issues, as well as political and economic headwinds.

Wind and solar command a lot of attention when it comes to renewable energy, but in many cases, other low-emissions sources are providing big assists. A key player in Portugal’s win is hydroelectric power, which accounts for about 19 percent of the country’s supply. Hydro can provide the steadier output needed to fill in gaps when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

Having a strong reserve of geothermal energy can help lay a foundation, too, as is the case in Iceland, Philippines, and others. But developing those resources takes time, money, and political consensus, which can often hold projects back.

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Technology has received its share of criticism over the years, especially when it comes to social interaction. With the advent of computers and smartphones, many of us have been accused of spending less time with friends and family, and more with gadgets. However, the same technology can be used to keep in touch with loved ones. Here’s how:

Send them a mail

While writing a letter is always an option, you can send your loved ones an email as well. It gets delivered in an instant and is versatile, allowing you to incorporate images and documents. Share your vacation pictures or tell them how the year has been for you and wait for a reply.

Email is a quick and hassle-free way of connecting with your loved ones.

Connect on video

Video calling is one of the best technologies available to us. It helps bring those staying far away closer to us, and is more personal than chat or email.

Use one of the many video calling software on your phone or laptop to call and connect with your loved ones. You’ll feel like they are right next to you.

Send E-greetings

Gone are the days when we shared greeting cards with friends and family on special occasions. However, technology has added its own twist to those cards, enabling you to customize them and send them electronically. There are several e-greeting sites online. You can choose the ones you like and send them to your loved ones.

Alternatively, you can use your design skills to create your own greeting card and mail it.

Send them a gift

With the boom in e-commerce, you can easily send a gift to your dear ones. Not sure about what they like? Browse their social media accounts or ask common friends.

Alternatively, you can send them an e-giftcard which will enable them to buy whatever they want from an e-commerce site.

Share memories

With the availability of cloud storage, you can collaborate with your loved ones and create a repository of photographs of everyone in your circle. It will stay forever, and you can always browse through them for a walk down memory lane.

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Scientists for the first time have measured the heart rate of the world’s largest creature. The blue whale, which can reach up to 100 feet in length and weighs 200 tons, is the largest mammal to have ever lived and possesses the largest heart of any living creature – around 180 kg. It lowers its heart rate to as little as two beats per minute as it plunges under the ocean surface for food. Its highest heart rate – between 25 and 37 beats per minute – occurs when it returns to the surface to restore oxygen levels. These extremes suggest that the blue whale’s heart is “working at its limit”. A more robust cardiovascular system is not likely, and the research may explain why no species on Earth has grown bigger than the blue whale, since the energy needs of a larger body might surpass what’s biologically possible for a heart to accommodate.

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Researchers at Shiv Nadar University in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, have identified two strains of plastic-eating bacteria which have the potential to decompose polystyrene – a key component in Single-Use Plastic (SUP) items such as disposable cups, cutlery, packaging materials, etc.

The bacteria species, Exiguobacterium sibiricum strain DR11 and Exiguobacterium undae strain DR14, were isolated from the wetlands adjoining the University. Upon coming into contact with the polystyrene, the bacteria strains use it as a carbon source to create biofilms – an assemblage of bacterial cells which grow as communities – allowing for targeted action of enzymes that alter the physical properties of polystyrene and initiate natural degradation.

India consumes about 16.5 million metric tonnes of plastic annually. Of the 300 million tonnes of plastic discarded every year, only about 10 per cent gets recycled. Researchers note that the use of both indigenous and genetically-modified bacteria could lead to eco-friendly, alternative clean-up methods for plastic waste.

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In an effort to save local plant species around Vijayawada, the Department of Botany at the Siddhartha College of Arts and Science tagged trees in the college grounds with QR (Quick Response) codes that give students information about the tree – from its scientific name to its medicinal value. Students only need to scan the code using their smartphones.

“Students now do not have the time to learn about the things around them via books. To keep up with the digital trend, we collected the database of all the trees in the college and assigned QR codes to them, making it easier for everybody to learn about a plant or a tree at the tip of their fingers,” said Ch. Srinivas Reddy, Head of Department, Botany.

The department has also brought in a few trees found mainly in the forests of the region, like the Gloriosa superb, and the Gyrocarpus americanus (or Nalla Poniki), used to make the famous Kondapalli toys.

“The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) categorizes the status of every plant species ever year. If we mention the status in the QR code, whether species is vulnerable, endangered or nearing extinction, we hope it will encourage people to grow more of these trees and conserve them,” says Srinivas.

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Did you know that our hunter-gatherer ancestors used to devour foods that were rich in sweets and calories, as they were few and far between? In fact, there is a gorging gene theory that attempts to explain our current eating habits, which continues to be high on sweets and calories, by tracing it back to those very ancestors. Gorging or not, sweets constitute an important portion of our diet and it is for this reason that both sugar and artificial sweeteners continue to play a crucial part in how we live.

Artificial sweeteners, however, are a rather recent phenomenon. Saccharin, which is the oldest to be discovered, came about only late in the 19th Century and having become the first such commercially available substance, it dominated the scene until second half of the 20th Century.

Remsen meets Fahlberg

The discovery of saccharin takes us back to the 1870s when Ira Remsen, an American chemist, returned to the U.S. and accepted a professorship at the John Hopkins University. As the university was founded only in 1976, it was, in fact, Remsen who set up the Department of Chemistry at the university.

Russian chemist Constantin Fahlberg entered the picture in 1877 when a firm that imported sugar enlisted him to analyse the purity of an import. That same firm put Fahlberg in touch with Remsen, getting him permission to use the latter’s laboratory for tests. Fahlberg and Remsen got along rather well and by 1878, Fahlberg took part in Remsen’s research at the institute.

Out-sugared sugar

On one of those days, Fahlberg was so sucked up in his lab work that he almost forgot his supper till quite late. When he broke a piece of bread and bit into a remarkably sweet crust, he merely assumed it must have been some cake. When he washed his mouth and dried his moustache with a napkin, he found that the napkin was even sweeter than the bread!

Puzzled, he next took his goblet of water. As luck would have it, he placed his mouth where his fingers had held it only moments previously, and the water tasted like a sugary syrup. Realising then that he was the cause of the universal sweetness, he licked his thumb, confirming his suspicion.

Knowing then that he had stumbled upon a coal-tar substance that “out-sugared sugar”, Fahlberg ran back to the laboratory and tasted everything that was on his worktable. He found the source and it took him weeks and months of work to determine its chemical composition, characteristics and reactions.

Even though Fahlberg previously synthesised saccharin by another method, he had no reason to taste it back then. By 1879, Fahlberg and Remsen published a joint article describing both methods of synthesising saccharin.

Sweeter than sugar

Saccharin, an organic compound which goes by the chemical formula C7H5NO3S, is nearly 300 times as sweet as sugar. Though it seemed initially that neither discoverer was interested in its commercial potential, Fahlberg applied for German and American patents after leaving Remsen’s lab and without informing Remsen.

Fahlberg received his U.S. patent for saccharin on September 15, 1885 and soon set up shop, selling it as pills and powder. Entering the fray as an artificial sweetener, saccharin soon became a viable alternative to sugar. The sugar shortage and its price rice during the World War paved the way for saccharin to be a sugar-substitute and it soon became more than just that.

Saccharin’s tale, however, is also inextricably woven with the rise of consumer consciousness, food control and regulation, especially in the U.S. With scientific evidence from both sides – for and against saccharin – no clear-cut demarcation has been possible with regard to its usage. The lingering threat hovering over a possible saccharin ban therefore spawned research into alternatives. Meaning that when saccharin was finally pushed off its perch, it was to give way to a new generation of artificial sweeteners.

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Moses found on rocks and trees in cities around the world can be used to measure the impact of atmospheric change and could prove a low-cost way to monitor urban pollution, according to Japanese scientists.

Moss responds to pollution or drought-stress by changing shape, density or by disappearing, allowing scientists to calculate atmospheric alterations.

Mosses are a common plant in all cities so this method can be used in many countries; they have a big potential to be bio-indicators.

The scientists studied the effect of nitrogen pollution, air quality and drought-stress on moss found over a 3 sq km area in Hachioji City in north-west Tokyo. The study showed severe drought-stress tended to occur in areas with high levels of nitrogen pollution, which raised concerns over the impact on health and biodiversity.

The World Health Organization says 88% of city dwellers are exposed to annual pollution levels that exceed its air quality guidelines.

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University of Texas researchers asked study participants to take a series of tests to measure their available cognitive capacity – that is, the brain’s ability to hold and process data at any given time. Participants randomly placed their smartphones (in silent mode) either on the desk, in their pocket or personal bag, or in another room.

The participants who left their phones in another room significantly outperformed those who had placed the phones on the desk, and these in turn slightly outperformed participants who had their phone in a pocket or bag. The results suggest that the mere presence of the devices is enough to drain somebody’s mental resources and impair cognitive capacity, even though participants felt that they were completely immersed in the task.

“Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but that process of requiring yourself to not think about something uses up some of your limited cognitive resources. It’s a brain drain,” says assistant professor Adrian Ward.

Whether the phone was turned on or off didn’t seem to matter, nor if it is on the desk lying face up or face down – all that was needed to reduce a participant’s ability to focus was to have a smartphone within reach.

The researchers say it doesn’t come down to us delegating some cognitive processes over to the devices and losing on brain ‘exercise’; rather, it’s a matter of self-control. We’ve become so attached to smartphones that the brain actually has to give up part of its processing power to keep the urge of picking them up at bay.

