News on Science, Technology and Research in India
In a first, space transportation firm Bellatrix Aerospace has tested the country’s first privately built Hall Thruster, a highly efficient electric propulsion system for satellites. Tests were carried out at the sophisticated spacecraft propulsion research laboratory Bellatrix has set up at the Indian Institute of Science’s (IISc) Society for Innovation and Development (SID).
Now, researchers from IIT Guwahati claim to have developed smart window materials that can control the amount of light and heat permeating through, when a voltage is passed thought it. They say this can help develop efficient automatic climate control systems in buildings.
Harikrishnan Aravindakshan, Prof. Amar Kakad, and Prof. Bharati Kakad from the Indian Institute of Geomagnetism (IIG), an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology, have developed thetheory. Prof. Peter Yoon of the University of Maryland, USA also joined the Indian scientists.
Didymocarpus is a genus belonging to the plant family Gesneriaceae (commonly known as ‘African Violets’) and its members are distributed from Western Himalayas to Sumatra. Most of these species are narrow endemics and require specialized habitats to survive, thus acting as an indicator of pristine habitats. There are 106 currently known species of this genus, of which 26 are present in Northeastern states of India.
A scientist has estimated the three-dimensional distribution of molecular and atomic hydrogen in a nearby galaxy which can help lead to clues to the star formation processes and the evolution of the galaxy.
India is home to 4,371 species of deep-sea fauna, including 1,032 species under the kingdom Protista and 3,339 species under the kingdom Animalia, a recent publication by the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) has revealed.
Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park will get African Cheetahs as part of India’s first inter-country big cat relocation project, a senior state forest department official said on Thursday after the MP government received a confirmation from the Union ministry of environment, forest and climate change. Five male cheetahs and three females will be donated by Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) of South Africa, said Alok Kumar, principal chief conservator of forest (Wildlife).
In our present day, most of us are spending more than 90% of our time indoors- most of it in front of TV, computer and mobile screens, even before restrictions due to COVID-19 were imposed. Such a lifestyle is likely to increase the risk of attentional problems, especially in children. On the other hand, being outdoors with nature, or even a brief interaction with nature through tending to indoor plants can help us to overcome distractions and build focus in a big way. It is revealed in a new study conducted by the researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi.
In the present pandemic scenario when most of the official meetings and work is being done online, this standalone solution enables a user (organizer) to detect if another person’s video is manipulated or spoofed during a video conferencing. That means the technique will find out if some imposter is attending a Webinar or virtual meeting on behalf of one of your colleagues by morphing his image with his own.
Indian Astronomers have developed a new method based on Machine Learning that can identify cluster stars– assembly of stars physically related through common origin, with much greater certainty. The method can be used on clusters of all ages, distances, and densities. The method has been used to identify hundreds of additional stars for six different clusters up to 18000 light-years away and uncover peculiar stars.
