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| Tribute to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam who passed away on 27th July 2015 |
1 August 2015: Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, who spent almost two decades in Kerala as a scientist with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), will be honoured by the state government by naming its proposed technological university after him. Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy proposed the idea in the assembly today, considering the contributions of Kalam to the south Indian state. He said that Education Minister PK Abdu Rabb will introduce an official amendment to the Kerala Technological University Bill 2015 to name it after the former Indian president.The exact name of the university will be decided only after checking the rules and regulations. Kalam, the Missile Man of India, passed away when he collapsed during a lecture at IIM Shillong on 27th July, 2015. Link: http://ktu.edu.in
2 August 2015: The British government ratified the International Convention on Total Ban of Landmines or the Ottawa Convention. Landmines kill or maim 2,000 people worldwide in a month. The government decided earlier this month to bow to intense public pressure through a Landmines Act in time for the first anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, who championed the campaign against the landmines. However, a significant loophole remain. British troops working with NATO would still be helping others lay mines. The United States has said it will not sign the Ottawa Convention, which prohibits use of land mines, until 2006. The US and Turkey are the only NATO countries which have not signed the convention. Link: http://www.icbl.org
3 August 2015: Eleven years ago today, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft was launched aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and after more than 6 1/2 years in transit it became the first spacecraft to orbit the innermost planet in our solar system. The spacecraft is no more; on April 30 it impacted the surface of Mercury, as expected. In a video released today, 'Making Mercury Whole', MESSENGER team members recount some highlights of the mission, originally planned to orbit Mercury for only one year, but ultimately orbiting the planet for more than four years. This has been an extraordinary year for planetary science, with discoveries from the innermost planet to Pluto and the outer reaches of the solar system, from comets to asteroids. Link: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu
4 August 2015: Scientists at the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun have decided to use drone technology as a tool to control the increasing cases of man-animal conflict in and around forest areas. Drones can be particularly useful in detecting movement of elephants which often create havoc in villages as they look around for food while crossing forests. In the first phase, drones would fly in the forests of Panna, Jim Corbett National Park, Kaziranga, Sundarbans and the Sathyamangalam forest of Tamil Nadu. In each site, 2-3 drones would be deployed which can fly at an average speed of 40 km per hour, at a height of around 100 metres. The design and features of the drones would vary according to the geography of the forest. Link: https://www.pinterest.com
5 August 2015: With two more Mars orbiters
sent into space last year, including India's MOM probe, traffic has picked up
around the red planet, so much so that NASA has bolstered its traffic
monitoring process to avoid spacecraft collisions. The US space agency
has beefed up a process of traffic monitoring, communication and manoeuvrings
planning to ensure that Mars orbiters do not approach each other too closely.
Last year's addition of two new spacecraft orbiting Mars brought the census of
active Mars orbiters to five, the most ever. NASA's Mars Atmosphere and
Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) and India's
Mars Orbiter Mission joined the 2003 Mars Express from ESA (the European Space
Agency) and two from Nasa: the 2001 Mars Odyssey and the 2006 Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Link: http://mars.nasa.gov
6 August 2015: Australian researchers have have developed a new technique to measure how much of Gold existed in the world's oceans over the past 3.5 billion years. Geologists from the University of Tasmania's ARC Centre of Excellence in Ore Deposits (CODES) have developed a 'time curve series' to show the variation of gold concentration in the ocean over that enormous length of time. At one stage, three billion years ago, the ancient ocean carried 2,000 times more gold than the world's biggest gold bullion depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in the US. Over the next 400 million years, gold remained high in the oceans and many other important deposits formed, including the Golden Mile in Western Australia. The research was published in the Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Link: http://www.utas.edu.au
7 August 2015: Treating cattle for
infertility had never been economic, time-saving and effective before. After
years of field trials and research, veterinarians here have developed a
modified technique from the prevalent hormonal therapy, which they call 'Udaipur protocol' for
treating infertility in cows and buffaloes. The modified technique tested among
cattle in many villages and 'gaushalas' has proved to be cheaper and faster
with as high as 60% conception rate. Encouraged by the achievement, a proposal
for establishing a Center
of Excellence here has
been moved by the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK) Badgaon for treating, training and
research on bovine infertility.In Rajasthan, more than about 50% breedable
cattle and buffalo are infertile, non-productive and non-pregnant. Link: http://udaipurtimes.com
9 August 2015: Japan
marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima today. Tens of thousands of
attendants stood for a minute of silence at 8:30 a.m. at the ceremony in Hiroshima's peace park
near the epicenter of the 1945 attack, marking the moment of the atomic blast.
