(Current Affairs) Science & Technology, Defence, Environment | March: 2016

Science & Technology, Defense, Environment

Antartic a may be a place for largest canyon in the world

  • The world’s largest canyon — over 1,000 km long and in places as much as one km deep, — may lie under the Antarctic ice sheet, a team of scientists, including Indian researchers, has revealed.
  • The canyon system is made up of a chain of winding and linear features buried under several kilometres of ice in one of the least unexplored regions of the Earth’s land surface — Princess Elizabeth Land (PEL) in East Antarctica.
  • Very few measurements of the ice thickness have been carried out in this particular area of the Antarctic, which has led to scientists dubbing it one of Antarctica’s two “Poles of Ignorance.”

Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) contribute 8 Mln for anti-microbial resistance

  • The U.S. government’s Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), launched two years ago to contain the spread of new and emergent infections following the Ebola outbreak, has pumped in a whopping $ 8 million to map the rising anti-microbial resistance in India and build capacities to tackle it better.

  • The rising anti-microbial resistance is a serious health concern in India, and also figured in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in September last year.

  • While Indian hospitals acknowledge a rise in drug-resistant infections, there is no centralised documentation of the infection rates, with hospitals shying away from reporting this data fearing loss of business.

  • This project is aiming, rather ambitiously, at the creation of a national network where hospitals will pool in their data on infection rates, which would then be in the public domain for patients to make an informed choice when they have to select a hospital to undergo treatment.

  • Titled ‘Capacity Building and strengthening of hospital infection control to detect and prevent anti-microbial resistance in India’, the project will be jointly executed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the India office of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

  • The project will start with surveillance, followed by data analysis. Systems will then be put in place to first check infections and eventually bring down resistance rates.

Crab Pulsar

  • Scientists have discovered the most energetic light ever detected in the universe from the centre of a supernova known as ‘Crab pulsar’ which is situated 6,500 light years away from Earth.
  • The Crab pulsar is the corpse left over when the star that created the Crab nebula exploded as a supernova.
  • It has a mass of 1.5 times the mass of the Sun, concentrated in about a 10 km diameter object, rotating 30 times per second.
  • It is surrounded by a region of intense magnetic field 10 thousand billion times stronger than that of the Sun.
  • The pulses were found by researchers working with the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (Magic) observatory in the Canary Islands, Spain.
  • The Crab pulsar, created in a supernova explosion that occurred in 1054 A.D., is located at the centre of a magnetised nebula visible in the Taurus constellation.
  • The Crab is the most powerful pulsar in our galaxy and it is one of only a few pulsars detected across all wavelengths, from radio up to gamma rays.
  • In its rotating magnetic field, electrons and positrons are accelerated up to relativistic energies and emit radiation that arrives to our telescopes in the form of pulses every 33 millisecond, each time the neutron star rotates and meets our telescopic sight.

Snowflake corals posing threat to marine ecology near Kanyakumari

  • Coloniesof snowflake coral (Carijoariisei), an invasive species recently documented of the coast of Thiruvananthapuram and Kanyakumari, could pose a serious threat to the marine ecology of the region, according to scientists.

  • Scuba divers working for Friends of Marine Life (FML), a local NGO, have recorded the presence of several colonies of the fast-growing alien species amid barnacle clusters on the rocky reef of the coast of Kovalam in Thiruvananthapuram and Enayam, Kanyakumari.

  • The documentation was done as part of a research project harnessing the traditional knowledge of the fishermen community to assess the marine biodiversity of the region.
  • The snowflake coral is known to inhabit reefs and underwater structures such as shipwrecks and piers, attaching itself to metal, concrete and even plastic.
  • It is considered an invasive species because of its capacity todominate space and crowd out other marine organisms.

Smart-phone based 3-D printer will become a reality

  • Researchers in Taiwan have developed a next generation smartphone-based 3D printer that may cost just over $100.
  • The printer employs a photopolymer that uses visible light emitted from a smartphone to cure the resin instead of the traditional method of using ultraviolet (UV) light or lasers.
  • The machine starts by placing a coated vat of the speciality resin on top of a smartphone, which cures the resin onto a metal print-bed as the photopolymer material is released.
  • The machine uses a z-axis platform to shape the design, and the phone to cure the material as it builds the object in layers, ‘Digital Trends’ reported.
  • This custom app makes it easy to load and print 3D models because the printer and the print management tool are housed within the same device.
  • Prof. Jeng hopes to add a scanning feature in the future that would allow users to scan a 3D object by inserting the phone into the 3D printer and printing up the model with minimal effort.

Click Here for Science & Technology, Defense, Environment Full Issue

Click Here to Join Online Coaching for IAS (Pre.) Exam

<< Go Back To Science & Technology, Defence, Environment Main Page

Current Affairs
Science and Technology
Civil Services EXAM
Civil Services Preliminary
Civil Services Mains
UPSC
संघ लोक सेवा आयोग - UPSC