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Astronauts abroad the International Space Station (ISS) have a new robotic companion. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Int-Ball is a spherical camera that resides in the Japanese module ‘Kibo’ on the ISS. Manufactured entirely by 3D printing, and using existing drone technology, it can move around autonomously or be controlled from Earth by JAXA Tsukuba Space Centre. The images it takes re transferred in near real-time allowing JAXA to quickly evaluate problems an offer solutions to ISS residents. It has cut the amount of the work done by Japanese astronauts on the ISS by about 10 per cent – photographing work and equipment for evaluation that otherwise would have to be done manually. In the future it will be able to check supplies and help with onboard problems.

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Now, after 13 years Japanese scientists have created a genuinely blue chrysanthemum. This could be applied to other species and could mean that florists will no longer have to dye flowers.

True blue requires complex chemistry. Anthocyanins – pigment molecules in the petals, stem and fruit – consist of rings that cause a flower to turn red, purple or blue depending on what sugars or groups of atoms are attached.

Naonobu Noda, a plant biologist at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, first put a gene from a bluish flower called The Canterbury bell into a chrysanthemum. The gene’s protein modified the chrysanthemum’s anthocyanin to make the bloom purple. A second gene from the blue-flowering butterfly pea was then added. This gene’s protein added a sugar molecule to the anthrocyanin which turned the flowers blue. The two-step method was unexpected as the scientists believed multiple genes were required in a more complicated process. Chemical analyses showed that the blue colour came about in just two steps because the chrysanthemums already had a colourless component that interacted with the modified anthocyanin to create the blue colour.

True blue flowers are rare in nature, occurring only in select species like morning glories and delphiniums. According to the Royal Horticultural Society’s colour scale, most “blues” are really violet or purple.

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Scientists have created a smart t-shirt that monitors the wearer’s respiratory rate in real time, without the help of any wires or sensors. The innovation paves the way for manufacturing clothing that could be used to diagnose respiratory illnesses or monitor people suffering from asthma, sleep apnea or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Created at Universities Laval in Canada, the t-shirt has an antenna sewn in at chest level that is made of a hollow optical fibre coated with a thin layer of silver on its inner surface. The fibre’s exterior surface is covered in a protective polymer. As the wearer breathes in, the smart fibre senses the increase in both thorax circumference and the volume of air in the lungs. The data is then sent to the user’s smartphone or a nearby computer.

To assess the durability of the invention, the researchers washed the t-shirt, and found that after 20 washes, the antenna withstood water and detergent and was still in good working condition.

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The Saraswati supercluster of 43 galaxies is 4 billion light years away from Earth and roughly more than 10 billion years old. It spans 600 million light years and many contain the mass equivalent of over 20 million billion suns.

Superclusters are a chain of galaxies and galaxy clusters bound by gravity, often stretching to several hundred times the size of clusters of galaxies, consisting of tens of thousands of galaxies. The Milky Way, the galaxy we are in, is part of the Laniakea Supercluster.

The Shapley Concentration or the Sloan Great Wall superclusters are comparatively large, but the Saraswati supercluster is far more distant.

The supercluster was discovered by Shishir Sankhayan, of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, Pratik Dabhade, IUCAA research fellow, Joe Jacob of Newman College, Kerala, and Prakash Sarkar of the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur.

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How do you carry your music? You probably have it stored in your mobile phone or use music apps to stream them and listen. If you still don’t have your own smartphone, then you might be using a music player or the radio to listen the songs whenever you want. What if none of these options was possible? What if you had to gather around a device that played music, paying for every time you used the service?

A jukebox is a semi-automated music-playing device popular in the middle of the 20th century. Usually a coin-operated machine, it played a user’s selection from available self-contained media. If the idea doesn’t seem relatable to you, wait till you hear about a nickel-in-the-slot phonograph.

First jukebox

The nickel-in-the-slot phonograph is seen by many as the first jukebox, even though it was never known by that name (the word “jukebox” seems to have originated only after the 1930s). it was first installed on November 23, 1889 in the Palais Royale Saloon, Sutter Street, San Francisco, meaning it appeared nearly four decades before the word “jukebox” started doing the rounds.

Before we look at the nickel-in-the-slot machine, we will have to understand the phonograph. The brainchild of American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison, it was first demonstrated by him in 1877. Even though Edison firmly believed that his phonograph – a device for mechanical recording and reproduction of sound – would be put to use in offices, it was the music industry that benefited most from it.

Phonograph at its core

Among those who made the most of the phonograph were two men, Louis T Glass and William S Arnold. Glass worked with the Pacific Phonograph Company during that time and Arnold was his business associate. Glass was struck with the idea that if he could get people to part with money to listen to music, he might make it big in a new business. He soon got to work along with Arnold, and he proved to be absolutely right about his ideas.

Glass and Arnold came up with the nickel-in-the-slot phonograph, an inventions that placed on Edison Class M electric phonograph inside a wooden cabinet. With loudspeakers yet to be invented, the phonograph was attached to four tubes that looked like stethoscopes that were used to listen to the only song stored in the device.

Glass particularly prided himself in the way in which he had devised these four tubes. Each of these tubes was provided with a slot in which a nickel (coin) could be dropped. While dropping a nickel in any of these slots started the machine and played the song, it was only audible in the tube in which the nickel was dropped. If others tried to listen in with the other tubes, they got no sound, unless they dropped a coin to activate that tube as well.

Once installed at the Palais Royale Saloon, it became evident that it was an instant success. With minimal amounts being spent for regular maintenance, it was clear that Glass and Arnold had struck it rich. To add to that, the machines turned out to be so attractive that places that wanted to be buzzing with people took it on lease on regular rentals, while receiving just a 10th of the actual proceedings.

Makes a lot of money

Six months from the time the first nickel-in-the-slot phonograph got going, on May 14, 1890, it had raked in $1,035.25 1(a lot of money at that time). Other machines that had been placed around the city, including some that were placed in close proximity to each other, also did equally well. This prompted Glass to say “that all the money we have made in the phonograph business we have made out of the-nickel-in-the-slot machine,” when he was invited to speak at the first annual convention of local phonograph companies of the U.S. held in Chicago on May 28 and 29, 1890.

Till the advent of radio, phonograph and the various inventions based on it remained the mass medium for popular music and recordings. It was then followed by jukeboxes that dominated the scene until transistors were invented. They might have gone by a different name, but the predecessor to these jukeboxes started out by accepting just a nickel in the slot.

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We have a thing for firsts. Be it the first human being to climb the Mt. Everest, the first to set foot on the moon, or any such feat, they leave an indelible mark in our collective consciousness. The ones who come second, even though achieving an equally significant accomplishment, often fade from our memory. One such second is the X-10 Graphite Reactor, the second artificial nuclear reactor after the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1).

Before we take a look at X-10, we have to understand the circumstances in which it came about. The authorisation of the Manhattan Project by the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II meant that scientists began their research and development to produce the first nuclear weapons. In December 1942, CP-1 became the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor as the experiment led by American-Italian physicist Enrico Fermi achieved the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. 

Need for plutonium

While CP-1 was a success as a scientific experiment and showed that nuclear chain reactions could be controlled, it was built on a small scale, which meant that recovering significant amounts of plutonium wasn’t feasible. As plutonium, a transuranium element that had been recently discovered, was seen as a potential ingredient for atomic weapons, producing it for research was a priority. 

The X-10 Graphite Reactor was thus born as an experimental air-cooled production pile that would help in designing the full-scale helium-cooled reactors that were also being planned. Whereas the X-10 Pile or Clinton Pile was to be built at the Oak Ridge site, the latter was planned to be constructed at Hanford. DuPont company was roped in to work with the University of Chicago to design and build both these reactors. 

Less than a year

Even though the design wasn’t completely ready, DuPont went ahead with the construction of the reactor in early 1943. The X-10 was to be a massive graphite block (24-ft cube), protected by concrete and having 1,248 horizontal channels that were to be filled with uranium slugs surrounded by cooling air. The face of the pile was to be used to push new slugs into the channels, while irradiated ones fell into an underwater bucket at the rear. 

These buckets of irradiated slugs were left to undergo radioactive decay before being moved to a separation facility , where remote-controlled equipment were used to extract the plutonium. Racing against time, the construction of the reactor was completed in less than a year. 

On November 4, 1943, the X-10 went critical for the first time. This meant that the number of neutrons being produced were equal to the number of neutrons being absorbed, which in turn produced the same number of neutrons. A reactor thus operates in a steady-state when it becomes critical. By the end of November, X-10 started producing small but significant samples of plutonium, which were experimentally valuable. 

Important learning

Even though it was decided that water should be used as a coolant for the Hanford reactors while X-10 was still under construction, X-10 provided important results and learning. The X-10 suppled the Los Alamos National Laboratory with the first significant amounts of plutonium, fission studies in which influenced the bomb design. The engineers, technicians, safety officers and reactor operators who worked on X-10 gained great experience, which they were able to apply once they moved to Hanford. 

Once the war was over, the reactor was put to use for peacetime efforts, producing radioisotopes, utilised in industry, medicine and research. It remained in operation until 1963, when X-10 was shut down permanently. By 1965, the X-10 Graphite Reactor was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. government and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. Recognised by the American Chemical Society as a National Historic Chemical Landmark in 2008, the control room and reactor face are still accessible to the public through tours provided by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

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The saying that friends are the family you choose may be more accurate than you thought. A study shows that people are likely to pick friends who are genetically similar to themselves – so much so that friends tend to be as alike at the genetic level as a person’s fourth cousin (people who have great-great-great grandparents in common).

People were most similar to their friends in olfactory genes, which involve the sense of smell, and least similar in immune system genes. People who like the same smells tend to be drawn to similar environments, where they meet others with the same tendencies. The opposite was true for genes controlling immunity; friends were more likely than strangers to have different genetic defences against various diseases. This may be because it helps to reduce the likelihood of epidemics if friends are resistant to different illnesses.