Then dozens of doves were released as a symbol of peace. The American bomb,
'Little Boy', the first one used at war, killed 140,000 people, and a second
bomb 'Fat Man', dropped over Nagasaki three days
later, killed another 70,000, prompting Japan's surrender in World War II.
'Little Boy' dropped from the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, destroyed 90 percent of
the city and killed an estimated 140,000 people, including those who succumbed
to injuries and radiation sickness in the ensuing weeks. Link:
http://www.nhk.or.jp
10 August 2015: A global satellite for earth
observation and disaster risk reduction, GlobalSat for DRR, proposed under the
UN framework is to be dedicated to A.P.J. Abdul Kalam as a tribute to the
vision of the celebrated rocket scientist and former Indian president who died
27 July, 2015. This has been stated by Milind Pimprikar, Chairman of CANEUS
(CANada-EUrope-US-ASia) Organization on Space Technologies for Societal
Applications headquartered in Montreal,
Canada. Launch
of this satellite was mooted at the third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk
Reduction held at Sendai in Japan this
March. The concept was initiated by CANEUS with UN agencies including the UN
Office for Outer Space Affairs, the UN International Strategy for Disaster
Reduction, UNDP and the World Bank. Link: http://www.unoosa.org
11 August 2015: A Brazilian scientist has made a first-hand discovery of the first frog capable of injecting a toxic venom into potential predators. Carlos Jared, a researcher at Instituto Butantan in Sao Paolo, collected the poisonous frog from a forest in Goytacazes National Reserve in southeastern Brazil. The frog is named Greening's frog with the scientific name: Corythomantis greeningi. It turns out that the venom produced by Greening's frog is twice as powerful as the venom of a deadly snake called the Brazilian Pit-viper. Jared's team soon also discovered that a related spiny-headed frog called Bruno's casque-headed frog, known to science as Aparasphenodon brunoi, can inject a venom that is 25 times as powerful as pitviper venom. The research is published in Current Biology. Link: http://www.cell.com
12 August 2015: A great sky show awaits celestial lovers as the annual Perseids Meteor Shower will light the sky tonight as it hits its peak, promising a spectacular show for the next two nights. The 'most famous' of the meteor showers, Perseids is an annual phenomenon that occurs between mid-July and early August when Earth passes through the remains of comet 'Swift-Tuttle', the greatest activity occurring in the second week of August. Every 133 years the huge comet swings through the inner solar system and ejects a trail of dust and gravel along its orbit. When Earth passes through the debris, specks of comet-stuff hit the atmosphere at 140,000 mph and disintegrate in flashes of light. The thin crescent new moon will pose no problems for viewing the bright Perseids this year. Link: https://www.nasa.go
13 August 2015: The Compressed Natural Gas (CNG)-run buses are harmful for humans as they emit 'nanocarbon' particles which can cause cancer, according to a study conducted by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Though the study was conducted on a very limited sample size in Delhi, CSIR took the findings seriously owing to the health hazard it poses to humans and alerted the central government for further follow up. According to to researchers from Alberta University, the study can change the perception that natural gas is a clean fuel as it does not emit any visible smoke, which is in contrast to smoke emitted by diesel-run vehicles and perceived as harmful for humans. The nanocarbon particles coming out of from CNG can enter lungs and are are carcinogenic. Link: http://www.mece.ualberta.ca
14 August 2015: Scientists are tapping into
photographs taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to
reliably measure the amount of light pollution worldwide. Light pollution is
excessive or obtrusive artificial (usually outdoor) light. Too much light
pollution washes out starlight in the night sky, interferes with astronomical
research, and disrupts ecosystems. The new study by scientists from the
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, and the Cegep de Sherbrooke in
Canada, not only includes the well-known signatures of cities and streets, but
also the effects of faint indirectly scattered light, which up to now had not
been measured quantitatively. The findings were presented at the 2015 IAU
General Assembly in Honolulu,
Hawaii. Link: http://astronomy2015.org
15 August 2015: NASA's Kepler mission has
discovered a new planet orbiting two stars and located within its host stars' 'habitable zone', the area around the stars in which life could
potentially exist.The planet, known as Kepler-453b, is the 10th such 'circum-binary' planet discovered by the Kepler mission.The planet's radius
is 6.2 times that of Earth, or about 60 per cent larger than Neptune, the
astronomers calculated. Any inhabitants of the system would see two suns in
their sky, much like the view from the planet Tatooine in the movie Star
Wars, orbiting each other every 27 days. The larger star is about 94
percent the size of our sun, the smaller star only 20 percent the size of our
sun and much cooler. The discovery of the new star appeared in the
Astrophysical Journal. Link:http://iopscience.iop.org
16 August 2015: NASA engineers are developing
drones that can fly to areas which are inaccessible to rovers - such as the
shaded region of a crater on Mars, asteroids and moon to gather samples. The
flying robotic vehicles similar to quad-copters but designed for the thin
