(Current Affairs) Science & Technology, Defence, Environment | February: 2017

Science & Technology, Defense, Environment

Leap second added to the Indian clock

  • A ‘leap second’ was added to the Indian clock at 5:29.59 hours on Sunday to synchronise with the Earth’s rotational clock.
  • As the atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) here struck 23:59:59 last night, it was programmed to add an extra second to 2017 to compensate for a slowdown in the Earth’s rotation.
  • Adding a second barely has an impact on the daily life, but it does matter in the fields of satellite navigation, astronomy and communication.
  • The Earth and rotation around its own axis is not regular, as sometimes it speeds up and sometimes it slows down due to various factors, including earthquakes and moon’s gravitational forces.
  • As a result, astronomical time (UT1) gradually falls out of sync with atomic time (UTC), and, as and when the difference between UTC and UT1 approaches 0.9 seconds, a leap second is added to UTC through atomic clocks worldwide.
  • Adding the leap second to the Indian clock is done by the NPL under the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
  • Atomic clocks are so precise that the margin of error in its functioning is just of a second in 100 million years.

Agni-IV successfully launched

  • New Year 2017 began on a happy note for the Strategic Forces Command (SFC) and the DRDO with the flight-testing of India’s long- range, strategic ballistic missile, Agni-IV, turning out to be a “grand success”.
  • The SFC, which is entrusted with the launching of nuclear weapon delivery systems, fired the missile around 12 noon from a road- mobile launcher positioned on the Abdul Kalam Island, of Damra village on the Odisha coast.
  • The two-stage, surface-to-surface Agni-IV can carry a nuclear warhead weighing one tonne over a distance of more than 4,000 km. But on Monday, the SFC fired it for a range of about 3,100 km only.
  • Agni-IV had been tested twice earlier for ranges between 3,000 and 3,500 km instead of its full range of more than 4,000 km. The DRDO conceived, designed and developed the Agni-IV.
  • The latest victory, coming in the wake of the spectacular success of the Agni-V mission on December 26, 2016, confirmed India’s nuclear deterrence capability for, both the missiles can cover the entire area on the other side of the border.
  • Agni-V can carry a nuclear warhead weighing 1.5 tonnes over a distance of 5,000 km and plus.
  • Agni-IV has already been deployed by the Army. It is 20 metres long and weighs 17 tonnes. Solid propellants power its two stages. It had been flight-tested five times earlier — in 2011, 2012, twice in 2014 and in 2015.

World's tallest solar tower in Israel

  • With Israel traditionally running its economy on fossil fuels, renewable energy has long been hobbled by bureaucracy and a lack of incentives.
  • But the country is starting to make an effort, setting a goal of generating 10 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, up from the current 2.5 per cent.
  • The Ashalim project, deep in the Negev desert, is made up of three plots, with a fourth planned for the future, each with a different solar technology. Together, the fields will be Israel’s largest renewable energy project when completed by 2018.
  • They are set to generate some 310 megawatts of power, about 1.6 per cent of the country’s energy needs enough for about 130,000 households, or roughly 5 per cent of Israel’s population, according to Israel’s Electricity Authority.
  • Solar towers use a method differing from the more common photovoltaic solar panels, which convert sunlight directly into electricity.
  • Instead, towers use a solar-thermal method — Thousands of mirrors focus the sun’s rays onto the tower, heating a boiler that creates steam to spin a turbine and generate electricity.
  • Encircling the Ashalim tower are 50,000 mirrors, known as heliostats, in a shimmering blanket of glass over the desert.

India’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope found black hole

  • Astronomers, using data from India’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), have discovered a supermassive black hole and the collision of giant galaxy clusters about two billion light years from Earth.
  • The two phenomenon have combined to create a stupendous cosmic particle accelerator.
  • By combining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, GMRT in Pune and other telescopes, researchers found what happens when matter ejected by a giant black hole is swept up in the merger of two enormous galaxy clusters.
  • This cosmic combination is found in a pair of colliding galaxy clusters called Abell 3411 and Abell 3412 located about two billion light years from Earth.
  • The two clusters are both very massive, each weighing about a quadrillion — or a million billion — times the mass of the Sun.
  • The comet-shaped appearance of the X-rays detected by Chandra is produced by hot gas from one cluster ploughing through the hot gas of the other cluster.
  • First, at least one spinning, supermassive black hole in one of the galaxy clusters produced a rotating, tightly—wound magnetic funnel.
  • The powerful electromagnetic fields associated with this structure have accelerated some of the inflowing gas away from the vicinity of the black hole in the form of an energetic, high-speed jet.