Researchers suspect that this trait, called ‘functional kinship’, is rooted in human evolution. Early human beings may have formed groups if they were genetically suited to certain environments, or had similar likes and dislikes, e.g., those with a similar susceptibility to the cold may have helped each other build a fire. It may have also been because some genetic attributes only work if you have someone to share it with. The first, most intelligent humans to develop speech would have grouped together with others with the small skill.

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A computer comparable to the human brain would need to be able to perform more than 38 thousand trillion operations per second and hold about 3,584 terabytes of memory! IBM’s BlueGene supercomputers, one of the world’s most powerful, can manage only 92 trillion operations per second and 8 terabytes of storage.

In addition to boosting computer performance, enhanced understanding of the brain will enable people to communicate directly with machines, whether they are robots or mechanized prosthetic limbs. Primates have already proved that such brain-machine interfaces are possible, Miguel Nicolelis, co-director of Duke University Medical Center’s Center for Neuroengineering, said during the conference. The researcher and his colleagues last year successfully implanted electrodes in the brain of a monkey in North Carolina that enabled him to control a robot on a treadmill in Kyoto, Japan.

Nicolelis and his team have developed a microchip they expect will allow human brains to communicate with robots using only brain signals and enables the bots to return messages directly to the brain, without the use of sight or touch. Nicolelis said that he hopes the technology will be sophisticated enough to implant into a human brain by 2012 and enable a completely quadriplegic patient to walk again.

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A strip of “smart” highway with glow-in-the-dark road markings has opened in The Netherlands. About 500 metres of highway have been treated with a special photo-luminizing powder which absorbs light or “charges” during the day and then emits a soft green light at night which lasts for about 10 hours. The goal is to develop a more sustainable method of illuminating roads. Dutch engineers also plan to test other paints that would show symbols when serve weather hits, e.g., displaying snowflakes when it starts to snow so drivers know the roads are slippery.

The concept itself has been developed through several iterations and has been tested for durability and user experience. As such, the Oss pilot should primarily provide information on how well it works on a day-to-day basis in a real-world setting.

There are a number of other concepts under the Smart Highway umbrella yet to be piloted. Dynamic Paint envisages the use of temperature sensitive paint on the roads to provide contextual information. For example, if it were to be very cold, then the usually transparent paint would become visible and display warning messages.

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The DeepFlight Super Falcon, developed by California-based Hawkes Ocean Technologies, is a winged submersible designed to dive below the surface, swim amongst marine animals, navigate through underwater canyons, and even perform aquatic barred rolls. The submarine is 21 feet long with a wingspan of nearly 9 feet, and can dive to a depth of about 394 feet. It dives underwater like a whale, using thrust to generate “downward lift” to help the vehicle descend below the water’s surface. Essentially, it uses ‘lift and drag’ – the principles of regular flight – to “soar” underwater. If the vehicle loses power underwater, it will simply float back to the surface. The Super Falcon currently retails for $1.7 million.

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A new earthworm species developed by the Indian Veterinary Research Institute (IVRI) can get rid of the wild aquatic plant Jal Kumbhi (Pistia Stratiotes) growing on the banks of river Brahmaputra. The plant is a menace as it spreads its tentacles right up to the river bed and impairs the movement of fisherman besides causing widespread pollution.

Jai Gopal (Perionyx ceylanesis) eats wild vegetation very fast and converts it into organic fertilizer that can be used in farming. It can withstand different temperature variations and survive temperatures ranging from 0 degree Celsius to 43 degree Celsius. The fertilizers produced will be used by tea gardens in the Assam valley. The earthworm will also benefit the sugarcane industry – waste products rich in phosphorous, calcium, potassium and other minerals can be transformed into organic fertilizers once they become fodder for the earthworm.

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A California electrician developed star-shaped cataracts after being shocked by 14,000 volts of electricity. The current passed through his entire body, including the optic nerve that connects the back of the eye to the brain. “The optic nerve is similar to any wire that conducts electricity,” said Dr Bobby Korn, associate professor of clinical ophthalmology, University of California. “The extreme current and voltage that passed through this important natural wire caused damage to the optic nerve itself.” In animal studies, damage to the eye’s lens from electricity first appears as small bubbles called ‘vacuoles’ on the outside of the lens. These then coalesce to form a star-shaped cataract.

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At Indonesia’s Kawah Ijen Volcano, extremely high quantities of sulphuric gases emerge at high pressure and temperatures (sometimes in excess of 600 degree Celsius) along with the lava. Exposed to the oxygen present in air and sparked by lava, the sulphur burns readily, and its flames are bright blue. There’s so much sulfur, that at times it flows down the rock face as it burns, making it seem as though blue lava is spilling down the mountainside. But because only the flames are blue rather than the lava itself, the effect is only visible at night – during daytime, the volcano looks like any other.

Miners extract the sulfur rock, which is formed after the blue flames extinguish leaving behind a solid sulfur-rich rock. They then carry these large loads in baskets down the side of the mountain to be paid per kilogram. The work is unregulated and small children can often be seen scrambling up and down the slopes hoping to support their family’s low incomes with additional money. They usually take two daily trips. Each local worker is paid about 680 Indonesian rupiahs per kilogram, the equivalent of about six USD cents. 

The working conditions are highly dangerous. It does not only require agility and strength to walk up and down the volcano’s steep slopes, but workers are also exposed to the toxic sulfur gases for long periods of time. Without gas masks or other safety equipment, many of the mine’s workers suffer long-term health problems resulting from sulfur exposure. These volcanic materials make it one of the more dangerous places on Earth.

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Alston’s singing mouse (Scotinomys teguina) produces vocalizations that are barely audible to humans. Unlike simple squeaks or chirps, the “songs” of these mice last longer and have multiple notes, and the mice can modulate both the amplitude and the frequency of the calls. Researchers have now found that besides using them to attract mates and repel rivals within their own species, these high-pitched tunes can serve as signals across species, too, helping males protect their turf.

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-93.2 degree Celsius is the temperature recorded by NASA satellites at the coldest place on earth. The record temperatures were found in 5 by 10 km pockets where the topography forms small hollows 6 to 13 feet deep just off the ice ridge that runs between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji – the ice dome summits of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. A lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said, “I am told that every breath is painful and you have to be extremely careful not to freeze part of your throat or lungs when inhaling.”

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Tired of the usual flavours of ice cream? How does bioluminescent jellyfish flavour sound? U.K.-based Lick Me I’m Delicious has developed the first-ever ice cream that glows in the dark using a protein that gives the jellyfish its bioluminescence.

Founder Charlie Francis explains that the act of licking warms up the protein in the ice cream, causing an increase in its  level, which produces the glow. “Is it safe to eat? Well I tried some and I don’t seem to be glowing anywhere, so we’ll go with a yes for now.”

Price of glowing treat? US$225 per scoop!

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A recent study showed that people who took photographs of items during a museum tour were less likely to remember details than those who merely looked at the objects. “When you press click on that button for the camera, you’re sending a signal to your brain saying, ‘I’ve just outsourced this, the camera is going to remember this for me,” said Linda Henkel, a psychological scientist at Fairfield University, Connecticut. “The photos are trophies. You want to show people where you were rather than saying, ‘Hey, this is important, I want to remember this.” Henkel called this the ‘photo-taking impairment effect’.

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Mt Erebus is the most active volcano in Antarctica and the southernmost active volcano on Earth. It features a 1700oF lava lake, a swirling pool of magma perhaps many miles deep: one of only five that exit in the world. Riddling the side of the snow-covered volcano are ice caves. The volcanic gases heat their way through these ice caves and escape into the air to form enormous 60-foot chimneys of ice or ‘fumaroles’ with noxious volcanic gases pouring out from their tips.

At the summit of the volcano is some 500 by 600 m large and 110 m deep crater. In this crater is one more – inner crater which is some 250 m wide and 100 m deep. In this inner crater is lava lake – one of the few such lakes in the world. It is filled with phonolitic lava. In fact, Mount Erebus is the only volcano in the world which erupts this kind of lava currently.

If the weather let’s see through the fumes, visitors can admire the glow of this lake from the rim of the crater. The lava lake of Mount Erebus has existed since the discovery of the volcano (and, most likely, before this), but it has constantly changed.

Thus, during the 1970ies the lava lake was some 130 m long and had oval shape. Then, in 1984 – 1985 the volcanic activity increased and the glow of lava was visible from a distance of some 70 km. During this time most of the lava lake “froze” – solidified. Nevertheless, Erebus threw volcanic bombs with a diameter up to 10 m up to 1.2 km far!

Small lava lake with a diameter of some 15 m appeared in late 1985. Then, in the late 1980ies, researchers observed up to three smaller lava lakes.

Lava lake or several lakes existed in the crater in the 1990ies and in the 21st century. In 2010 – 2016 volcano formed two lava lakes.

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Forgetting everything you hear in classes or meetings? Your overstuffed notebook might be the culprit. According to psychologists at Mount St. Vincent University in New York, our brains go: “Hey, he’s writing this down, so no need to warehouse this stuff. Better to make room for other stuff.” Researchers call this phenomenon ‘intentional forgetting’.

Subjects played the memory game Concentration in which players memorize images on cards and try to identify them after the cards have been covered up. Half the subjects studied the cards before they were covered; the other half were allowed to take notes. The note-takers did significantly worse than the group that knew they had to concentrate on the images and position of the cards.

Researchers concluded that “participants adopted an intentional-forgetting strategy when using notes to store certain types of information.” Taking notes didn’t improve memory; it made recall worse because the brain was forgetting as fast as its owner was writing.

