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A search for a migratory stork in the Upper Anaicut near Mukkombu (on the road leading to the Butterfly Park) turned up another surprise visitor instead for the city’s nature lovers recently — the smooth-coated otter, a freshwater fish-loving animal that hasn’t been seen along the Cauvery river stretch for many years.
“We thought they were crows at first, but when we looked more closely, we realised it was a group of eight smooth-coated otters rolling around on the sandbank,” said A. Relton, associate professor and head, Department of Social Work, Bishop Heber College, who was part of the team led by the institution’s Nature Club on Sunday.
When spotted, the otters were rubbing themselves with ‘spraint’ or their own faeces, which is a peculiar part of the animals’ grooming behaviour and a means of olfactory communication, Mr. Relton told The Hindu.
Listed as ‘Vulnerable’ on the IUCN Red List, the animals commonly occur in shallow and placid waters such as wetlands and seasonal swamps, rivers, lakes, and rice paddies. They are active during night and day, and are strong swimmers.
Known as neer naai (aquatic dogs) in Tamil, the animal plays an important role in controlling the population of fish in rivers, said Mr. Relton. “Even though humans are fishing commercially, otters do this naturally. In fact the human impact of overfishing and depletion of water resources has caused the disappearance of smooth-coated otters from the freshwater bodies in the country,” he said. The animals are also illegally hunted for their pelt.
In the Cauvery delta, the drying out of riverbeds in recent years has driven away these animals. Significantly, the countrywide population of the otters remains undocumented.
Video clips shared by the Nature Club showed the otters swimming in the river in V-formation, led by a dominant male. “We identified four young and three females in the group. The swimming method is meant to narrow down the fishing area and prevent fish from escaping,” he said.
Besides the smooth-coated otter ( Lutra perspicillata), India is home to two more of the 13 species found worldwide. These are Eurasian Otter (L utra lutra) and Small-clawed otter (A onyx cinereus).
Mr. Relton said that Nature Club would soon be setting out for another expedition to look out for smooth-coated otters. “More people should be made aware of this animal in our ecosystem,” he said.
“What we do is rocket science,” proclaims a tee-shirt. Created by Indic Inspirations for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the tee -shirt is a part of its Vyom collection. Most of the products, which include jigsaw puzzles based on Mangalyaan, rocket collectible matchboxes, mySpace PSLV notebooks and fridge magnets, come with a storyline.
“This collection is about ISRO’s achievements in space science and technology. We had to create a line that would interest a child and adults alike,” says Yogesh Dandekar, architect and chief product designer of Indic Inspirations. “India is doing a lot of work in space technology and people should know about this.” He adds that minute details on the models build up curiosity.
When Indic Inspirations approached ISRO with a pitch to tell its story in a fresh style, ISRO reverted with a voluminous 10 GB of data. This included a catalogue filled with drawings of ISRO rockets, pictures taken by Cartosat, IRS satellites, by Mangalayaan and Chandrayaan, as well as videos of their launches. A line of 50 products was created from this.
A third generation artisanal engineering company from Moradabad, known for die casting, was roped in to manufacture medallions; Channapatna artisans, in house designers and a “passionate IIT Chennai engineer” worked to create the rocket shaped pencil box-to denote the PSLVs four stages- boosters, payload fairing and the satellite. “Channapatna uses lacquerware techniques with natural colours and dyes,” explains social entrepreneur and founder of Indic Inspirations, Sunil Jalihal.
Since 2014, Indic Inspirations has been working with artisans and craftspeople for the Heart For Art Charitable Project that was set up to help India’s artisans connect with consumers. In 2019, it introduced a contemporary language to narrate stories of India using utilitarian products and souvenirs by introducing technology at every level of product design and engineering. In addition to e-commerce they opened a physical store, Phygital, in Pune.
“There are various ways of narrating stories,” says Sunil, adding, “We believe that objects remain on people’s shelves and desks to be touched and felt. Our focus has been on narrating India’s culture and achievements using 65 indigenous crafts and artisan clusters who work with wood, metal, grass, pottery, folk painting, masks and such.
The brand began with finding ways to present mythology in a modern context, says Sunil giving an example of using the mythical demon king Ravana’s ten heads as a dart board. “He was a master of the Vedas but his ten heads represent the vices. We shifted the bull’s eye a bit in the dart board we created.”
Medallions, coasters, clocks were created in the product line that told the story of Zero or Shunya. Subsequently the company crafted products around the Indian Preamble, Flag and Constitution. “Our Constitution, besides being a legal document, is also a work of art. It was calligraphed by Prem Behari Narain Raizada, and illustrated by Nandalal Bose and his team. So, we have used original “constitution paper” that was used to frame the original constitution document, to frame the Preamble and such,” says Sunil.
Indic Inspirations also worked with artisans of Pattamadai in Tamil Nadu to revive the dying craft of weaving mats using darbha grass to create chic yoga mats. It helped revive a dying and ancient pottery craft in Kutch and recreated a Bidri work betel-leaf box that is at the Sotheby’s Museum in London.
Harking back to the space collection, Sunil is pleased that they are first registered merchandisers of ISRO and operate with them against a nominal license fee and a set of rules. He says the products have connected well with students, space watchers, astronomers and lay consumers, adding that a board game based on the Mars Mission is soon to be launched.
The natural world is rife with pairs of antagonists. Plants and viruses, insects and pathogens, bacteria and their phages, and so on. In these systems, it is an interesting question to study how the resistance to a pathogen, in the case of the host, and virulence towards the host, in the case of a pathogen, evolve. Towards understanding this better, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali researchers have taken up the system of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) and a bacterial pathogen that affects the fruit fly, sometimes even causing death – Pseudomonas entomophilia – have been co-evolved to study the pathway of evolution taken by the system of antagonists. In this case, they find that being surrounded by enemies actually makes the organism stronger, or fitter, to combat the enemy.
How does one set up a co-evolving system experimentally? A population of flies are infected by the pathogen and the infection is allowed to take its course. Among the infected flies, only those that survive the infection, namely the ones that have the best immune systems to combat the pathogen, are taken to breed the next generation. Similarly, bacteria are collected from the flies that die due to the infection. These are the bacteria that have the virulence sufficiently strong to cause death in the present population. These bacteria are taken to breed and also infect the flies in the next generation. Thus, both the host (fruit fly) and the pathogen (bacteria) are ‘selected’ for having the maximum fitness.
The methodology of the experiment is like this: Four types of populations were bred in the lab. One in which, as described above, the host and pathogen both co-evolved. The second was a population in which only the host was selected from the flies that did not die due to the infection. Every generation, infection was done from a stock of ancestral bacteria which was not evolving. The third and fourth were two types of control populations.
This methodology allowed the researchers to compare the evolution process in hosts that were co-evolved against their pathogen and the hosts that were adapted against a static, non-evolving pathogen. They found that the former category evolved higher survivorship against the co-evolved pathogen than the hosts that was adapted against a non-evolving, static pathogen. Further they also found that the co-evolved hosts showed higher survivorship with respect to ancestral, unevolved pathogens than their counterparts who have been pitted against static pathogens.
From the point of view of the pathogens also a similar improvement in fitness was seen – the co-evolved pathogens develop greater virulence and capacity to cause death than the ancestral, unevolved pathogens. “This evolved virulence of co-evolving pathogens was higher towards both their local hosts (against which they coevolved each generation) and nonlocal hosts,” says Dr. Neetika Ahlawat, from the Department of Biological Sciences at IISER Mohali, who led the research. The work has been published in the journal E cology and Evolution.
The evolution pathways described above then lead to the conclusion that having enemies makes the organism stronger. Just as the host evolves a stronger, more resistant immune system when pitted against a co-evolving pathogen, the pathogen also becomes more virulent when allowed to evolve against a co-evolving host.
The experiment is the first to study co-evolving insect–pathogen pair, that is, Drosophila melanogaster and Pseudomonas entomophilia. Earlier studies have either studied insects evolving against static pathogens or have studied bacteria and virus pairs that are co-evolving. “This is also the first study to compare insect–host evolution to a co-evolving pathogen versus host evolution towards a non-evolving or static pathogen,” says Prof. N.G. Prasad, senior author in the study.
The interactions being very complex, it was hard to predict the outcomes, and there were surprises: The researchers expected the co-evolving pathogens to show specificity towards their local co-evolving hosts as these two antagonists were allowed to co-evolve for several generations in closed association. “However, contrary to our expectations, we observed a rather more general effect of evolved virulence of the co-evolving pathogens,” he clarifies.
When the researchers started, they anticipated major challenges in conducting the study. There were four selection regimes (host–pathogen co-evolution, one-sided host evolution to a static pathogen and two controls) each with four population sets to evolve. “In view of the fly mortality caused due to pathogenic infection, we had to pick a relatively larger fly population size in both the selected populations,” says Dr. Ahlawat.
“In our lab, we manually infect each individual fly using a sterile needle dipped in bacterial solution every single time,” she says. Infecting about 1,000 flies individually for each group in one single day was a major challenge.
Each replicate (group) containing four populations (two selected and two control) were handled on different days. “This means 1,000 fly infections daily for four days. Therefore, we had to infect 4,000 flies each generation, over 20 generations,” says Dr. Ahlawat.
