Category Science & Technology

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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