So the next time your teacher asks why you’re not taking notes, explain that you want to make sure you remember!

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Stanford engineers recently demonstrated a pair of gecko-inspired hand pads strong enough to pull the weight of an adult man and to allow him to climb a wall.

The gecko’s climbing ability is due to specialized pads located on its toes, comprised of various satae (bristle-or hair-like structures) on the tip of which lie tiny structures called spatulae, each less than a micron wide. These allow attraction forces called Van der Waals interactions to arise between the adhesive satae and the surface. A single spatulae shows very weak molecular forces, however when coupled together in thousands of thousands on the satae, the attraction becomes very strong.

Researchers created an artificial adhesive that could copy the high surface area of the satae on a gecko’s feet, made from a silicone material called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) that is layered as a microscopic wedge. The pads have “controllable adhesion”, so they could easily be switched on or off simply by transferring weight on the adhesive.

The pads could prove useful in manipulating huge solar panels or other massive objects without any suction power or chemical glues, and in space where astronauts could cling to surfaces of the International Space Station.

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The true purpose of eyelashes? Controlling airflow around the eye. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology measured lash length and eye width in 22 preserved mammals ranging in size from hedgehogs to giraffes. In all species, lash length was about one-third eye width, suggesting they had evolved to be a particular size relative to the eye. The researchers made artificial eyes, attaching synthetic lashes to small water-filled aluminium caps and monitoring the “eyes” water loss and particle deposition by 50%, as they trap a protective layer of air on top of the eye. Lashes that are too long no longer trap air and instead funnel airflow onto the eye, likely increasing evaporation and particle deposition.

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Carbon3D Inc. has developed a new 3D printing technology that uses light and oxygen to print objects at speeds 25 to 100 times faster than current technology. The technique was inspired by the film Terminator 2, in which the T-1000 robot rises from a pool of metallic liquid.

Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) enables objects to rise from a liquid media continuously, rather than using the layer-by-layer method that has defined the technology for decades. Beams of light are projected through an oxygen-permeable window into a liquid resin. Light and oxygen control the solidification of the resin, creating objects that can have sizes below 20 microns.

CLIP enables a very wide range of materials to be used to make 3D parts with novel properties, including elastomers, silicones, nylon-like materials, ceramics and biodegradable materials. Since it is facilitates 3D objects fabrication in minutes instead of hours or days, it would not be impossible within coming years to enable personalized coronary stents, dental implants or prosthetics to be printed on-demand in a medical setting.

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Bats can make ultra-fast decisions about how to attack their prey or even call off the attack. A bat is capable of adjusting its attack until it is approximately 100 milliseconds away from its prey.

Bats use echolocation for orientation. They emit ultrasonic sounds, which hit potential prey nearby, sending an echo back to the bat. From this echo the bat can define where the prey is and attack it. A new study has examined how hunting bats react when approaching their prey. The study concludes that bats are capable of gathering information from the environment and process it surprisingly fast in order to determine how to carry out the attack or maybe call it off.

“A bat is capable of adjusting its attack until it is approximately 100 milliseconds away from its prey,” explains Signe Brinkløv, postdoc at the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark.

“It is surprising that they are so fast. Until now we thought that bats are deploying a kind of autopilot in the last phase of an attack limiting them to an unchangeable behavioral pattern.”

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China has finished building the world’s biggest radio telescope, which it will use to explore space and hunt for extraterrestrial life. The Five hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is the size of 30 soccer fields and has been hewn out of a mountain in the south-western province of Guizhou.

The telescope has been designed so that individual panels can be rearranged to focus on and track radio waves from specific objects of interest, which will give the dish much greater range and sensitivity than rival dishes.

O’Brien says FAST will enable more-detailed studies of pulsars: ultra-dense collapsed cores of exploding stars. “We may even find [more] pulsars outside our own galaxy,” he says. “It will also allow us to survey hydrogen in very distant galaxies, detect molecules in space, search for natural radio wave emissions from planets orbiting other stars and help in the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.”

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A little asteroid has been tagging along in Earth’s orbit for at least a century – and it’ll probably follow along for at least a few hundred years more.

Scientists at the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii spotted the little asteroid known as 2016 HO3, in April. They estimate that the asteroid is only about 130-330 feet wide, making it a tiny speck in the vastness of space. Even at its closet point, 2016 HO3 is at least about 9 million miles away.

“The asteroid’s loops around Earth drift a little ahead or behind from year to year, but when they drift too far forward or backward, Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to reverse the drift and hold onto the asteroid so that it never wanders farther away than about 100 times the distance of the moon,” says NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies. “The same effect also prevents the asteroid from approaching much closer than about 38 times the distance of the moon. In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth.

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Researchers from Carnegie of Science have been monitoring the seismic activity of more than 50 volcanic explosions in active volcanoes since 2009. Leading up to an eruption, volcanoes threw out plenty of smoke, fire, and sputtering ground movement, as expected. But, in the moments right before an eruption, the volcanoes went suddenly and completely quiet and still.

Most eruptions had quiet periods of less than 30 minutes, and some had lulls lasting only a few minutes. The longest one measured 10 hours, but then it was also followed by the largest eruption that researchers noticed that the longest lull was also linked to the biggest explosion, they compared all explosion sizes to the length of the quiet periods and found a clear correlation – the shorter the lull, the smaller the explosion; the longer the lull, the bigger the explosion.

Researchers can use these long, ominous silences to predict how big of an explosion will occur, right before it happens.

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The giant fluorescent pink slug (Triboniophorus aff. graeffei) that only lives on an extinct volcano in Australia is under severe threat of global warming. The slug grows up to 8 inches long and lives in a small forest at Mount Kaputar’s peak where it has no predators. Millions of years ago, when Australia was part of a larger landmass known as Gondwana, the terrain was characterized by lush rainforests. A volcanic eruption 17 million years ago on Mount Kaputar kept a small, 10 sq.km. area lush and wet even as much of Australia turned to desert. The slugs spend most of their time buried beneath the leaf mould on which they feed, but come out in the hundreds by night or after a rain shower to snack on tree moss.

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Whether you prefer drinking tea or coffee may come down to your genes.

University of Queensland researchers studied the relationship between taste receptor genes and tea and coffee consumption in over 430,000 men and women. People taste bitter flavours like caffeine, quinine and an artificial substance called propylthiouracil differently according to the types of taste receptor genes they have.

Participants with gene variants that made them taste caffeine more strongly were 20 percent more likely than the average person to be heavy coffee drinkers. These caffeine super-tasters were less likely to drink tea as people who are better at detecting caffeine are more prone to becoming addicted to its stimulant effects, and coffee contains more caffeine than tea.

Participants with gene variants that made them more sensitive to the tastes of quinine and propylthiouracil were 4 and 9 per cent more likely than the average person to be heavy tea drinkers respectively. They were also less likely to drink coffee. This may be because super-tasters of quinine and propylthiouracil – both more bitter than caffeine – are more sensitive to bitter tastes overall. They may find the intense bitterness of coffee overwhelming and prefer the gentler bitterness of tea.

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Arunachal Pradesh has gifted India with a fifth brown pit viper with a reddish tinge. Herpetologists discovered the new species of pit viper – a venomous snake with a unique heat-sensing system – from a forest in West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh. India has four other brown pit vipers – Malabar, Horseshoe, Hump-nosed and Himalayan – discovered 70 years ago. The new species, Trimeresurus arunachalensis, makes Arunachal Pradesh the only Indian state to have a pit viper named after it. As only one male has been found so far, this single known specimen of the species currently makes it the rarest pit viper in the world.

Comparative analyses of DNA sequences by Mr. Deepak and examination of morphological features by Mr. Captain suggested that the snake belonged to a species not described before.

Mr. Bhatt, a scientist of the Arunachal Pradesh forest department, said that the single known specimen of this species makes it currently the rarest pit viper in the world. The specimen was donated to the museum of the State Forest Research Institute in Itanagar.

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Scientists have for the first time successfully raised laboratory-bred colonies of a critically endangered Caribbean coral species to their reproductive age, a step towards sustainable restoration of degraded reefs.

An estimated 80 per cent of all Caribbean corals have disappeared over the last four decades. The elkhorn coral (Acropora palmate) was one species whose decline was so severe that it was one of the first coral species to be listed as critically endangered under The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened species.

Due to its large size and branching shape, elkhorn corals created vast forests in shallow reef waters that protect shores from incoming storms and provide a critical habitat for a myriad of reef organisms, including ecologically and economically important fish species.

Elkhorn corals reproduce only once or twice a year, synchronously releasing their gametes (reproductive cells) into the water column. SECORE International researchers collected a small proportion of these gametes and produced coral embryos by in-vitro fertilization. Coral embryos develop into swimming larvae within days and eventually settle onto specifically designed substrates. After a short nursery period, researches outplanted the substrates with the newly-settles corals onto the reef.

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This Japanese firm, Spread, is to open the world’s first automated farm with robots handling almost every step of the process, from watering seedlings to harvesting crops. The only part of the process that would require human inputs is seeding.

The farm, measuring about 4,400 square metres, will have floor-to-ceiling shelves where the produce is grown. The robots will also monitor levels of carbon dioxide in the air and adjust lighting and temperature to optimize growth. The use of LED lighting means energy costs will be slashed by almost a third, and about 98% per cent of the water need to grow the crops will be recycled.

The indoor grow house will start operating by the middle of 2017 and produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day. It hopes to boost that figure to half a million lettuce heads daily within five years.

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Last recorded in the wild in 1870, Jerdon’s tree frog was feared extinct. But an expedition led by Indian biologist S. D. Biju found the elusive Frankixaius jerdonii in the East Khasi district of Meghalaya. They observed the frog hiding in hollow bamboo stems and tree holes around 19 feet above ground, where it carries out the remarkable breeding antics. Females attach their eggs to the insides of tree hollows which hold pools of water. When the tadpoles hatch, they fall in the water, where the females feed them unfertilized eggs until they turn into froglets.