Is a tree in a forest the same as one outside it? The belief that it is, allays the conscience of government-backed afforestation programmes where dense forests are often razed for mines, and multiple saplings are commissioned in alternate locations that are usually outside forest boundaries.
Conservationists have on the other hand pointed out that this isn’t the same because a loss of a section of forest means destroying an ecosystem that can’t be easily substituted for. To account for these losses more minutely, Lucy Hutyra, a bio-geochemist and ecologist at the Boston University, Massachusetts, U.S., has been analysing the terrestrial carbon sink.
This is made up of the billions of square kilometres of forest in the world that are major storehouses of carbon. In net, forests store more carbon dioxide than they release and an estimated 30% of carbon emissions from emitting fossil fuels are absorbed by the forest, making them a terrestrial carbon sink.
Trees absorb carbon dioxide (CO 2), release oxygen by way of photosynthesis, and store carbon in their trunks. When they shed, soil microbes work to decompose the leaves and other organic matter that releases the trapped carbon dioxide. A major prong of countries’ climate change strategy, including India’s, is to increase the terrestrial sink area.
Hutyra, who has been researching the consequences of forest loss, examined if the same species of tree had different patterns of carbon dioxide storage when located at a forest edge or further away.
The textbook assumption was that trees at forest edges release and store carbon at similar rates as forest interiors, but Hutyra and her colleagues report this isn’t true.
In two papers published in the peer-reviewed Global Change Biology, and Nature Communications, Hutyra's team found edge trees grew faster than their country cousins deep in the forest, and that soil in urban areas can hoard more carbon dioxide than previously thought.
Using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Inventory and Analysis program – which monitors tree size, growth, and land use across the country – Hutyra's team looked at more than 48,000 forest plots in the Northeast United States. They found trees on the edges grow nearly twice as fast as interior trees – those roughly 100 feet away from the edge.
"This is likely because the trees on the edge don't have competition with interior forest, so they get more light," says Luca Morreale, a PhD candidate in Hutyra's lab, in a press statement.
In another related study, Hutyra found differences even in the way soil in forests and outside released carbon dioxide. Warmer temperatures at the edge of the forest caused leaves and organic matter to decompose faster, as it forced soil microorganisms to work harder and release more carbon dioxide than their cooler, more shaded peers in the forest interior. But, in urban forests, where the ground was significantly hotter and drier, those soils stopped releasing as much carbon, they note in a press statement from Boston University.
Though these studies were specific to Massachusetts, there are implications for India too. Conservationists have noted that plantations outside forests don't capture carbon efficiently and don't make up for biodiversity losses.
The India State of Forest Report (2021) released in January found that nearly 28% of the forest cover is outside the recorded forest area. About 12% of the forests classified as ‘very dense’ is also outside the recorded areas. Following a trend and noted in previous editions of the forest surveys, the increase in forest cover between 2019 and 2021 was led by growth outside the recorded area and the sharpest increase was in so called ‘open forest’ where any patch over a hectare and having a canopy density more than 10% counts as ‘forest.’ This brings in man-made plantations of cash crops such as tea and coffee plantations and mango orchards and even tree-lined avenues in densely built-up cities were being classified as ‘forest’.
Ecologists M. Madhusudan and T.R. Shankar Raman note: “In one stroke, just between the 1999 and the 2001, this redefinition helped raise India’s forest cover by over 38,000 sq.km.” They highlight research in the Western Ghats that finds plantations deplete groundwater, have higher surface water runoff, poorer soil infiltration, compared to trees in natural forests. They also report that carbon stocks in plantations such as teak and eucalyptus were 30% to 50% lower than in natural evergreen forests and were generally less stable and resilient. The biggest loss, however, was that species dependent on forests—from insects to primates—were ripped apart from their natural habitats and plantations, which were mostly monocultures, rarely had the capacity to support a rich, biodiverse system.
For modern humans, three meals a day may seem to be the ideal formula for being healthy and wise. Yet, evolutionarily speaking, our bodies are adapted to occasional periods of fasting, as a constant supply of food was not always guaranteed. Fasting is certainly a part of our heritage, being prevalent in a range of cultures – from Ekadashi to Karwa Chauth among Hindus; the Yom Kippur for Jews, Paryushana among Jains, Ramzan among Muslims, the Christian period of Lent, and so on. One wonders if widespread prevalence points to health benefits in addition to the discipline of the mind.
In 2016, a study of data from 186 countries in the journal The Lancet revealed that obese people now outnumber underweight individuals. Our lifespans, too, are much longer than they were two generations ago. Together, these trends have added greatly to the disease burden of society, and other than exercise, only fasting and caloric restriction (CR) have consistently been shown to extend a healthy lifespan.
Fasting and CR are not synonymous. CR results from reducing caloric intake by 15% to 40%, without leading to malnutrition. There are several strategies for fasting. In intermittent fasting (IF), you alternate a 24 hour period without any food (or with no more than 25% of your dietary norm) with 24 hours of normal eating. In periodic fasting you fast for one or two days followed by five days of normal diet. In time-restricted feeding (TRF), all daily intake is done within a 4–12 hour window. In an example of a fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) you reduce intake to 30% of your energy requirements for five consecutive days, once every month. In addition, the ratio of fats, proteins and carbohydrates may be altered during reduced intake to favour more fat.
The island of Okinawa in Japan has an exceptional number of healthy centenarians because adults practice Hara Hachi Bu – stopping eating when they are 80% full (CR). Buddhist monks of certain sects eat their last meal at noon (TRF).
These strategies have been examined in a large number of studies on rodents and on humans – we humans often have difficulty in sticking to restricted diets! When properly adhered to, these practices have been shown to prevent obesity, to protect against oxidative stress and hypertension. They also mitigate and postpone the onset of several age-related diseases.
Careful monitoring and expert advice is essential for choosing suitable strategies based on individual circumstances such as age.
We store glucose in the form of glycogen in the liver, and the energy demands of the body are met from this reservoir. One day of fasting leads to a 20% decrease in blood sugar levels and depleted glycogen reserves. The body switches to a metabolic mode where energy is obtained from fat-derived ketone bodies and from glucose outside the liver. Insulin levels are lowered and lipolysis burns away lipid triglycerides in adipocytes.
The metabolic syndrome is a group of risk factors that are predictors of heart disease and diabetes. The work of Satchidanand Panda at the Salk institute has highlighted the benefits of a 10-hour TRF on sufferers, and noted improvements in blood pressure, heart-rate variability and physical endurance (Longo and Panda, Cell Metabolism, 23, 1048–1059 (2016)).
IF has also been shown to cause a remodelling of the gut microbiome. Bacterial diversity goes up, and there is a rise in bacterial species that produce short-chain fatty acids, which are known to thwart inflammation-mediated conditions such as ulcerative colitis.
In the fruit fly, prolonged overnight fasting promotes a recycling process inside cells called autophagy (Latin for self-devouring). This results in a 15%-20% extension in lifespan (Ulgherait, M. et al, Nature, 598, 353–358 (2021)). Autophagy mostly occurs at night and is modulated by the body's circadian clock. Autophagy is essential for the fitness and survival of neurons; errors in this process lead to Parkinson's disease.
A plentiful supply of nutrients represses autophagy and activates pathways that promote the biosynthesis of proteins and thus of rejuvenation (Jouandin et al., Science 375, eabc4203 (2022)). This dynamic control of degradation and rejuvenation suggests that IF, TRF, FMD and periodic fasting may be better for the body than chronic caloric restriction.,
A few small organic molecules – rapamycin, metformin and resveratrol – appear to affect our metabolic pathways in ways that mimic the effects of fasting. Could it turn out that some day we could be able to imbibe carefully tailored pills and eat our cake, but not put on weight ?
(The article was written in collaboration with Sushil Chandani sushilchandani@gmail.com, dbala@lvpei.org)
To say Kangra is enchanting would be trite. The sunlit valley stretches beyond cumulus clouds, flanked by the jagged Dhauladhar range on one side and rolling green hills on the other. Birches, chir pines and deodars sway in the wind.
As our small aircraft starts its descent, we get a glimpse of River Beas flowing below and the expansive Pong dam’s reservoir. But all this beauty is deceptive — the Indian Himalayan Region is facing an as yet unrecognised existential crisis: mountains of solid waste.
Tourism in this region generates some eight million tonnes of waste every year. Added to this is the one million tonnes of annual waste generated by the urban population. By 2025, it is projected that 240 million tourists will visit the hill States every year: it was 100 million in 2018. If the problem of solid waste disposal is not addressed scientifically, the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas will pay a price the country can ill-afford. Given that all our major glacial rivers originate in these mountains, it’s not difficult to envisage the catastrophic implications.
The Himalayan region comprises 10 States, of which Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh bear the biggest brunt. Although the local population density is not very high, these States attract vast numbers of tourists — campers, trekkers, mountaineers, backpackers and pilgrims. And the waste they generate now impacts the ecology crucially.
Unlike the plains, usable land is scarce in the Himalayan region, with habitations either on the ridges of mountains or in valleys such as Kangra and Kullu. While hillocks of garbage can rise in the peripheries of cities on the plains, hill towns have no such space. What is mindlessly thrown out remains on the slopes forever, turning into major polluters of land, water and air.