A solar-panel powered coach, the first of its kind in Jan Shatabdi

  • A solar-panel powered coach, the first of its kind in Jan Shatabdi in Southern Railway, was flagged off.
  • The 4.8 kW solar PV panels have been mounted on a specially designed metallic structure to withstand wind velocity, vibration and shock of the trains.
  • The solar panels will help the Railways in saving about 1,700 litres of diesel per annum per coach.
  • The Railways will have to replace the existing conventional lights in the coach into LED lights before going ahead with the green initiative.
  • The successful performance of this coach will later pave way for having a full train with solar-panel powered coaches.
  • The Railways will take into consideration all the safety aspects before plunging into this project in a full-fledged manner.

NASA will send two spacecraft to explore asteroids

  • NASA will send two spacecraft to explore asteroids in the hopes of revealing new information about the solar system’s origins.
  • Psyche will journey to what could be the metallic heart of a failed planet, and Lucy will investigate the Trojan asteroids near Jupiter.
  • They were shortlisted by NASA in September 2015 and have survived a final cut that eliminated two proposed missions to Venus — which has not seen a U.S. planetary mission since Magellan launched in 1989.
  • Scheduled to launch in October 2021 and arrive at its first major target in 2027, Lucy will explore six of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, which are trapped in orbits ahead of and behind the giant planet.
  • Named after the famous hominid fossil, the spacecraft will investigate the origins of the giant planets by looking at the fragments left over from their formation.
  • Psyche is slated to launch in October 2023 and should reach its 210-kilometer-wide target in 2030. It will explore what could be the exposed core of an early, now-vanished planet.

China is setting up the world’s highest altitude gravitational wave telescopes

  • China is setting up the world’s highest altitude gravitational wave telescopes in a Tibet prefecture close to the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with India, which may reveal more about the Big Bang theory.
  • Construction has started for the first telescope, code-named Ngari No. 1, 30 km south of Shiquanhe Town in Ngari Prefecture. Parts of Nagri is last Tibetan prefecture at China’s border with India.
  • The telescope, located 5,250 meters above sea level, will detect and gather precise data on primordial gravitational waves in the Northern Hemisphere.
  • It is expected to be operational by 2021, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. The budget for the two-phase Ngari gravitational wave observatory is an estimated 130 million yuan ($18.8 million).
  • Ngari, with its high altitude, clear sky and minimal human activity is said to be one of the world’s best spots to detect tiny twists in cosmic light.
  • Gravitational waves were first proposed by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity 100 years ago, but it wasn’t until 2016 that scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory announced proof of the waves’ existence.
  • China commissioned the world’s largest radio telescope in a mountainous region of southwest China’s Guizhou Province to search for more strange objects space, gain better understand the origin of the universe.
  • The installation of the telescope’s main structure — a 4,450-panel reflector as large as 30 football pitches was built at unique valley in Guizhou Province.

Diagnosing retinal diseases

  • Early diagnosis of certain eye diseases and studying the early progression of the diseases has now become possible, thanks to the work carried out by a team of researchers from three institutes.
  • Early diagnosis of eye diseases and quantification of disease progression has been a challenge.
  • For instance, the human retina has 10 layers and subtle morphological changes in these layers do not lead to a change in thickness that can be detected by OCT imaging.
  • But OCT images do contain data on subtle refractive index variations and the researchers have successfully teased out this information to help diagnose eye diseases early and study the early progression of disease.
  • Using the software, the researchers are able to find a peak at the junction between two layers from the refractive index data extracted from the OCT images.
  • The thickness of a layer can be calculated by measuring the distance between two successive peaks. When the thickness of a layer becomes more as the disease progresses the distance between two successive peaks increases.
  • In the case of the retina, different layers are affected by different diseases. For instance, the photoreceptor layer is affected in the case of diabetic macular edema, while the top layer (retinal nerve fibre layer) is affected in the case of glaucoma.

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