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The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence, s developing self-destructing electronic components as part of its Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) programme. Its recent ICARUS project is dedicated to the development of air vehicles that disappear upon mission completion. The programme is named for the Icarus of Greek mythology, whose waxy wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.

The VAPR team developed electronic-infused glass strips that can be triggered to shatter into dust and small polymer panels that disappear when they convert from a solid to a gas phase. The team found it was theoretically possible to build larger structures that could be engineered to self-combust.

Self-destructing systems are useful for a range of situations, e.g., destroying sophisticated technologies that are used on battlefields and then left behind. Discarded electronics also pose a threat to the environment as they rust and decompose. The flying vehicles could also be used to deliver food, water and vaccines to people living in remote areas, or to transport supplies to people stranded by natural disasters.

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Creators of Living Ink Technologies have created an eco-friendly “timelapse” ink that magically appears after exposure to sunlight.

The plant pens contain cyanobacteria, algae and chlorophyll in tiny amounts that are invisible to the naked eye at first. But when exposed to sunlight, the organisms reproduce at astonishing rates, bolstering their numbers to the point where they finally appear dense and green, thanks to the chlorophyll that harvests light energy and reflects light.

There are two types of ink: pink or “fast ink” which grows in 1-2 days, and blue or “slow ink” that takes 3-4 days to appear. This allows you to create a two-stage secret reveal over the course of a week which could find use in greeting cards or even a proposal!

The creation is housed inside a compact ‘greenhouse’ (which doubles as a picture frame) filled with a nutrient-dense material called agar that promotes the ink’s growth. When removed from the frame the algae and bacteria will eventually die, but the resulting image stains the paper so that it won’t fade away.

Besides being fun, Living Ink is also nontoxic. “Carbon black is the most common pigment used in black inks. It’s most commonly made from the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products such as tar,” says the company, who sidestepped this by making its product out of the ultimate organic material – living organisms.

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Research has identified the tiny chameleon Rhampholeon spinosus as having the ultimate high-speed tongue. When it flicks its tongue at a fly, it reaches peak acceleration 264 times the force of gravity. In comparison, NASA’s shuttle delivered astronauts into orbit with a peak acceleration of only 3g. The F-16 jet fighter only reaches 7 g in pulling out of a dive. The acceleration of a chameleon’s tongue is the equivalent of getting from 0 to 60 mph in a hundredth of a second. But in the course of sticking out its tongue to 2.5 times its own body length, at a peak acceleration of 486 m/sec2, it generates the highest yet measured acceleration and power output per kilogram of muscle mass of any reptile, bird or mammal: 14,040 watts per kilo, making it second only to the most powerful vertebrate tongue of all, that of the salamander.

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A tiny mollusc in Borneo is the new record holder for the world’s smallest known snail. It is so small that the researchers couldn’t see it in the wild without a microscope! Its shiny, translucent, white shell has an average height of 0.027 inches. The former champion – the Chinese snail Angustopila dominikae – is the world’s second-smallest snail, with an average shell height of 0.033 inches. Dutch and Malaysian researchers have named the snail Acmella nana; its species name (nana) is a reference to the Latin nanus, or “dwarf”.

But the researchers knew exactly where to hunt for unknown mollusks: Snails tend to live on Borneo’s limestone hills, likely because their shells are made of calcium carbonate, the main component of limestone, said study co-researcher Menno Schilthuizen, a professor of evolution at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

“When we go to a limestone hill, we just bring some strong plastic bags, and we collect a lot of soil and litter and dirt from underneath the limestone cliffs,” Schilthuizen told Live Science.

They sieve the contents, and dump the larger objects (including the snail shells) into a bucket of water. “We stir it around a lot so that the sand and clay sinks to the bottom, but the shells- which contain a bubble of air – float,” Schilthuizen said.

Then, they scoop out the floating shells and sort them under a microscope.

“You can sometimes get thousands or tens of thousands of shells from a few liters of soil, including these very tiny ones,” he said.

It’s unclear what Acmella nana eats, because the researchers have never seen it alive in the wild. But the researchers have observed a related snail species from Borneo, Acmella polita, foraging on thin films of bacteria and fungi that grow on wet limestone surfaces in caves.

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Researchers at the University of Michigan have created a lattice-like solar cell that can stretch like an accordion, allowing it to tilt along the sun’s trajectory and capture more energy. The unique solar cell is inspired by the ancient art of paper cutting, known as kirigami.

The new design helps fix a problem with most solar power systems – the sun moves and the panels don’t. the kirigami cells are made of flexible, thin-film gallium arsenide strips that have been cut in a simple, two-dimensional pattern. When the cells are stretched using a motorized mechanism, the sheets twist open into three dimensions, offering raised surfaces to track the sun over a radius of about 120 degrees. The patterned film can collect 30 per cent more solar energy than conventional cells would.

The idea has the potential to make rooftop solar much more efficient, but in the near future, researchers say it would be more feasible for smaller aerospace applications.

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Mars may one day have rings similar to Saturn’s famous halo, new research suggests.

The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, are named after the children of the god Ares, the Greek counterpart to Mars, the Roman god of war. The larger, inner moon, Phobos is the only remaining inwardly migrating moon known to exist today.

Phobos, is just 22 kms wide and orbits the Red Planet rapidly, rising and setting twice each Martian day. The tiny moon is slowly drawing closer to Mars by 6.5 feet every century which may result in a dramatic crash into the Martian surface within 30-50 million years, previous research has shown.

Researchers now suggest that instead of going out in a single, enormous impact, the moon will be pulled apart by Martian gravity. After simulating the stresses caused by the tidal pull of Mars, found that the moon would break up over the course of 20-40 million years, forming a ring of debris around the planet. The rubble would continue to move inward towards the planet, and over the span of 1 million to 100 million years, the particles would rain down on the equatorial region of Mars. Initially, the ring could be as dense as Saturn’s, but it would become thinner as the particles fall down onto the planet over time.

What would the Martian ring look like? “From one angle, the ring will reflect extra light towards a viewer, and it will look like a bright curve in the sky,” says Tushar Mittal, one of the authors of the research paper. “From another angle, the viewer might be in the ring’s shadow, and the ring would be a dark curve in the sky.”

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Out of 425,000 e-buses worldwide at the end of last year, 421,000 were in China, a Bloomberg report found. The e-fleet is projected to rise to over 600,000 buses by 2025. Electric buses have become the norm in many Chinese cities. Shenzhlen, a city of 13 million people, has a fleet of over 16,000 electric buses, and it’s making a huge difference. China’s electric buses save more diesel than all the world’s electric cars combined.

To achieve this wide-scale implementation, China used a top-down approach (as is usually the case with the Asian country). National objectives were implemented, both for manufacturers and municipalities, and the policy was used to nurture a productive competition between major cities. Meanwhile, in the US, the opposite is happening — the current administration discourages the national implementation of low-emission transport, and local markets are trying to fill in the void. Even in Europe, which is doing a bit better than the US with 2,250 electric buses, policy has not been decisive enough to fuel a revolution in electric transportation. The rest of Asia, despite some progress, also lags behind.

Buses are excellently suited for transitioning to electric engines: they follow a relatively short and stable route and can be easily recharged between rides. They also transport many more people than a regular car, which means that the positive impact is maximized.

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Billed as “one of the most exciting artists of our time”, Ai-Da is the brainchild of Aidan Meller, who claims she is the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid artist, able to draw creatively thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).

Ai-Da is named after Ada Lovelace, the English mathematician and writer often called the world’s first computer coder.

Ai-Da uses her camera “eyes” to capture what is in front of her, which an internal computer translates into coordinates of the image to be plotted on paper. She ran currently hold only hard tools like pencils, not brushes. Her paint works are printed onto canvas with a human painting it over. Her works of art include abstract images and pencil sketches of historical figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Alan Turing.

Ai-Da can move, allowing what Meller calls “performance art”. He hopes that she will eventually be able to intuitively communicate and describe her own artwork. For the moment she is given voice by a human helper.

Art work created by Ai-Da for her first exhibition has already sold for over 1 million.

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Researchers from Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore, in a study carried out in Pakke Tiger Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh noted that hornbills, one among the large-sized frugivores (fruit-eaters), are the most effective seed dispersers.

“They were found to swallow and disperse most of the fruits they handled. They also removed maximum number of fruits – and therefore seeds – in every visit to a fruiting tree,” explains Dr Rohit Naniwadekar, author of the study. “They swallow the fruit as a whole causing no damage to the seed. They are known to disperse seeds far away from the parent plant and our previous studies have shown that they can disperse up to 13 kms.”

Sadly, hornbills are also the most threatened because they are hunted for meat, and tribal communities use their feathers for headdresses.

“Seeds that fall under the parent tree face heavy competition, predation by rodents and insects, and fungal infections. So their chances for survival are very low. Plants depend on frugivorous birds to disperse the seeds at favourable sites. And so the decline of frugivores could severely affect the ecosystem,” he added.

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Between October 2011 and November 2017, at least 259 people around the world died taking selfies, according to the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care in India, compared to just 50 people killed by sharks in the same period.

And the death toll is increasing incrementally each year as smartphones become more sophisticated and Selfie-sticks increase the range at which people can snap themselves, prompting them to take bigger risks for the perfect shot.

In October 2018, an Indian couple fell to their deaths trying to take a Selfie a Taft Overlook at Yosemite National Park (U.S). The couple’s Instagram account often showed them in dangerous situations.