From Kangra airport, I drive up to the office of Waste Warriors, an NGO based in Dharamshala, which works in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh to educate and train people in solid waste management. Etoshi Chattejee, 33, heads the team. She was a software professional before joining the NGO. Shashank Prabhu, 24, is an electrical engineer from Karnataka and Nidhi Sharma, 29, from Shimla, has a degree in social work. Together, they work with the municipal corporation, district authorities, colleges, schools and households. This committed team organises workshops to train and create awareness, and works in two of the 17 wards in Dharamshala town. It also collects non-biodegradable waste for segregation, processing and recycling.
Documents they hand me have some astonishing information: cigarette butts take 12 years to decompose; plastic bottles 450 years; glass bottles thousands of years; cardboard two months; newspapers one month, juice cartons five years; cans 200-500 years; and polystyrene foam cups — never. My education begins.
Later in the afternoon I head to Rakkar village on the outskirts of Dharamshala. Here, on leased land, is the NGO’s dry waste segregation centre, where some 200 kilos of dry waste is segregated every day. Much of the material is shredded or made into pellets before it’s taken for recycling elsewhere. I see paper, cardboard, cloth , glass, ceramic, metal and plastic. Together, they tell the story of modern living and patterns of consumption.
The municipality has recently allotted the NGO a new site, near a mountain stream, much nearer town, to set up a new material recovery facility for non-biodegradable and recyclable waste processing. Construction is on to set up a large galvanised iron shed. Dharamshala generates 25 tonnes of waste every month. The main waste, the biodegradable kind, is handled by the municipality. Composting, by various means, is the ideal means of disposal. Once done, bio-degradable waste can be used as manure to fertilize the soil. But compost pits need land, and the magnitude of the problem dwarfs the efforts. So the bio-degradable waste is transported to a dumping ground in Sudher village.
This has, in turn, led to protests by Sudher villagers, who are facing the brunt of the pollution. Open dumping is unscientific, especially in the sub-zero Himalayan conditions. Cold prevents decomposition. Since such dumps are open to the elements, they could release harmful gases such as methane and carbon monoxide. When bio-degradable waste mixes with water, it forms leachate, a toxic liquid that permeates groundwater. Open waste also releases toxic chemicals into the soil. Rainfall then carries the leachate to rivers and streams nearby. This is the primary reason of river pollution in the hills rather than industrial activity.
As for air pollution, open burning of waste is a major source besides particulate matter emissions. Pollutants such as dioxins, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, toluene and benzene are released into the atmosphere. Carbon and other light-absorbing impurities darken glacial snow and trigger melting. As for plastic, it needs segregation, processing and recycling, but in actual fact much of the plastic is burnt or dumped. Micro particles are carcinogenic and enter the food chain and cause enduring damage. Plastic also chokes rivulets and streams on the hill sides. The rivers of Himachal Pradesh — Ravi, Beas, Sutlej, Chenab, Yamuna, Ghaggar, Parvati, Devprayag, Baspa, Spiti and Tons — all copiously water the plains, but today, all of them are affected in various degrees.
Tourism has surely brought economic prosperity to the hills, accounting for as much of 7% of Himachal Pradesh’s GDP. This is a conservative estimate because there are many ancillary activities too. Besides, Dharamshala is now firmly on the cricket map of India. The new stadium is spectacular, with the Dhauladhar range as its backdrop and the cupolas of the pavilion silhouetted against its peaks. Some 25,000 spectators can be seated here, and people turn up from Delhi, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh for matches. Restaurants, hotels, resorts and homestays have come up.
But as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has pointed out, all this brings with it waste. A CSIR study finds that 55% of waste generated in the Himalayan region is biodegradable and comes largely from homes and eateries; 21% is inert such as construction material; 9% is paper; 8% is plastic; 4% is glass and ceramic and 3% metal.
In 2016, the Centre issued very progressive new rules for handling solid waste. Single-use plastic is now banned and the ‘polluters to pay’ principle has has the potential to deter polluters. But the key lies in enforcement. As biodegradable waste constitutes the largest chunk, its disposal has to be scientific rather than resorting to open dumping or burning. Himachal Pradesh, according to the CSIR study, has 54 dumpsites but no operational landfill. Scarce land in the hills makes it difficult to create landfills.
I leave Kangra on a day when rain is lashing and fresh snow has fallen on the Dhauladhar. As I wait for the flight to be called, it occurs to me that Dharamshala town, with a population of about 60,000 and legions of visitors, is a microcosm of the problem of waste management in the country. Urban India produces approximately 52 million tonnes of waste each year. It is estimated that by 2047 we will be generating 260 million tonnes annually, requiring 1,400 sq.km. of landfill area.
Here, in the Himalayan region, at least there is the beginning of advocacy, awareness and action. But grave issues continue to loom in Kullu, Parvati, and Lahaul valleys, and in the Great Himalayan National Park, where tourist influx is very high. Even in the remote Kasol in Parvati valley, the ecosystem is under siege.
Himachal Pradesh has the advantage of literacy. People are change-embracing. Government agencies are willing to work with NGOs and experts to tackle waste management issues. Yet, as Etoshi, with her experience on the ground, tells me, entrenched social attitudes to waste and waste removal need to change fast. It is too big a problem to be tackled by waste collectors and street sweepers alone.
Gopinath is a photography and classical music enthusiast; Sharma works with the government in New Delhi.
Intel has announced a modular desktop PC, designed for high-end gaming and content creation tasks, powered by its latest 12th generation processors.
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Intel NUC 12 Extreme, code-named Dragon Canyon, offers two CPU options – a Core i9-12900 and a Core i7-12700 – along with support for full-size 12-inch discrete graphics cards and a full range of input and output ports.
Packed with the latest hardware components in a compact and modular form factor, the PC is engineered to provide high performance that is usually expected from much larger gaming rigs. It offers enthusiast gamers and creators the ability to create their small-form-factor designs.
The most powerful Intel NUC yet, can be configured with up to 64 GB dual-channel DDR4-3200 MHz SODIMMs memory and high storage using up to three PCIe Gen4 M.2 SSDs.
Also Read | Intel launches blockchain chip to tap crypto boom
The PC also features two Thunderbolt 4 ports, six USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, two USB 3.1 headers, two USB 2.0 headers, an HDMI 2.0 port, Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211, Bluetooth 5.2, an SDXC card slot with UHS-II support, three large 92mm fans, as well as a 10Gbps Ethernet port standard; and additional 2.5Gbps Ethernet port on Core i9 processor option.
Additionally, the modular PC features Intel UHD Graphics 770, along with support for PCIe Gen5 x16 graphics cards and backwards compatibility with PCIe Gen4 and Gen3 devices.
The device built with flexibility in mind, can offer high performance with 12th generation i9 processor, featuring eight Performance-cores (P-cores) and eight Efficient-cores (E-cores), 24 threads and up to 5.1 GHz turbo boost max frequency. The other variant comes with 12th generation i7 processor, featuring eight P-cores and four E-cores, 20 threads and up to 4.9 GHz turbo boost max frequency.
The pricing of the Core i7 model will start at $1,150 (about ₹86,500), while that of the Core i9 model will start at $1,450 (about ₹1,09,000), Intel said, adding that the PC will be available starting in the second quarter of this year.
A Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS), a payload on-board Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter, has detected solar proton events which significantly increase the radiation exposure to humans in space, the Indian Space Research Organisation has said.
The instrument on January 18 also recorded coronal mass ejections (CMEs), a powerful stream of ionised material and magnetic fields, which reach the Earth a few days later, leading to geomagnetic storms and lighting up the polar sky with auroras, the ISRO said on Wednesday.
"Such multi-point observations help us understand the propagation and its impact on different planetary systems," it said.
When the sun is active, spectacular eruptions called solar flares occur that sometimes also spew out energetic particles (called solar proton events or SPEs) into interplanetary space.
Most of these are high energy protons that impact space systems and significantly increase radiation exposure to humans in space. They can cause ionisation on large scales in the earth's middle atmosphere, the space agency said.
Many intense solar flares are accompanied by CMEs, a powerful stream of ionised material and magnetic fields, which reach the earth a few days later, leading to geomagnetic storms and lighting up the polar sky with auroras.
Solar flares are classified according to their strength. The smallest ones are A-class, followed by B, C, M and X. Each letter represents a 10-fold increase in energy output. This means that an M class flare is 10 times more intense than C-class flare and 100 times intense than B-class flare, the ISRO said.
Within each letter class there is a finer scale from 1 to 9 - a M2 flare is twice the strength of M1 flare.
“Recently, there were two M-class solar flares. One flare (M5.5) spewed out energetic particles into interplanetary space and the other flare (M1.5) was accompanied by a CME,” the space agency said.
The SPE event was seen by NASA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) orbiting around the Earth. However, the CME event was not detected by GOES.
“Chandrayaan-2 Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS) on-board Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter detected SPE due to an M5.5 class solar flare that occurred on January 20, 2022,” the ISRO said.
“The CLASS instrument also detected a CME event as it passed through the moon due to an M1.5 class solar flare that occurred on January 18,” it added.
The CME travels at a speed of about 1,000 km/s and it takes about two-three days to reach the Earth.
