Sunday, August 2, 2015

SCIENCE OF THE MONTH: AUGUST 2015

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

8 August 2015: The world's first ever ant map showing the distribution of the tiny industrious creature around the globe was launched today by the University of Hong Kong in a bid to shed more light on the insect world. The colourful interactive online map which took four years to complete, displays the geographic locations of nearly 15,000 types of ant with the Australian state of Queensland home to the highest number of native species at more than 1,400.  'Antmaps', a joint project between HKU and the Okinawa Institute of Sciences and Technology, also differentiates ants which are native to a region and species which were imported. Work on the map is ongoing with new species of ants discovered frequently. Ants have an astonishing ability to mix collective muscle for heavy lifting. Link: http://antmaps.org

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.Nano-crystals are tiny nanometre-sized particles of the drug that act faster and more efficiently than the conventional ones. The US and Ireland are the only other countries where the technology is available. NIPER has already got an Indian patent for the technology. NIPER has developed a technology for generation of nano crystalline solid dispersions called NanoCrySP. NIPER has entered into licensing agreement for development and commercialisation, retaining the ownership of the patent, with Windlas Biotech limited, an Indian pharmaceutical company. Link:http://abstracts.aaps.org

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

31 August 2015: As many as nine out of 10 of the world's seabirds likely have pieces of plastic in their guts. Previously, scientists figured about 29 percent of seabirds had swallowed plastic. An Australian team of scientists who have studied birds and marine debris for decades used computer models to update those figures, calculating that far more seabirds are affected. The problem with plastics in the ocean is increasing as the world makes more of the stuff. In the next 11 years there will be as much plastic as had been since industrial plastic production began in the 1950s. The biggest problem strangely isn't where there's the most garbage, such as the infamous garbage patch in the central north Pacific Ocean. The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Link:http://www.pnas.org

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