While woman take the most selfies, young men, who are more prone to taking risks, make up three quarters of “selfecides”. Most deaths are caused by drowning, being hit by vehicles, falling, posing with loaded weapons or wild animals or while driving.

India, with a population of more than 1.3 billion and 800 million cell phones, had the highest number of deaths (159 so far) partly because the country has a high number of people younger than 30, and because selfies in India are especially trendy.

The study concluded that ‘no Selfie zones’ should be declared across tourist areas, especially water bodies, mountain peaks and tall buildings to decrease the incidence of Selfie-related deaths.

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The Indian Institute of technology (IIT) Indore has developed a prototype robot resembling a jellyfish to document marine life at close range. Conventional motor-based bio-inspired robots are noisy, limiting their applicability for marine life monitoring as they disturb marine species.

IIT Indore’s Mechatronics and Instrumentation Laboratory has developed a shape memory alloy (SMA) polymer-based soft robotic jellyfish for noiseless marine life monitoring. The continuous heating and cooling of the SMA wire-based polymer structure is responsible for expansion and contraction of its body with tentacles which generate thrust to make the 250 gm robot move in the water. A combination of soft and smart materials allows it to mimic complex motions like real underwater living creatures.

These robots can be used to study the functioning of certain underwater species that are highly conscious of artificial cameras or understanding the behaviour of coral reefs.

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 Around 70 hatchlings of the rare Black Softshell and Indian Softshell turtles bred in the ponds of two temples in Assam were recently released in the Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary. The hatchlings from the temple ponds were nurtured at a conservation facility at the Assam State Zoo in Guwahati.

The “wild restocking” of the two turtle species was done under a joint programme of the management committees of Ugra Tara Temple in Guwahati and Hayagriva Madhava Temple in Hajo, the Assam Forest Department and the NGOs, Turtle Survival Alliance and Help Earth.

“This wild restocking programme is important for sustaining turtles in the Brahmaputra river system, especially the Black Softshell (Nilssonia nigricans) that is considered extinct in the wild,” said Help Earth.

Assam is the most species-rich state in India in terms of turtle diversity. It is home to 20 species of freshwater turtles and tortoises out of 29 species found in India. But 80% of these species are threatened with extinction.

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Canadian Space Company Thoth Technology Inc. has been granted a patent to build the world’s first-ever space elevator – 20 times the height of the world’s tallest building Burj Khalifa – that will also have a tower assisting spacecraft to land and take off. It will help save enormous amounts of fuel and money that go into launching rockets into orbit and will also be used for wind-energy generation and communications.

The company will build a freestanding tower reaching 20 km above the planet’s surface. “Astronauts would ascend 20 km by an electric elevator. From the top of the tower, space planes will launch in a single stage to orbit, returning to the top of the tower for refueling and reflight”, says its inventor Dr Brendan Quine.

The design uses inflatable sections and flywheels to provide dynamic stability and seeks to get around the complication of geostationary orbit by limiting its height to just 20 km instead of the full 100 km, considered the end of our atmosphere and the beginning of space.

The space elevator tower may also be used to deliver equipment personnel to at least one platform or pod above the surface of the Earth for scientific research, communications and tourism.

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Ants self-medicate when sick, say Finnish researchers. Researchers from University of Helsinki, Finland, did a series of experiments on the black ant Formica fusca and found that when the ants get infected by a local fungus, they seek out and eat a certain type of food.

The sick ants eat hydrogen peroxide to fight the fungus. Hydrogen peroxide is an antiseptic and is also used for bleaching. It releases free oxygen that kills off fungus. Ants find it in damaged plants, other insects and cadavers. The scientists found that taking the medicine increased the changes of infected ants surviving by 20 per cent. The fungal disease is lethal to these ants.

Hydrogen peroxide containing food was avoided by healthy ants and eaten only by infected ones, the researchers found. If healthy ants are given hydrogen peroxide it damages their health. So it was definitely a choice being made by the ants. Also, when the scientists increased the quantity of hydrogen peroxide available for consumption, the ants consumed less of it. This implied that the ants were consuming, a certain dosage of the ‘medicine’.

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Scientists searching through the treetops in Panama and Peru have discovered a previously unknown species of spider that glides its way to safety after a fall. And it can change direction in mid-air. The daredevil arachnids steer themselves through the air with movements of their outstretched forelegs. The species, belonging to the genus Selenops, is the only one ever found that has this ability. They’re nocturnal hunters that hide in crevices or under bark. The largest species are about three inches wide, but less than a sixteenth of an inch thick. Selenops have evolved to live in the treetops where there are fewer predators. Gliding helps them move from tree to tree without venturing down to the dangerous forest floor. When the spiders began to fall, they take just a tiny fraction of a second to flip themselves right side up and point their heads towards a tree trunk. The study of this kind of behaviour may help engineers design robots in the future that can remain upright during a fall.

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On an average, mobile phones today are replaced every two years, but the lithium-ion batteries inside them are still good for around five years of use. Researchers from Kyung Hee University in Seoul have discovered they’ve still got enough power left – more than enough to store power for LED solar lamps. That’s a big deal in remote regions and developing countries that have to rely on kerosene lamps for lighting, which release dangerous, toxic fumes, provide inconsistent light, and cause burns and start fires.

Lead researcher Boucar Diouf used a single lithium-ion battery from a mobile phone to run a 1 Watt solar lamp for just over three hours. With a 0.5 Watt bulb, the system lasted six hours. He took it further and built a 12-volt system out of three batteries, a 5 Watt bulb, and a solar panel. That provided enough power to light a room five hours a day for three years, without needing any maintenance. Once the battery dies, the user can just swap it for a new one.

Diouf estimates that if every family swapped five hours of candle use daily for a solar lamp system, it could save more than 32,658 tonnes of CO2 per day globally.

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MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well…when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.”

When we complete a tiny task (sending an email, answering a text message, posting a tweet), we are hit with a dose of dopamine, the reward hormone. This encourages us to keep switching between mini-tasks that give us instant gratification, creating a feedback loop that makes us feel like we’re accomplishing a lot, when we’re really not doing much at all (or at least nothing requiring much critical thinking).

Multitasking makes it more difficult to organize thoughts and filter out irrelevant information, and reduces the efficiency and quality of our work. It has also been found to increase production of cortisol, the stress hormone, and leaves us feeling mentally exhausted.

Some studies have shown that even opportunity to multitask, e.g., knowledge of an unread email in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points! Texting is worse, demanding even more immediacy than email.

MRI scans on the brains of individuals who spent time on multiple devices at once (texting while watching TV, etc.) reveal that those who multitask more had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, the area responsible for empathy and emotional control.

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Mecysmaucheniidae spiders are tiny – the smallest has a body length of less than 0.08 inches – yet they are formidable super-fast predators. Native to New Zealand and South America, these “trap-jaw” spiders are the fastest-known arachnids so far. Compared with other spiders, their jaws, called chelicerae, are more elongated and manoeuvrable, while their frontal region, the carapace, almost appears necklike. The spiders keep their jaws open while hunting, snapping them closed when they encounter prey. The fastest could snap their jaws shut in 0.12 milliseconds; the smaller the species, the faster its jaw-snapping capabilities. It could be that the quickest spiders evolved their lightning-fast attack so that they could target speedier prey.

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Floating on a man-made lake over a collapsed coal mine, the power station in Anhui province can produce 40 megawatts of energy. Built by Sun grow Power Supply, the power plant will produce enough energy to power 15,000 homes.

Anhui province is a coal-rich region, and the plant is located on a lake that was once the site of intensive mining. But why build solar plants on top of lakes and reservoirs? Building on bodies of water, especially man-made lakes that are not ecologically sensitive, helps protect agricultural land and terrestrial ecosystems from being developed for energy use. The water also cools the electronics in the solar panels, helping them to work more efficiently.

China also boasts of the world’s largest farm – the Longyangxia Dam Solar Park hosting 4 million solar panels that produced 850 megawatts of energy. This will soon be eclipsed by a project in the Ningxia autonomous region, which will have 6 million solar panels and produce 2 gigawatts of power.

China is the leading nation in solar power, having produced 66.2 gigawatts of electricity last year. The country will invest $361 billion in renewable power by 2020, and by 2022 could produce 320 gigawatts of wind and solar power and 340 gigawatts of hydropower. Currently, renewable are responsible for 11 per cent of China’s energy and may reach 20 per cent by 2030.

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When you’re an easy target for any number of predators the ability to turn yourself into a snake is a handy one. The snake mimic caterpillar (Hameroplanes triptolemus) is also to do just that. What threatened it pulls in its legs and head and expands the front part of its body to take on the appearance of a serpent. The brown head of this ‘snake’ is actually the underside of the caterpillar. If the “deadly” costume isn’t enough to deter a predator, the caterpillar might also strike to enhance the effect.

Hemeroplanes belongs to the Sphingidae family, found in many parts of South America, Africa and Central America. Upon closer inspection, however, one will see that this ‘snake’ is abnormally short in length; and while its topside looks pretty non-descript, the Hemeroplanes caterpillar has the ability to put on a snake disguise at the moment it feels threatened.

Many animals have conspicuous eye-like spots on their body. In most animals these ‘eyespots’ are thought to intimidate predators from attacking or deflect the predator strikes away from vulnerable body parts. That ‘eyespots’ could help prey by resembling the eyes of a predator’s own enemies is thought to be particularly true for butterfly and moth caterpillars. Caterpillars with eyespots are often cited to be snake mimics that startle attacking birds which mistake them for dangerous snakes. 

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Scientists at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai, have developed two anti-cancer medicines from the fruit extract of the Rampatri plant, which may help destroy tumors and receive cells damaged by radiation. The Rampatri plant, used as a spice in foods, belongs to the Myristicaceae family and is found in western coastal region of India.