“The signature of this event is missed by the GOES satellite, as the earth's magnetic field provides shielding from such events. However, the event was recorded by Chandrayaan-2,” the ISRO said.
“The CLASS payload on Chandrayaan-2 saw both the SPE and CME events pass by from two intense flares on the Sun,” it added.
Planned to land on the moon's south pole, Chandrayaan-2 was launched on July 22, 2019. However, the lander Vikram hard-landed on September 7, 2019, crashing India's dream to become the first nation to successfully land on the lunar surface in its maiden attempt.
The ISRO had then said the mission achieved 98% success as the orbiter continues to share data with the ground station.
The story so far: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has announced plans to retire and decommission the International Space Station (ISS) by 2031. The U.S. space agency has detailed its goals for the next decade in the International Space Transition Report as it aims to hand over operations to commercial organisations. NASA has listed an elaborate outline of the plan to decommission the space station. Other international partners that operate the ISS are, however, yet to approve it.
The ISS was launched in 1998 as part of joint efforts by the U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe. The space station was assembled over many years, and it operates in low-earth orbit. Since its inception, the ISS has served as a laboratory suspended in space and has aided multiple scientific and technological developments.
The idea of a space station originated in the 1984 State of the Union address by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. “A space station will permit quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, and in metals and lifesaving medicines which could be manufactured only in space. We want our friends to help us meet these challenges and share in their benefits. NASA will invite other countries to participate so we can strengthen peace, build prosperity, and expand freedom for all who share our goals,” he had said.
ISS has consistently maintained human presence for the past 21 years, providing astronauts with sophisticated technologies for scientific research.
The ISS was originally built to operate for 15 years. The space station has already surpassed that checkpoint by being active for 21 years, with plans to continue operations till 2030. However, the limitations on the life-cycle of the station are catching up. The ISS goes through 16 rotations of the earth per day, causing extreme temperature changes on the exterior. The side facing the sun can get heated up to 121°C while the temperature on the opposite, darker side can fall to –157°C, causing intense expansion and contraction of the building material. This orbital thermal cycling, coupled with dynamic loading, affects the longevity of the primary structure of the space station. The technical lifetime is also limited by parts like radiators, modules and truss structures that tend to degrade over time.
NASA is planning to transition operations in low-earth orbit to private players and focus energies on its missions to explore the moon and Mars.
NASA plans to remove the ISS from its orbit around the earth and eventually plunge it into the ocean at a point farthest from human civilisation. The space agency will use the dual method of natural orbit decay and a re-entry manoeuvre to bring an end to the ISS as we know it.
According to the plan, the earth’s natural atmospheric drag will be used in lowering the altitude of the ISS while setting up the de-orbit. The space station operators will then provide the final push to it to lower the structure to the maximum possible height and ensure safe re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, leading it to Point Nemo over the South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area (SPOUA). The exterior of the modules is expected to melt when the debris re-enters the earth’s atmosphere. The exposed internal hardware is also expected to burn or vaporise during the process. It is believed that denser components like the truss sections will survive the re-entry and fall into the SPOUA. Alternative options like disassembly and return to the earth, boost to a higher orbit, and random re-entry were also considered.
The ISS is a huge structure — almost the size of a football field — and it was not designed to be disassembled easily in space. This process would have posed huge logistical and financial challenges. ISS cannot be decommissioned by boosting to a higher orbit because of its large mass and low operational altitude. The station currently operates in low-earth orbit above 400 km in altitude, at a point where it still experiences atmospheric drag and requires re-boosts to continue in its orbit. The station also has a mass of over 4,30,000 kg. Existing propulsion systems do not have the capacity to raise the station’s altitude to a high target and escape low-earth orbit. The random re-entry method was discarded since it carries a huge risk for the human population on the ground.
NASA claims that the debris of the ISS that survives the re-entry will settle on the ocean floor and not cause any substantial long-term impact.
As the ISS plans to end operations in space, new players are already lining up to replace it. In January 2022, China announced that its space station will be ready for operations this year. Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos, has also announced its plans to build Orbital Reef, a commercially developed, owned, and operated space station in low-earth orbit. Blue Origin is working alongside Sierra Space on the project.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing recommendations on social distancing and lockdowns caused a fall of 62.5% in the detection of active leprosy cases between April and September 2020 when compared with the previous year’s corresponding period in four States — Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
In 2019, these States accounted for 35% of the total new leprosy cases reported in the country. They reported 22,000 new cases during April-September 2019, but only 8,270 for the same period in 2020. The latest report by the Leprosy Mission Trust India, “The Pandemic and the People’s Plight’’, says that active case finding activities were suspended in most States since April 2020.
Two other worrying trends emerged. The report highlights that the proportions of multibacillary (MB) leprosy and grade-2 disability (G2D) among the new cases increased by 20% and 12%, respectively, during April-September 2020, compared to the same six-month period in 2019. Moreover, the proportion of both women and children among new cases decreased by 70% compared to the same two quarters in 2019. These figures were shared by the National Leprosy Eradication Programme (NLEP), notes the report.
Other Indian States may have experienced similar outcomes, especially when the second wave put brakes on the Leprosy Case Detection Campaign for the entire second quarter of 2021 (April-June).
The report also has constraints in terms of the sample size it reached out to. “Collectively, we could reach out to around 400 respondents for getting firsthand information on the impact of COVID-19. The in-house survey of patients, residents of leprosy colonies, public health consultants, ASHA workers and students from vocational training centres is restricted to six States and Union Terrotories: Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu,’’ it said.
The report said that people undergoing leprosy treatment need to visit hospitals regularly for their routine medical needs such as blood pressure monitoring, ulcer dressing, medicines (multi drug therapy or MDT blister packs, and steroids), and micro-cellular rubber (MCR) footwear.
The report also states: “With public transport becoming out of bounds because of nationwide lockdown, the scope for getting healthcare and disability management services in institutional setup reduced. Of all the things that COVID-19 pandemic taught us, the most important was, perhaps, the fact that the ‘vulnerable population’ is not a homogenous entity. Their vulnerability is sometimes a complex intersection of different social variables: poverty, disability, stigma, exclusion, etc. Much to our dismay, the pandemic demonstrated how it affects different vulnerable groups differently, with adverse consequences being the constant factor.’’
Observations showing a roughly dough-nut-shaped cloud of cosmic dust and gas shrouding a huge black hole at the heart of a galaxy similar in size to our Milky Way are providing scientists with new clarity about the universe's most energetic objects.
Scientists said on Wednesday that their observations involving the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy Messier 77 and its surrounding cloud lend support to predictions made three decades ago about what are called “active galactic nuclei.”
These are places at the centres of many large galaxies that have tremendous luminosity – sometimes outshining all of a galaxy's billions of stars combined – and produce the universe's most energetic outbursts seen since the Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago. The energy arises from gas violently falling into a supermassive black hole that is surrounded by a cloud of tiny particles of rock and soot along with mostly hydrogen gas.
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects possessing gravitational pulls so powerful even light cannot escape them. Supermassive black holes, which reside at the centre of many galaxies, including our own, are the largest of them.
Messier 77, also called NGC 1068 or the Squid Galaxy, is located 47 million light years – the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km – from the Earth in the constellation Cetus. Its supermassive black hole has a mass roughly 10 million times greater than our sun.
The observations, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, provided strong support for what is called the “unified model” of active galactic nuclei. This model holds that all active galactic nuclei are basically the same but that some appear from the vantage point of Earth to have different properties.
Some look intensely bright because the position of theirring-like cloud does not obscure the gas plummeting into the black hole from our viewing angle. Others look dark because thecloud blocks our view of what is truly happening.
Messier 77's active galactic nucleus is one of the dark ones, but the new observations indicate that it actually possesses the same qualities as the bright ones.
"The dust and gas in these clouds are probably blown out of the atmospheres of stars at a larger distance – hundreds of light years – from the black hole, and are falling in towards the centre under the influence of the black hole gravity," said Violeta Gamez Rosas, an astronomy doctoral student at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the research published in the journal Nature.
"Some clouds spiral in towards the black hole while others are pushed up into a 'fountain' that falls back onto the galaxy. Because of the dust, it is very difficult to see with telescopes what is going on in this region, but it is easier at infrared wavelengths than at normal visible wavelengths because the dust does not absorb infrared light as much," said study co-author Walter Jaffe, a Leiden University astronomy professor.
The Milky Way's supermassive black hole, which has a mass 4 million times greater than the Sun, is currently "fairly quiet," Gamez Rosas said, but previously may have been more active like Messier 77's.
Gamez Rosas expressed satisfaction at studying active galactic nuclei.
"A lot of it is pure fascination with explosions on such gigantic scales, and the challenge of trying to explain them with what we think we know about physics," Gamez Rosas said.
"There is also the challenge of trying to build and operate telescopes to make these images of things so far away," Gamez Rosas added. "And there is the peace of mind that results from the knowledge that there is a large, complex, varied universe that goes its own way whatever we do on Earth."
Moths are vital to pollination in the Himalayan ecosystem of northeast India, reveals a recent study. The study establishes 91 species of moths as potential pollinators of 21 plant families in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh in the northeastern Himalayas.
The results assume significance as a majority of the pollination-related studies are based on diurnal pollinators (bees and butterflies) and the role of nocturnal pollinators have so far received less scientific attention.