atmosphere of Mars and the airless voids of asteroids and the Moon would use a
lander as a base to replenish batteries and propellants between flights. The
machines being built fall under the name Extreme Access Flyers, and their
designers intend to create vehicles that can travel into the shaded regions of
a crater and pull out small amounts of soil to see whether it holds the
water-ice promised by readings from orbiting spacecraft. The drone-team is now
programming the flyer to recognize terrain and landmarks. Link:
https://www.nasa.gov
17 August 2015: Hawai'i, the tiny islands in the midst of the Pacific are home to a great diversity of flora and fauna. But it has been called the 'Extinction Capital of the World' because of the decimation of many of its living species. A team of researchers, including scientists from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Howard University in Washington DC, and the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, recently published the first rigorous assessment of extinction of invertebrates in Hawai'i. In a companion study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addressed invertebrate extinction globally. Since the 1980s, it is concluded that the earth is in the midst of a massive bio-extinction crisis caused by human activities. Link: http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk
18 August 2015: ESA's Rosetta space craft which is orbiting a comet rode with it to its closest approach to the Sun, called perihelion, according to the European Space Agency. The exact moment of perihelion occurred at 02:03 GMT, that is, about 7:30 AM India time, this morning when the comet came within 186 million km of the sun. In the year that has passed since Rosetta arrived, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has travelled some 750 million kilometres along its orbit towards the sun, the increasing solar radiation heating up the nucleus and causing its frozen ices to escape as gas and stream out into space at an ever greater rate. Rosetta's measurements suggest the comet is spewing up to 300 kg of water vapour, roughly the equivalent of two bathtubs, every second. Link: http://rosetta.esa.int
19 August 2015: As part of its ambitious Space
Launch System (SLS), the US
space agency has successfully tested an engine that will help propel astronauts
on future deep-space missions, including Mars. The 535-second test of RS-25
rocket engine at NASA's Stennis Space Center
near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, was aimed to collect engine performance data,
the US
space agency said in a statement. An initial 77-tonne SLS configuration will
use four RS-25 engines for the core stage, along with two five-segment solid rocket
boosters, providing more lift to orbit than any current launch vehicle. One
final test of this RS-25 developmental engine is left and testing of flight
engines will begin later this fall. The core stage for the first SLS and Orion
integrated flight will also be tested at Stennis. Link: http://www.nasa.gov
20 August 2015: The discovery of a new ring
galaxy which arose from a galaxy collision, the closest ever to the earth, was
made public by the University of Hong Kong (HKU). The newly formed ring galaxy
was found by a team of astronomers led by Professor Quentin Parker at the HKU
and Professor Albert Zijlstra at the University
of Manchester, during a
survey of the southern Milky Way. The ring is 30 million light years away. The
results were published in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society. Shock-waves from the collision compress reservoirs of gas in each
galaxy and trigger the formation of new stars. This creates a spectacular ring
of intense emission. Galaxies grow through collisions but it is extremely rare
to see a bull's-eye collision in progress. Link: http://www.hku.hk
21 August 2015: The World Food Program (WFP)
is closely monitoring the El Nino weather pattern and preparing for the possible
impacts it will have on food production. El Nino is a climactic phenomenon that
results from a warming of the ocean west of Peru. It triggers atmospheric
changes that can mean very hot weather in Asia, rain in South America and
cooler summer in North America. Over the next
12 months, El Nino could potentially affect the food security of a large number
of already vulnerable people who are dependent on agriculture and livestock for
their livelihoods in Central America, most of Sub- Saharan Africa and South East Asia. According to the UN, people living in
the Dry Corridor, from Guatemala
to Nicaragua,
are enduring the second year of drought. Link: http://www.wfp.org
22 August 2015: NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and
Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft has confirmed for the first time
the existence of neon gas in moon's atmosphere. Neon gas is commonly used in
electric signs on Earth because of its intense glow. Scientists have speculated
on the presence of neon in the lunar atmosphere for decades. There is not
enough neon to make the moon visibly glow because the moon's atmosphere is
extremely tenuous, about 100 trillion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere at
sea level. A dense atmosphere like Earth's is relatively rare in our solar
system because an object has to be sufficiently massive to have gravity to hold
it. Since the moon's atmosphere is thin, rocket and spaccecraft exhaust could
easily change its composition. Link: http://www.nasa.gov
23 August 2015: Global warming caused by human
activities has halted 1,800 years of steady cooling trend in the oceans of the
world, shows new research. Today, the Earth is warming about 20 times faster