BARC Radio Modifier (BRM) protects normal tissues while cancerous cells are destroyed during radiotherapy while BARC Radio Protector (BRP) will help reverse the effect of radiations if a ‘nuclear accident’ takes place.

The scientists tested the medicine on mice and found that they may help in treating lung cancer and neuroblastoma, a rare cancer found in children. In neuroblastoma, cancer cells grow in nerve cells of adrenal glands, neck, chest and spinal cord.

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New research suggests that blind people’s brains may be able to adapt regions usually used for sight to help solve math problems.

“Across all humans, numerical thinking is supported by similar areas in the brain,” says Shipra Kanjlia, a graduate student in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. We are taught to solve math problems from an early age using visuals. Does this brain usage change for people who have never “seen the number of people at a party or the number of flowers in a field?”

Kanjlia asked 17 people born blind and 19 sighted people wearing blindfolds to solve math problems while monitored by MRI. When they worked out the solutions, the standard parts of the brain lit up with activity. But in the blind-since-birth participants, another region lit up: part of the visual cortex. The harder the blind volunteers thought about the algebra problems, the stronger the visual cortex shone. The same region remained dark for sighted participants, even though blindfolded. It appeared that the brains of blind participants had repurposed the unused region to assist in number processing.

Previously, researchers found that the visual cortex can be rewired to handle other sensory input, such as hearing and touch. The ability to do algebra, however, suggests that brain can adjust the visual cortex to handle more tasks.

So are people who are born blind better at math? No, but the findings indicate that the brain is very good at resource management in attending to higher functions.

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Researchers from Japan’s Okayama University of Science and the Mongolian Academy of Science came across a massive footprint that may have been left behind by a dinosaur in the Gobi Desert. The fossil is more than 4 feet long with imprints of a titanosaur’s claws. The long-necked herbivores stretched nearly 100 feet from tip to tail and stood almost 70 feet tall. Because of their enormous size, they walked on large stump-like legs that lacked toes, which might break under their weight. The fossil footprint was created between 70 and 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.

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Ever wonder what the computer-generated Transformer robots in the Transformer movies would look like in real life? A Turkish company has the answer with a fully functional Transformer prototype. Letvision unveiled a prototype called Letrons built from a BMW 3 Series coupe.

In a video, an operator uses a remote control to drive the Letrons vehicle before initiating its transformation. As the BMW slowly unfolds, a robot is revealed and stands tall. The robot can move its head and arms, but the walking functionality has not yet been developed.

There’s no information as yet on how much the Letrons could cost or when it will be available for purchase.

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The panda’s distinctive black-and-white fur makes it one of the most recognizable animals on the planet. But why does it have this unique colouring? Panda patterns serve as a combination of communication and camouflage, say biologists.

The white parts of the giant panda (ailuropoda melanoleuca) help it hide in the snow, while black arms and legs help it hide in the shadows.

It’s possible that the panda’s colouration is a result of its restricted diet. Because pandas get little nutrition and calories from eating bamboo, they can’t store enough fat to hibernate during the winter. So they must stay active year-round, wandering long distances and across different habitats – from snowy mountains to tropical forests – to find more bamboo. As the giant panda is unable to moult sufficiently rapidly to match each background, it has evolved a compromise white and black fur.

The bear’s black ears may help express aggression as a warning to predators. And its dark eye patches may help pandas recognize each other.

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Geologists propose that lying beneath New Zealand is a long-hidden continent called Zealandia.

A continuous expanse of continental crust covering 4.9 million sq/kms, Zealandia is bigger than the Indian subcontinent, but it would be the smallest of the world’s continents. Unlike the others, around 94 per cent of Zealandia hides beneath the ocean. Only New Zealand, New Caledonia and a few small islands are visible above the sea, Zealandia rises about 9800 feet above the surrounding ocean crust. “If it wasn’t for the ocean level, long ago we’d have recognized Zealandia for what it was – a continent,”says geologist Nick Mortimer.

Zealandia rises about 9800 feet above the surrounding ocean crust.”If it wasn’t for the ocean level, long ago we’d have recognized Zealandia for what it was – a continent.” says geologist Nick Mortimer.

Zealandia probably began as part of the south-eastern edge of the super continent Gondwana before it began breaking off around 100 million years ago. This break-up distorted Zealandia, ultimately lowering it below sea level.

Zealandia faces a battle for continent status as there is no scientific body that formally recognizes continents. Recognizing it as a continent would help scientists piece together ancient super continents, and help in the study of how geologic forces reshape landmasses over time.

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A Single gram of poison from Bruno’s casque-headed frog (Aparasphenodon brunoi) is enough to kill 80 humans. The frogs deliver the toxins into the bloodstream of the predator using bony spines that grow out of their skulls which are rooted in glands that secrete the toxic mucous. The frogs live in holes on trees, closing the hole with their heads to maintain humidity inside and reduce water loss from the body. The top of their heads is similar to the barks of trees, making it difficult for a predator to see them. But in case the disguise is identified, it’s impossible for the predator to grab the frog by the head to pull it out of the hole.

Venomous animals have toxins associated with delivery mechanisms that can introduce the toxins into another animal.

Although most amphibian species produce or sequester noxious or toxic secretions in the glands of the skin to use as anti predator mechanisms, they have been considered poisonous rather than venomous because delivery mechanisms are absent.

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Created by the Institute ofAdvance Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) the world’s first 3D printed pedestrian bridge is 12 metres long and 1.75 metres wide, and spans a body of water in Castilla-La Mancha Park in Alcobendas, Madrid, Spain. The bridge is made up of eight parts, each made of concrete powder micro-reinforced with thermoplastic polypropylene. “This is an evolutionary technique which involves depositing layers of material one sheet on another. Instead of using ink like a normal printer, we were depositing layers of material one sheet on another. Instead of using ink like a normal printer, we were depositing construction material, “said the IAAC team.

The institute stated in a press release that the parametric design allowed for the optimal distribution of the material and minimized the amount of waste by recycling the raw material during production. The design also allowed for maximum structural performance. The material is used only where it is needed, with complete freedom in terms of form, maintaining its porosity thanks to the application of generative algorithms and challenging the traditional techniques of construction.

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No man-made object has survived on Venus for more than 127 minutes. A Soviet spacecraft called Venera 13 lasted for 127 minutes when it arrived on the planet: it was eventually crushed by the enormous heat and pressure of the planet. Venus’ 470 degree Celsius temperature, sulphuric acid atmosphere, and overwhelming air pressure (90 times greater than our home planet’s) have left scientists with the challenge to develop technology to withstand such a harsh environment.

After a four-month journey to Venus, the spacecraft descended through the planet’s atmosphere, plunging through the clouds toward the surface. Venera 13 then popped a parachute and rode it all the way down.

Venera 13 touched down safely on March 1, 1982, in the southern hemisphere of Venus, on an area that the Lunar and Planetary Institute describes as “a typical expanse of Venusians’ plains.” The broad area around the landing site is known to contain lava flows and small dome volcanoes, which may indicate an active surface.

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The Naica mine in Chihuahua, Mexico, yields zinc, lead, and silver – and giant gypsum crystals, some reaching more than 30 feet long, that have made the Cueva de los Cristales or Cave of Crystals famous.

Recently, NASA researchers found microbes that thrive on iron, sulphur, and other chemicals, trapped in fluid pockets inside the massive crystals. Analysis suggests that the microbes may have been tucked away in these tiny time capsules for 10,000 to 50,000 years and may have been dormant for some or all of that time. But they “remained viable and were able to be regrown”. The microbes that ended up growing were genetically distant from any known living microbes.

The microbes could represent some of the toughest extremophiles on the planet – dwelling at depths 100 to 400 metres below Earth’s surface and enduring temperature of 45 degree to 65 degree Celsius. Studies like these show that some microbes are hardy creatures, willing to turn just about any habitat into a home.

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Indian long pepper may soon be used as a potential cancer treatment drug, according to a new study. It contains a chemical that could stop the body from producing an enzyme that is commonly found in tumors in large number, according to a study in Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Long pepper’s medicinal properties date back thousands of years. Its benefits were even cited by Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician known as the father of medicine. Its cancer-fighting secret lies in a chemical called Piperlongumine (PL), which has shown activity against many cancers including prostate, breast, lung, colon, lymphoma, leukemia, primary brain tumors and gastric cancer.

Using x-ray crystallography, researchers were able to create molecular structures that show how the chemical is transformed after being ingested. PL converts to , an active drug that silences a gene called GSTPI. The GSTPI gene produces a detoxification enzyme that is often overly abundant in tumors.

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Marne biologists working on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Okeanos Explorer spotted this beautiful deep-sea jellyfish at Utu Seamount in the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa. Looking like a flying saucer with tentacles, rhopalonematid trachymedusa is primarily found in the deep ocean, and is identifiable by its umbrella-like appearance. The translucent creature’s reproductive organs can be seen in bright yellow, and its digestive system appears in red. The creature’s two unique set of tentacles – one facing up and one facing down – likely help it to catch prey.

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A new spider species discovered by three Mumbai researchers in the Kans forest area of Karnataka has been named after a popular wizard in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series.

Eriovixia gryffindori, ,measuring barely 7 mm in length, has been named after the wizard Godric Gryffindor, one of the four founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, mainly because it resembles the magical sorting hat worn by the wizard. The spider’s shape allowed it to resemble a dried leaf and protect itself from predators.

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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) recently launched an unmanned cargo ship bound for the International Space Station (ISS). Along for the ride was the vessel Kounotori 6, which is embedded with a 2300-foot electrodynamic tether (EDT) meant to swat space junk out of orbit.