The details of the study were recently published in a paper titled “ Settling moths are the vital component of pollination in Himalayan ecosystem of North‑East India, pollen transfer network approach revealed” in Scientific Reports, a publication from the Nature group of journals.
“In the present study about 65% moths (91 species) carried sufficient quantities of pollen grains to be considered as potential pollinators. Teliphasa sp. (Crambidae) and Cuculia sp. (Noctuidae) are found to carry the highest quantity of pollen,” the paper reads.
Navneet Singh, lead author of the study, said that Geometridae (geometer moths) and Erebidae (erebid moths, tiger moths, lichen moths, among others ) turned out to be the most important moth families for pollen transportation in the Himalayan region.
“We also found frequent interaction of moths with Betulaceae, Fabaceae, Rosaceae and Ericaceae . Though the Betulaceae is predominantly a wind-pollinated plant family, some recent studies indicate that wind-pollinated plant families also benefit from enhanced dispersal by insects,” Dr. Singh, who is associated with the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), added
Another interesting outcome of the study is that the moth species Achaea janata (a well-known pest of various economically important plants) was identified as a potential pollinator of three plant families, indicating that moths can provide net benefits as pollinators even when acting as larval herbivores of the same species.
Scientists of the ZSI said that the study assumes significance as it revealed a high degree of selectivity in moths, which are generally considered generalists (that is, not very choosy about food plants), and season and altitude affect the role of moths as potential pollinators.
According to Dr. Singh and his fellow authors, the research, which is part of a project funded by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, was among very few large scale studies at a global level where the research team studied the effect of various seasons and different altitudes on the pollination ecology of moths.
The research is based on the field work conducted in the Himalayan terrains, from the foot hills to elevations up to 3,000 m, and also based on the laboratory investigations of more than 1,800 moth proboscides (mouth parts of moths). Along with Navneet Singh, the other contributors to the publication are Rajesh Lenka, Pallab Chatterjee and Dipayan Mitra.
Dhriti Banerjee, Director of ZSI, said that generally moths are considered mysterious denizens of nights, and for a long time they were better known as pest species.
“This study revealed the importance of moths in nature. When we are sleeping in our bedrooms, they are tirelessly working for the ecosystems to work, on which our survival is invariably dependent, and are helping in a great way towards food security,” Dr. Banerjee said.
Scientists behind the study emphasise that the interaction between moths and plants established through research points out that the species-interactions are much more complicated than they are actually considered.
According to Dr. Singh, there are about 12,000 moth species in India and about 160,000 moth species in the world, and the study can go a long way in understanding the role of the nocturnal insect pollinators.
After quickly spreading to many countries and becoming the dominant strain in circulation within a very short time after Omicron was designated as a variant of concern on November 26, 2021, the Omicron sub-lineage BA.2 is now following the in the footsteps of BA.1 in many countries, including Denmark, the Philippines and South Africa in the past few weeks. This suggests that the sub-lineage BA.2 has a “selective advantage” over the original Omicron variant — BA.1 sub-lineage.
The BA.2 has a “cluster of sequences that share many of the same mutations as the ‘original’ Omicron (BA.1) but is missing some mutations and has some other new ones,” Dr Emma Hodcroft, co-developer of Next Strain tweeted.
A few studies are now discovering that BA.2 sub-lineage has even higher propensity to spread among people and has the ability to infect people who have been fully vaccinated and/or previously infected by escaping from neutralising antibodies induced by vaccination or infection.
A study was carried out in 24 individuals who were fully vaccinated and received a booster shot of the Pfizer vaccine and eight participants who were naturally infected with SARS-CoV-2. In people who have been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, compared with the Wuhan strain, there was a 23-fold and 27-fold reduction in median neutralising antibody titres to BA.1 and BA.2, respectively. The results were posted in a preprint server medRxiv on February 7. Preprints are yet to be peer-reviewed.
Two weeks after a booster shot, the reduction in median neutralising antibody titres to BA.1 and BA.2 was only 6.1-fold and 8.4-fold, respectively, compared with the Wuhan strain. The neutralising antibody titres to BA.2 were about 1.4-fold lower than BA.1. From a public health perspective, the study found that when vaccinated individuals were infected with BA.1, they developed robust neutralising antibodies against BA.2. So BA.1 infection in vaccinated people offered good protection against BA.2.
The differences in protection to BA.1 and BA.2 in both fully vaccinated and those who received a booster shot were not sufficiently different to explain why BA.2 is spreading widely in many regions of the world.
Another study by a team led by Dr. Dan H. Barouch from the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. found that both BA.1 and BA.2 had comparable ability to escape neutralising antibodies in people who are either fully vaccinated or naturally infected. Using a panel of 19 neutralising monoclonal antibodies as probes, the researchers found that like BA.1, BA.2 also totally or severely resisted 17 of 19 monoclonal antibodies but with certain critical differences. BA.1 was more resistant to one class of antibodies than BA.2, while BA.2 was more resistant to another class of antibodies tested. The results were posted as a preprint in bioRxiv sever on February 9.
“These findings have important public health implications and suggest that the increasing BA.2 frequency in the context of the BA.1 surge is likely related to increased transmissibility rather than enhanced immunologic escape,” Dr. Dan H. Barouch and others write.
Another study carried out in over 8,500 Danish households that were infected with the Omicron variant by a team led by Frederik Plesner Lyngse from the Danish Ministry of Health, Copenhagen, Denmark, found that unvaccinated, fully vaccinated and those who have received a booster shot were more susceptible to infection by BA.2 than BA.1. In short, BA.2 was more infectious than BA.1.
Surprisingly, the “relative increase in susceptibility was significantly greater in vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individuals which points towards immune evasive properties of the BA.2 conferring an even greater advantage for BA.2 in a highly vaccinated population such as Denmark,” the researchers note.
Unvaccinated people infected with BA.2 had greater transmissibility than those who were infected by BA.1. But this difference between BA.1 and BA.2 was not seen in people who have been fully vaccinated or among those who have taken a booster shot. The results are posted on a preprint server medRxiv on January 30, this year.
“We conclude that Omicron BA.2 is inherently substantially more transmissible than BA.1, and that it also possesses immune-evasive properties that further reduce the protective effect of vaccination against infection, but do not increase its transmissibility from vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections,” the Danish researchers write.
Another study posted as preprint in bioRxiv found that in cell culture, BA.2 had higher ability to replicate in human nasal epithelial cells and also the ability to fuse with cells was higher.
Importantly, infection experiments using hamsters showed that BA.2 is more pathogenic than BA.1, the authors write.
In January, another sub-lineage of Omicron — BA.3 — was detected. It has 33 mutations in the spike protein. But none of the mutations are novel. Of the 33 mutations, 31 are seen in BA.1 as well, and the remaining two are seen in BA.2.
Compared with BA.1 and BA.2, the BA.3 sub-lineage is marked by slow spread. One reason could be the absence of six mutations seen in BA.1, according to an article in the BMJ.
Astronomical observations suggest that a significant part of the universe is made up of dark matter which interacts with the rest of the universe only through the gravitational pull. Many large lab experiments have tried to detect elementary particles that could be candidates for dark matter. However, such dark matter particles have not been detected until now. So, the question arises – could dark matter be composed, at least partly, of compact objects such as black holes? New research by an international team of scientists, presents a new way of addressing this question. The paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Several astronomical observations suggest that all galaxies are embedded in a “halo” of dark matter. The “visible” galaxy is like a disc embedded in a dark matter halo that is much larger in size. “One hypothesis is that dark matter comprises a large number of compact objects such as primordial black holes,” says P. Ajith from International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru, in an email to The Hindu.
He is the senior author of the paper and an expert on gravitational waves.
When the universe was very young, hot and dense – soon after the Big Bang, it must have had quantum fluctuations of its density. This, in turn, would have caused some regions to become extremely dense, and therefore, to collapse under their own gravity to form the primordial black holes.
“While we have no conclusive evidence of spotting these objects, some of the binary black hole mergers detected by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors might be primordial black holes. The question is open,” says Prof. Ajith. From a theoretical standpoint, there is good reason to believe that primordial black holes did form in the young universe.
The paper explores what happens when such objects get in the way of gravitational waves travelling towards the Earth from the distance. They invoke a phenomenon called gravitational lensing that is used regularly in astronomy. When light travels through space and passes near a massive or compact body – a star, a galaxy or a black hole, for example, the intense gravity of that body may attract the light towards it, bending it from its rectilinear (straight line) path.
This phenomenon is known as gravitational lensing and was first observed by Arthur Eddington in 1919. Massive objects like galaxies can bend light significantly, producing multiple images, this is called strong lensing. Lighter objects like stars or black holes bend light less, and this is called microlensing. A similar lensing can happen to gravitational waves travelling towards the Earth, and this would leave signatures in the detected gravitational waves. This can be used to detect the presence, or the existence, of primordial black holes.
Until now, individual black holes have not marked out these signatures on gravitational waves detected by the LIGO-VIRGO detectors. However, if all of the dark matter is made of primordial black holes, they should have produced detectable signatures on the gravitational wave signals. The researchers use the non-observation of the lensing signatures to assess what fraction of the dark matter could be made of black holes.