than it cooled during the past 1,800 years. During the latter half of this
cooling period, the trend was most likely driven by large and frequent volcanic
eruptions. The coolest temperatures occurred during the Little Ice Age- a
period that spanned the 16th through 18th centuries and was known for cooler
average temperatures over land, the study found. The scientists combined 57
previously published marine surface temperature reconstructions that cover all
of the world's oceans, from near-polar to tropical regions. The study was
published in the journal Nature Geoscience. Link:http://www.nature.com
24
August 2015: Indian researchers and scientists, for the first time, will have access
to the data from Mars collected by the five scientific instruments on ISRO's Mangalyaan (Mars Orbiter Mission)
spacecraft. Until now, all research on Mars depended on data from foreign
agencies, especially NASA, which has the most extensive collection of
information. The Department of Space and ISRO has announced an opportunity to
carry out scientific research using data from Mangalyaan. Researchers can get an understanding of the Martian
atmospheric processes, including dust storms and cloud formation and surface
geology from the data. The data will be made available to the national
scientific community by inviting research proposals, which can be submitted by students
or scientists. Link:http://www.isro.gov.in
25
August 2015: National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER),
Mohali has put India in the select club of countries that manufacture raw
material for generating nano-crystal based medicines.
26
August 2015: A software by Intel that lets physicist Stephen Hawking communicate via
a computer has been published online by the company in the hopes that it will
be used by researchers developing new interfaces for sufferers of diseases like
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The programme interprets visual signals and
translates them into words, which are spoken by a machine. Intel originally
developed the technology specially for Hawking but it has been used by other
sufferers of Motor Neurone Disease (MND). Hawking, 73, suffers from a
slow-progressing form of ALS. Anyone can now download and experiment with the
Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT). The programme and full source code is published
on the code-sharing website GitHub. Link:https://github.com
27
August 2015: The sudden death four years ago of Knut, the celebrity Berlin Zoo polar
bear had shocked and posed a riddle for veterinarians anxious to keep other
animals from suffering the same fate. Researchers have now found the cause of
Knut's untimely demise and the discovery may help raise awareness of a
condition that affects humans, possibly saving lives. The bear died in March
2011 after suffering an apparent seizure and collapsing into his enclosure's
pool. His short life came as a surprise since polar bears can live for up to 20
years. A necropsy quickly established that Knut suffered from encephalitis, a
swelling of the brain. Knut's case showed similarities to some of his human
patients suffering from anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.
Link:http://www.nature.com
28
August 2015: After its historic July 14 flyby of the Pluto system that revealed
interesting findings, NASA has selected the next potential next destination for
its New Horizons mission, a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69
that orbits nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto. This remote KBO was one of two
identified as potential destinations and the one recommended to NASA by the New
Horizons team. New Horizons will perform a series of four maneuvers in late
October and early November to set its course toward 2014 MU69, nicknamed ‘PT1’
(Potential Target 1) which it expects to reach on January 1, 2019. Although NASA
has selected 2014 MU69 as the target, the agency will conduct a detailed
assessment before officially approving the mission extension.
Link:https://www.nasa.gov
29
August 2015: Six recruits of American astronauts have began the Hawaii Space
Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission. They will live in the
dome, located on barren land in Hawaii, for the next 12 months. Previous
HI-SEAS missions have lasted four months and eight months respectively. The NASA-funded
project will allow the organization to plan for a human mission to the Red
Planet, which is expected to take between one and three years.The team will
have to survive without fresh air and fresh food. Their diet will include
powdered cheese and canned tuna and they will only have a small sleeping cot
and desk inside their room. The isolation experiment is aimed at better
understanding the social and psychological effects of travelling in space for
great lengths of time. Link:http://hi-seas.org
30
August 2015: Use of antibiotics may be linked to higher risk of diabetes, according
to a latest study published in an international journal. Doctors and experts
said the findings are highly relevant to India because of huge prevalence of
diabetes as well as irrational use of such medicines. Findings of the study,
conducted at the Center for Diabetes Research at University of Copenhagen,
showed prior exposure to antibiotics was associated with a 53% increased risk
of developing Type2 diabetes. Though the study was conducted based on data from
three national Danish registries, the findings are significant because
clinically, these add a new argument to the more judicious use of antibiotics. The
study is published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
Link:http://metabol.ku.dk