“To preserve the outer space environment for future generations, it is necessary to remove existing large pieces of space debris,” according to JAXA.

Uses fishnet plaiting technology developed by local fishnet manufacturer Nitto Seimo, the length of the cord is currently about 2,300 feet, but eventually must extend to between 16,400 and 32,800 feet long, “to show down the targeted space junk.”

The idea is that one end of the cord will be attached to debris; the electricity generated by the tether as it swings through Earth’s magnetic field is expected to have a slowing effect on the space junk, which should pull it into a lower and lower orbit. Eventually, the debris will enter Earth’s atmosphere, burning up long before it crashes on land or into the sea.

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An underwater robot has captured a rare glimpse beneath the Antarctic sea ice, revealing a colourful world filled with coconut-shaped sponges, dandelion-like worms, pink algae and spidery starfish.

The Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) recorded footage on a camera attached to a Remotely Operated Vehicle sent down through a small hole drilled in the ice.

“When you think of the Antarctic coastal marine environment, iconic species such as penguins, seals and whales usually steal the show,” says AAD biologist Gleen Johnstone. “This footage reveals a habitat that is productive, colourful dynamic and full of a wide variety of biodiversity, including sponge, sea cucumbers and sea stars.”

These species live in water that is -1.5 degree Celsius year round and covered in nearly 5 feet of sea ice for ten months of the year.

“Occasionally an iceberg may move around and wipe out an unlucky community, but mostly the sea ice provides protection from the storms that rage above, making it a relatively stable environment in which biodiversity can flourish,” he added.

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Snakebots, modular robots that look like snakes, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, can twist in many directions and move – slithering, swimming – like their namesake animal.

Built by roboticist Howie Choset, a typical snake robot consist of metal containers linked together, each with a motor and electronic parts inside.

The robots have another special feature: they can manoeuvre into tight spaces, a feat that could help save lives. For example, robotic snakes could help find people trapped in collapsed buildings after earthquakes. With a camera-equipped snakebot, rescue workers could search for people in the rubble from a safe distance.

Snakebots also show promise in surgeries, acting as surgical tools that could be navigated through a small incision, moving around corners and behind organs. This could minimize physical trauma, speed up a patient’s recovery and leave minimal scarring. A company called Medrobotics in Boston is now adapting the technology for surgeries.

Choset is exploring the possibility of sending snakebots into archaeological sites that are too small or dangerous to enter. A robot equipped with a camera could show scientists what is inside and perhaps even retrieve artefacts.

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Dragonfly may be only several centimetres long, but with their oversized jaws and rows of fang-like teeth, they can trap and swallow sizable prey. How these small terrors manage to open their mouths so wide has puzzled scientists, until now. In most fish, the skull is fused to the backbone, limiting their gape. But a barbelled dragonfish can open its jaw up to 120 degrees thanks to a soft tissue joint that connects the fish’s head and spine.

Studies of specimens of barbelled dragonfish, show a flexible rod called a notochord, covered by special connective tissue that bridged their vertebrae and skulls. When the mouths are opened, the connective tissues stretched out. The joint provide just enough room for dragonfish to swallow whole crustaceans and lanternfish almost as long as they are.

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Tiny zircon crystals coughed up by volcanic eruptions on the island of Mauritius are around 2.5-3 billion years old. That’s a billions of years older than the island itself; Mauritius that nestled between Madagascar and India before the two landmasses split apart around 84 million years ago.

Comparing the crystals’ ages with those of nearby landmasses, researchers retraced Mauritia’s fate. Volcanic eruptions and shifting tectonic plates fragmented Mauritia and the land, including the zircon crystals, was recycled into the rising plume of magma that fuelled the eruptions that eventually built Mauritius.

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The amount of manmade goods around today is 30 trillion metric tonnes. That’s about 50 kilogrammes for every square metre of Earth’s surface. Researchers refer to this tsunami of stuff as the ‘technosphere’. The term is a way of helping people recognizes the magnitude and pervasive influence of humans on the planet. In Earth’s biological ecosystems, animal and plant waste are generally reused by other organisms in an efficient cycle of life. Much of the material in the technosphere, by contrast, ends up in landfills where it often doesn’t decay or get reused.

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The Botanical Survey of India (BSI) says that India is home to 11.5% of all flora in the world. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, since 1750, more than double the numbers of plants have disappeared from the wild than birds, mammals and amphibians combined.

Eighteen species of plants (4 non-flowering and 14 flowering) are extinct. Notable among them – Lastreopsis wattii, a fern in Manipur discovered in 1882, three species from the genus Ophiorrhiza discovered from peninsular India, and Corypha taliera Roxb, a palm species discovered in the Bengal region.

The cheetah (Acionyx jubatus) and the Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensisi) are considered extinct in India. The pink-headed duck (Rhodonessa caryophyllaceai) is feared extinct since 1950 and the Himalayan quail (Ophrysia supercililios) was last reported in 1876. The Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) says that the four animals can be found in other parts of the world. India has about 6.49% of all the fauna species in the world.

“Competition, predation, natural selection, and human induced factors like hunting, habitat degradation” are some of the reasons that have led to these extinctions.

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Researchers have discovered Dracaena cambodiana, a dragon tree species, in the Dongka Sarpo area of West Karbi Anglong, Assam, adding to India’s botanical wealth a plant whose sap turns bright red after coming in contact with air. This is the first time that a dragon tree species has been reported from India.

Dracaena cambodiana is an important medicinal and ornamental tree. Several antifungal and antibacterial compounds, antioxidants, flavonoids, etc. have been extracted from various parts of the plant. The bright red resin has also been used since ancient times as varnish, incense and dye.

The population size of the dragon tree species in Assam was estimated to be fewer than 50 mature individuals. Dracaena seeds are usually dispersed by birds. But due to the large fruit size, only a few species of birds are able to swallow the fruits, thus limiting the scope of its natural conservation. Forest officers are working hard to propagate it; Dracaena saplings are currently growing in nurseries in Sonitpur, Guwahati, Dhemaji and Jorhat.

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Scientists from the University of California, San Diego, have created a robotic soft contact lens that lets you zoom in by blinking twice.

The lens mimics the natural electric signals in the human eyeball that are active even when the eye itself is closed. Researchers measured the electrical potential of the eye – called the “electro-oculographic signal” – made lenses that would respond to that activity.

The lens is made from polymers that expand when electric current is applied. It’s controlled using five electrodes surrounding the eye that act like human muscles. A person blinking twice in succession causes the lens to change its focal length, allowing it to zoom in and out just like users do on their phones. Because the lenses depend on electrical signals, they should function even if a person is blind. This will prove useful in creating visual prostheses.

A lead researcher said: “Even if your eye cannot see anything, many people still can move their eyeball and generate this electro-oculographic signal.”

In the future, this lens can also be used for adjustable glasses and remotely-operated robotics.

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The number of trees planted in 12 hours in Madhya Pradesh is 66 million. More than 1.5 million people helped plant the 66,750,000 tree saplings which featured over 20 different species. In total, 24 districts of the Narmada river basin were chosen for the planting, to increase the likelihood of survival for the trees. The goal was to raise awareness and help India achieve its environmental objectives. As part of the Paris Agreement, India pledged to increase forest cover to 95 million hectares by 2030. Kerala has planted more than 10 million trees in a single day, and Maharashtra will plant 40 million trees this year in a reforestation campaign.

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The long term impact of smoking, from heart disease to a range of cancers, is well known. But according to research funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, the damage begins just moments after the first cigarette is smoked; chemicals which cause cancer from rapidly after smoking.

Researchers looked at the level of chemicals linked with cancer, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), in 12 patients after smoking. A PAH in cigarettes are modified by the body and turned into another chemical which damages DNA and has been linked with cancer. This process only took between 15 and 30 minutes.

Scientists involved in the study described the results as a stark warning to people considering smoking. Anti-smoking charity Ash (Action on Smoking and Health) said: “The chilling thing about this research is that it shows just how early a single cigarette. The process starts early but it is never too late to quit and the sooner you quit the sooner you start to reduce the harm.”

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               Cameras work by focusing light in order to produce an image on a light-sensitive surface. Some cameras work by forming the image on light-sensitive film. Sometimes film uses dyes that change colour when exposed to light, as happens with film used to make coloured slides or prints. Earlier film or glass plates used a silver compound as the light-sensitive material. To produce a photographic print the image is projected onto the surface of light-sensitive paper. It is treated with chemicals to make the print visible and prevent further changes when exposed to light.

               Digital cameras are a recent development. They convert the image they receive into electrical signals that are stored. These signals can then be read by a computer and used to produce a picture on screen, which can then be printed out.

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               Printing is the process by which many copies of words and pictures can be reproduced on paper or other materials. Simple wood blocks with carved letters covered with ink were used to print until around 1440, when Johannes Gutenberg developed movable type (a separate piece of metal type for each character). A machine pressed the inked type against paper.

               Most modern printing is carried out by offset printing, or lithography. Images are placed on metal printing plates by a photographic process, and a greasy ink is applied that sticks to the areas where the image will be. The inked image is then transferred to a rubber roller and applied onto paper. Some of the fastest newspaper presses can print at a speed of 900 m of paper per minute.

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               Calendars have been used for thousands of years. The early ones were usually based on the phases of the Moon and the movement of the Sun. We still depend largely on the natural movements of the Earth, Moon and Sun to divide up time. The calendar we use today is based on the Julian calendar, which, was introduced by the Romans in 46 BC. It had 365 days, and the Romans had not yet discovered the need for leap years. By 1582 the Julian calendar was ten days out, and Pope Gregory decreed that ten days would have to go missing from that year. This caused rioting because people felt that ten days of their lives had been stolen.