“This provides a new way of constraining the nature of dark matter,” says Prof Ajith. He adds, “Our study concludes that black holes in the mass range from a hundred to a million solar masses can contribute only up to 50-80% of the dark matter in the universe.” This is an upper limit and the actual fraction can be much smaller. “These upper limits will get better and better with more and more observations.”
The work is significant in being the first to use this method, which presents a new avenue for probing dark matter.
Philanthropist couples Susmita and Subroto Bagchi, and Radha and N.S. Parthasarathy collectively donated ₹425 crore to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) to set up a postgraduate medical college and an 800-bed multi-speciality hospital on its Bengaluru campus. Less than a year ago, the Bagchis had committed ₹340 crore towards building a cancer hospital and palliative care centre in Odisha.
Mr. Bagchi, co-founder of Mindtree, in a conversation with The Hindu spoke about why health is the most important space that requires attention and how the Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed his views about the term ‘lifetime’.
Excerpts from an interview:
For a nation of 1.3 billion people, we are woefully inadequate in terms of healthcare infrastructure and investment. The big part of this is not the hardware, it is the human capital mismatch. We do not have enough doctors, nurses, paramedics, hospital beds. As a result, access and equity have suffered hugely over the last many decades. The underbelly of the healthcare system was starkly visible during the Covid-19 pandemic, and we run the risk of collective amnesia as we come out of it.
The difficulty with us is that we think that the big strides in healthcare must be always the government’s job. But if we look at developed nations, great things in medical research and healthcare happened because private individuals came forward to write a cheque and had the sagacity to walk away from it. That is how Sloan Kettering (oldest and largest cancer centre in New York) happened. Harvard, Yale and Stanford and Oxford flourished because of commitment from non-government and non-institutional actors of change.
Long back, Susmita and I chose to focus on healthcare due to personal reasons. Her mother battled cancer and later dementia. My mother was blind, and my father had mental health issues. Through deeply personal experiences, deeply personal choices present themselves. That is how we decided to work on mental health, vision, cancer and ageing. We decided to set up a large cancer hospital and a palliative care centre in Odisha. This will be one of the largest cancer cure and care facilities in the country.
Sri Shankara Cancer Foundation from Bengaluru is setting up a 750-bed hospital in Bhubaneswar. Karunashraya, the hugely regarded palliative care pioneer, will set up their facility. These two will be adjacent to each other. The Odisha Government has given 20 acres of prime land to each of these institutions free of charge. With these two major projects under way, we needed to do something in Karnataka.
Odisha and Karnataka are very dear to us. Odisha has given us life, and Karnataka has given us identity. But, we were looking at a possible convergence between health and education. That is exactly what happened with the IISc. project. While our work in Odisha will deliver care, our support to IISc. will lead to path-breaking inter-disciplinary research that will have bench-to-bed translational impact. It will create a special cadre of scientist-doctors that India badly needs. The facility will create a new breed of physician-scientists who will pursue careers in clinical research to develop new treatments and healthcare solutions.
The Government of India had taken a decision that institutes of eminence. like IISc. and IITs, could start medical schools so that science, engineering and medicine could be under one roof, as it happens in leading institutions in the world. But, the caveat was that these institutes were told to generate their own resources.
Health facilities require massive investments. It could freeze anyone into inaction. But we were stumped when we saw how far, how professionally, a group of leaders in IISc. had gone forward to blueprint their ideas. Frankly, when I read their papers, I was asking myself, could I myself have written a plan so good with my decades of institution building experience. They drew us in.
As I said before, India has woefully inadequate healthcare research and delivery capacity. Bengaluru is better than other places, but not good enough. Not globally comparable. Not demographically adequate. But leaving that aside, don’t for a moment think that all that is happening is an 800-bed multi-speciality hospital in IISc. The hospital is the focal point where doctors, physicists, biologists, nano-technologist, software and deep tech experts as much as med-tech start-ups will learn by doing. The bigger umbrella is the Institute of Medical Sciences, which will do cross-disciplinary research, training, innovation, capacity building. The hospital will be the stage on which they will all perform. It is called a bench-to-bed and bed-to-bench flow of knowledge.
New machines and equipment will be designed and tried here, new processes will be perfected here, new vaccines will be designed, developed and tried here. A whole new cadre of scientist-doctors will come out of it who will be able to lift the larger eco-system of healthcare in India. This isn’t yet another fancy hospital. The future of medical knowledge will unfold here.
We have been told that the green cover of IISc. will not suffer. The total area is only 15 acres in about a 440-acre campus. If there is any need for relocation of any tree, there is enough technology and capability on hand to do so. The IISc. administration is deeply committed to protecting its environment. We were very impressed with how they have executed their super-state-of-the-art fablab without sacrificing a single tree.
It made Susmita and me, and at the same time Partha and Radha, rethink timelines. It gave us a sense of urgency like never before. We had a shared belief that we must spend our money for the larger good in our own lifetime. The Covid-19 pandemic told us, don’t think a lifetime can be a long time. Engage now, tomorrow may be too late.
A doodle on search giant Google’s homepage on February 17, 2022, has featured Japanese virologist Dr Michiaki Takahashi, the developer of the world’s first vaccine against chickenpox, to commemorate his 94th birthday.
The doodle, illustrated by Tatsuro Kiuchi, a Tokyo-based artist, depicts Dr Takahashi looking through his microscope, and putting a bandaid on a child’s arm.
“Thanks to his innovations, millions of cases of chickenpox are prevented each year,” Google said in a note released with the doodle.
Dr Takahashi was born on this day in 1928 in Japan’s Osaka. His chickenpox vaccine, named ‘Oka’, was developed in 1974 and subsequently approved by the World Health Organization. The lifesaving immunisation went on to be used by 80 countries and was administered to millions of children .
After earning a medical degree from the Osaka university, Dr Takahashi had joined the Research Institute for Microbial Disease at the same university in 1959, to study polio viruses and measles.
In 1963, Dr Takahashi accepted a research fellowship at Baylor College in the United States. It was during his time at the institute that his son developed a severe case of chickenpox, which led him to change the focus of his research, with the aim of developing a vaccine against the viral illness.
Returning to Japan in 1965, the virologist began culturing weakened, live strains of chickenpox. In 1974, he came up with the first vaccine against Varicella Virus, which causes the disease. The drug was subjected to a thorough trial process, involving immunosuppressed patients, eventually proving to be highly effective.
The Research Foundation for Microbial Disease at Osaka University began rolling out the vaccine in 1986 in Japan. At the time, Dr Takahashi’s was the only vaccine approved by the World Health Organisation, against Varicella virus.
In 1994, Dr Takahashi was appointed the director of the Microbial Disease study Group at Osaka University. He held this position until retirement.
Dr Michiaki Takahashi died in 2013 of a cardiac arrest.
While India ramps up its solar power installation, it does not yet have a firm policy on managing waste that results from used solar panels or from the manufacturing process.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) last December estimated that the global photovoltaic waste will touch 78 million tonnes by 2050, with India expected to be one of the top five photovoltaic-waste creators.
India currently considers solar waste a part of electronic waste and does not account for it separately, according to a response to a question in the Rajya Sabha. However, said Minister for New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) R.K. Singh, a committee had been constituted under the chairmanship of the Ministry’s Secretary to propose an action plan to evolve a “circular economy” in solar panel, through reuse/recycling of waste generated. There was no commercial raw material recovery facility for solar e-waste operational in India, but a pilot facility for solar panel recycling and material recovery had been set up by a private company in Gummidipoondi, Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
India has set a target of producing 100 GW of solar energy by 2022. The cumulative capacity of grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) installations is around 40 GW and of the current capacity, about 35.6 GW, is generated from ground-mounted plants and 4.4 GW from rooftop solar. A gigawatt is a 1,000 megawatt.
Solar panels have an estimated life of 25 years, and given that India’s solar manufacturing industry took off around 2010 most of the installed systems were new and early in their calendar life cycle and therefore unlikely to generate a large quantity of solar waste. That, however, is only partially accurate, according to the Council for Energy, Environment and Water, a Delhi based think-tank. End-of-life was only one of the possible waste streams for PV modules and there were several other stages where modules could get damaged and were discarded, especially during transportation and installation. Additionally, modules could develop defects during the plant operations and be discarded even before their scheduled life span.
Despite its ambitious expansion plans, much of India’s solar PV manufacturing uses imported components with parts mostly sourced from China. India now has a manufacturing capacity of 3GW for solar cells and 15GW for modules and, in the Budget this month, had announced a basic customs duty of 40% on modules and 25% on solar cell imports from April 1.
In the CEEW’s reckoning, PV modules had so far likely generated a cumulative waste of nearly 285,000 tonnes, as of FY21, from the early-life loss of the installed 40 GW grid-connected solar capacity. “Hence, it will be imprudent to ignore and delay the issue of PV waste management anymore,” say CEEW analysts Akanksha Tyagi and Neeraj Kuldeep, in a report.
The Blue Blob is a cold patch located south of Iceland and Greenland and little is known about it. However,a recent study theorises that it may have helped temporarily stall the melting of Arctic sea ice. The cold patch was most prominent during the winter of 2014-2015 when the sea surface temperature was about 1.4 degrees Celsius colder than normal.
The Arctic region is reportedly warming four times faster than the global average. Iceland’s glaciers steadily shrank from 1995 to 2010, losing an average of 11 billion tons of ice per year. Starting in 2011, however, the speed of Iceland’s melting slowed, resulting in about half as much ice loss, or about five billiontons annually. This trend was not seen in nearby, larger glaciers across Greenland and Svalbard.
The researchers found that cooler waters near the Blue Blob were linked to observations of lower air temperatures over Iceland’s glaciers and coincided with a slowing of glacial melting since 2011.
Other scientists have proposed that the Blue Blob is part of the normal sea surface temperature variability in the Arctic. Notably, especially cold winters in 2014 and 2015 led to record cooling, which caused upwelling of cold, deep water, even as ocean temperatures around the region warmed due to climate change.
Before the Blue Blob, a long-term cooling trend in the same region, called the Atlantic Warming Hole, reduced sea surface temperatures by about 0.4 to 0.8 degrees Celsius during the last century and may continue to cool the region in the future. A possible explanation for the Warming Hole is that climate change has slowed the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an ocean current that brings warm water up from the tropics to the Arctic, thus reducing the amount of heat delivered to the region.
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SpaceX engineer Anna Menon will be among the crew of a unique space mission announced on Monday by U.S. billionaire Jared Isaacman, who had commanded a human spaceflight mission last year.
Ms. Menon is a Lead Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX, where she manages the development of crew operations and serves in mission control as both a Mission Director and crew communicator, a SpaceX release said.
Mr. Isaacman, the founder and CEO of American payment processing company Shift4, who had commanded the Inspiration4 mission, announced the Polaris Programme, “a first-of-its-kind effort to rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities, while continuing to raise funds and awareness for important causes here on Earth.”
The programme will consist of up to three human spaceflight missions that will demonstrate new technologies, conduct extensive research, and ultimately culminate in the first flight of SpaceX’s Starship with humans on board.
The first mission is named Polaris Dawn, which is targeted to launch no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2022 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Polaris Dawn mission has many first-time objectives, so the Polaris Programme chose a crew of experts who know each other well and have a foundation of trust they can build upon as they undergo the challenges of this mission. Menon is Mission Specialist and Medical Officer.
In addition to Mr. Isaacman, the crew includes Ms. Menon, a veteran member of Mr. Isaacman’s team Scott Poteet and SpaceX employee Sarah Gillis.
During her tenure at SpaceX, Ms. Menon has led the implementation of Dragon’s crew capabilities, helped create the crew communicator operator role, and developed critical operational responses to vehicle emergencies, such as a fire or cabin depressurisation.
Anna served in mission control during multiple cargo and crew Dragon missions, including Demo-2, Crew-1, CRS-22, and CRS-23. Prior to SpaceX, she worked for seven years at NASA as a biomedical flight controller for the International Space Station.
She is the wife of Indian-origin physician Anil Menon, a lieutenant colonel at the US Air Force, who was selected by NASA in December last year along with nine others to be astronauts for future missions.
Anil Menon (45) was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Ukrainian and Indian immigrants.
He was SpaceX's first flight surgeon, helping to launch the company's first humans to space during NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 mission and building a medical organisation to support the human system during future missions. He previously served NASA as the crew flight surgeon for various expeditions taking astronauts to the International Space Station.
SpaceX said the Dragon mission will take advantage of Falcon 9 and Dragon’s maximum performance, flying higher than any Dragon mission to date and endeavouring to reach the highest Earth orbit ever flown.
“Dragon and the Polaris Dawn crew will spend up to five days in orbit, during which the crew will attempt the first-ever commercial spacewalk, conduct scientific research designed to advance both human health on Earth and our understanding of human health during future long-duration spaceflights, and be the first crew to test Starlink laser-based communications in space, providing valuable data for future space communications systems necessary for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond,” the company said.
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) in Bengaluru has received its single largest private donation of ₹425 crore, which will be used to set up a postgraduate medical school along with a multispeciality 800-bed hospital on its Bengaluru campus.
The project will be in line with global examples of integrating science, engineering and medicine under a single institution, creating “physician-scientists.” IISc. inked a partnership with philanthropists Susmita and Subroto Bagchi, and Radha and N.S. Parthasarathy, who collectively donated the amount.
Addressing mediapersons in Bengaluru on Monday, IISc. Director Govindan Rangarajan said the new venture would be named IISc. Medical School and Bagchi-Parthasarathy Hospital.
“The academic centrepiece of this initiative will be an integrated dual degree MD-PhD programme aimed at creating a new breed of physician-scientists, who will pursue a career in clinical research to develop new treatments and healthcare solutions, driven by a bench-to-bedside philosophy. They will be trained simultaneously in the hospital as well as in the science and engineering laboratories at IISc.,” he said.
The building of the 800-bed multispeciality hospital, catering to clinical training and research activities of the academic programme, has been designed by Ahmedabad-based company Archi Medes (I) Consultants Pvt. Ltd. Work on the project will start in June 2022, and the hospital will be operational by the end of 2024.
According to National Medical Commission norms, students admitted in specific MD/MS and DM/MCh programmes will also be trained in appropriate sections of the hospital along with their classroom and laboratory training. The hospital will also implement advanced digital technologies and solutions, such as integrated Electronic Medical Record systems and a comprehensive telemedicine suite with haptics interfaces, the director explained.
Asked if the hospital will be accessible to the public, Prof. Rangarajan said it will be open for all but will not be a charitable facility. “It will have a mixture of beds — private as well as insurance beds where patients can avail themselves of benefits under the government insurance schemes,” he said. The PG medical school will have an intake of 70 students and will start admission from 2025, he added.
Speaking on behalf of the Bagchis, Ms. Susmita said, “In a country like ours, medical research and delivery cannot be left to the Government or the corporate sector alone. With IISc., we find a shared vision. It is an institution with depth, competence, leadership, and capacity to deliver in scale.”
Ms. Radha said IISc.’s larger vision to integrate science, engineering, and medicine in one campus is a new concept in India. “IISc.’s global reputation and network will attract outstanding talent to create breakthroughs in research and delivery of medicine that must impact the masses,” she said.
Written by Esteban Pardo
Scotland is well known for its cloudy days and constant rain. One hundred and seventy million years ago, it was much warmer and tropical ― and it had huge reptiles with a wingspan of 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) soaring the skies.
That’s what researchers learned from a fossil that was discovered on the Isle of Skye, in northwest Scotland. The findings were published in Current Biology earlier this week and describe the biggest pterosaur from the Middle Jurassic period discovered so far.
The new species is called Dearc sgiathanach pronounced “jark ski-an-ack,” which is a Scottish Gaelic name meaning both “winged reptile! and “reptile from Skye.”
The discovery is “a superlative Scottish fossil,” Stephen Brusatte told DW. The paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh led the National Geographic Society-funded expedition that found “Jark” back in 2017.
He was referring to the state of preservation of the fossil, “far beyond any pterosaur ever found in Scotland and probably the best British skeleton found since the days of Mary Anning in the early 1800s,” he said.
Anning was a famous English paleontologist from the first half of the 19th century who discovered many fossils, including the first pterosaur skeleton outside of Germany.
Pterosaurs, or pterodactyls as they are commonly known, were flying reptiles that existed from the Late Triassic, which was around 228 million years ago, to the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, when an asteroid wiped out almost all life on Earth.
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to fly. For those who grew up with the movie series “The Land Before Time,” they may be already familiar, since Petrie, one of the main characters, was a Pterosaur.
Even though their name might suggest it, pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. They are close cousins that evolved on a different branch of the reptile family tree.
Before the discovery of this fossil, scientists used to think that pterosaurs were rarely bigger than 1.6 meters during the Triassic and the Jurassic, Brusatte said, but “now we know they were capable of getting much bigger.”
The fossil was spotted in 2017 by then-PhD student Amelia Penny at the shores of the Isle of Skye, at a place known as Brothers’ Point. She saw part of the jaw and teeth protruding from a lime stone.
Brusatte said team members became excited when they found out that it wasn’t just a skull but a whole skeleton. He said it was a challenge to free the fossil from the rock, because the tide was rising quickly, so they had to wait until midnight, when the water had receeded, to finish cutting the fossil out of the rock.
The team had to leave the find overnight until members were ready to carry out the full excavation the next morning, Brusatte said, praying that no one would stumble into the precious fossil.
Natalia Jagielska, lead author of the paper, told DW that another thing that makes this fossil so rare is that it’s already hard to find any Middle Jurassic fossils, but it’s even harder to find pterosaurs.
“They are very rarely preserved in the fossil record,” Jagielska said. “They are very very delicate, have very thin bones and get crushed.”
So what might D. sgiathanach have looked like?
Although the degree of preservation was remarkable, the fossil still had many missing parts.
That’s why, Jagielska said, it took detective and forensic work to get an idea of its appearance. The team used a lot of other pterosaur fossils from many different museums to fill in the blanks and complete the puzzle.
Jagielska, who is also an illustrator, described the pterosaur as a creature with four legs and a 2.5-meter wingspan — close to that of an albatross. Its forearms were modified into wings and much larger than its hindlegs, and it had four fingers, with the fourth one being very elongated to extend its membranous wings, similar to modern bats. It also had a long tail for balance and very sharp teeth, most likely for fish catching.
A deeper look into its skull revealed that it probably had good eyesight and a very good sense of balance, “both features very helpful for a flying animal,” Jagielska said.
And: The skeleton didn’t belong to an adult. When analyzing bone slices under the microscope, the Scottish researchers found out that D. sgiathanach was still growing.
Jagielska said she wanted people who see the fossil on display at the National Museum of Scotland them to take a moment and think about the fact that they ar0e looking at the remains of an animal that was flying over Scotland 170 million years ago, “preserved with many of the features it had when living.”
Unlike fruit size and yield, flavour is one phenotypic characteristic that is difficult to quantify in the real world. So, how can breeders and farmers over the world select for a certain flavour over others (and have happier customers)? In an attempt to answer this question, a team of researchers from University of Florida examined over a 100 different tomato and blueberry accessions from the University’s breeding programme.
These accessions included commercial cultivars and heirloom varieties. Heirloom or heritage varieties refer to those that are grown in a small isolated pockets, and are not as widespread as their commercially produced counterparts.
The study involved taking each of these accessions and correlating their metabolome with their respective consumer panel ratings. The metabolome refers to a compendium of all chemical reactions taking place inside the cell of an organism i.e. the full set of metabolites, and is a direct window into the ‘physiological state of the organism.’ The consumer sensory panels consisted of 80 participants on an average from various ethnic- and age-groups to account for flavour perception with attributes like sweetness, sourness, flavour intensity and overall liking on a 100-point scale.
This novel method has an advantage over other similar studies in that they usually consisted of sensory preferences of a few individuals and were, therefore, prone to error and bias. Not only that, it offered scientists a more direct glimpse into flavour preferences, which, until now, have conventionally been quantified on the basis of acid content, soluble solids and firmness.
The aforementioned exercise was preceded by predictions flavour perceptions based on its chemical profile. These predictions were made using a total of eighteen mathematical models prior to the metabolome—consumer sensory panel correlations.
The flavour of any food item is a product of a complex interaction between its genetics and the environment, that renders it a specific chemical composition in terms of sugars/acids and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). While sugars and acids are perceived by the tongue, VOCs are sensed by the nose. So, can the exercise underpin the various chemicals and pathways that are responsible for the flavour of the fruit, and ‘predict how flavourful a fruit will be’? And, if successful, will ascertaining the metabolome of a fruit enable breeders to target specific genetic makeups (hereinafter, ‘genotype’) that determine those physical traits?
It was found that nearly 59% of the flavour perceptions (measured as ‘overall liking’) – in both tomatoes and blueberries – were determined by volatile organic compounds (VOCs). On the other hand, sugars/acids were found to account for nearly 77% of sourness in tomato and 66% sweetness in blueberries. Glucose and fructose – both sugars – were found to be the main drivers of sweetness in both tomatoes and blueberries as well as ‘overall liking;’ while acids were the most responsible for sourness. Volatile compounds were grouped by the biochemical pathways. Flavour in tomato was largely determined by volatiles derived from phenylalanine and lipids; whereas that in blueberries was largely determined by volatiles derived from lipids, esters, carotenoids and terpenoids.
When researchers employed the genetic sequence, for 70 varieties of tomatoes for which they had full genome sequences, to predict consumer sensory ratings, they found that ‘metabolomic selection outperformed genomic selection in the prediction of all these complex traits, especially for sweetness and overall flavour liking.’
A key takeaway of the study, therefore, is the association of a metabolome profile with a certain genotype. This enables agriculturalists to make better-informed selections from a wide variety of genotypes – and, ultimately, have a happier customer at the end of the day. Its authors, however, caution that the contribution of specific chemicals to overall liking of the fruit will depend on cultural preferences and the ethnic/geographic composition of the sample we choose to study.
The author is a research fellow at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and a freelance science communicator. He tweets at @critvik
From bustling Tokyo to the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, from Novosibirsk in Siberia to the equatorial city of Quito, from congested Cairo to the desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, people everywhere comprise a single family.
Researchers on Thursday underscored that point, unveiling the most comprehensive family tree for Homo sapiens ever devised, based upon both modern and ancient genome data from more than 3,600 people from around the world. They dubbed the results the “genealogy of everyone.”
The study helps delineate human genetic diversity and map out how people globally are related to one another, with our species arising in Africa before fanning out worldwide.
The oldest roots of present-day human genetic variation reach back to northeastern Africa at a time before our species originated, according to Anthony Wilder Wohns, a postdoctoral researcher in genetics at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University and lead author of the study published in the journal Science.
“The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan. These ancestors lived up to and over one million years ago – which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens – 250,000 to 300,000 years ago. So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans,” Wohns said.
This million-year-old genetic contribution likely came from the species Homo erectus, Wohns said. Homo erectus, which lived from about 1.9 million years ago to 110,000 years ago, was the first species in the human evolutionary lineage with body proportions resembling our own.
The study, spearheaded by the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute, also documented how extinct human species such as the Denisovans and Neanderthals left genetic descendants among modern-day people around the world, though not in Africa.
“For example, people in Papua New Guinea and Oceania have quite large amounts of Denisovan ancestry, but even people living in Europe have some ancestry that looks like these ancient people,” Wohns said.
The study helped shed light on when and where major population developments unfolded, such as the large-scale “out of Africa” migration that led our species to distant locales and occasional interbreeding with Denisovans and Neanderthals.
“Our method uses DNA sequences to learn about the ancestral relationships between individuals. Informally, what we try to do is to trace how genetic mutations, which occurred in our ancestors, and the bits of genome in which they occur have been passed down through the generations to the present day,” Wohns said.
“Moreover, we can estimate the date and approximate geographic location of ancestors,” Wohns added.
Other studies have indicated that groups of Homo sapiens departed Africa at various times in the ancient past. The new study suggests that the timing of the most significant departures occurred roughly 72,000 years ago.
The study raises the possibility that our species populated the Americas and Oceania well before the earliest archaeological evidence of human presence in those regions.
“Our method estimated that there were ancestors in the Americas by 56,000 years ago. We also estimated significant numbers of human ancestors in Oceania – specifically Papua New Guinea – by 140,000 years ago,” Wohns added. “But this is not firm evidence like a radiocarbon-dated tool or fossil.”
The researchers built the genealogy using 3,601 genetic samples from people around the world and eight ancient samples, the oldest coming from Neanderthal remains about 110,000 years old from a Siberian cave. They examined genome fragments from 3,500 ancient humans but did not directly incorporate these into the genealogy.
“The story of humanity is written in our genes,” Wohns said, “and reconstructing our genealogy allows us to read that history.”
Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien
A study conducted over three experiments by researchers from Lancaster University and UC Berkeley has found that AI-synthesised (deepfake) faces are indistinguishable from real faces and that people rate the former to be more trustworthy.
A report of the study authored by Sophie J Nightingale and Hany Farid was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
For the study, the researchers used 400 synthetic faces generated by StyleGAN2, ensuring equal representation across gender (200 women and 200 men), estimated age (faces that seem to correspond to a range of ages from childhood to older adults), and race (100 Black, 100 Caucasian, 100 East Asian and 100 South Asian). To reduce the effect that outside cues could have, researchers only used images with a uniform background and no clear rendering artefacts.
For each of the 400 synthetic faces, the researchers collected a matching face (in terms of overall appearance, race, gender etc.) from the face database used in StyleGAN2. A neural network was used to extract a low-dimensional representation of each face to compare with the database of real faces to derive the most similar face in each case.
In the first experiment, 315 participants classified 128 of the 800 faces as real or synthesised, one by one. The participants were able to guess with an average accuracy of just 48.2 per cent, which is close to a chance performance of 50 per cent.
For real faces, there was a significant interaction between gender and race, and the results. Mean accuracy was higher for male East Asian faces than female East Asian faces. It was also higher for male White faces than it was for female White faces. The study didn’t infer any such significant interaction between race, gender and results for synthetic faces.
In the second experiment, 219 new participants classified 128 faces taken from the 800 faces, but this time, with training and trial-by-trial feedback. Average accuracy improved a little to 59 per cent but there was no improvement in accuracy over time despite providing trial-by-trial feedback. The average accuracy was 59.3 per cent for the first set of 64 faces and 58.8 per cent for the next set of 64.
The third experiment was designed to ascertain whether there is a difference in perceived trustworthiness between synthetic and real faces. A total of 223 participants rated the trustworthiness of 128 faces taken from the same set of 800 faces on a scale of one to seven (one for very untrustworthy and seven for very trustworthy).
At the end of the experiment, the average rating for real faces was just 4.48 compared to 4.82 for synthetic faces. Even though the difference is only 7.7 per cent, it is significant due to the high t-value and low p-value of the experiment (t(222)=14.6, P<0.001)
Women were rated significantly more trustworthy than men with an average 4.94 rating compared to male faces’ 4.36 rating. There was also a small effect of Black faces being rated more trustworthy than South Asian faces. There was no other significant effect across race in the third experiment.
Written by Esteban Pardo
Something out of a Star Wars movie occurred in Earth’s orbit last month.
A Chinese satellite was spotted in late January grabbing another long-dead satellite and days later throwing it into a “graveyard” orbit 300 km away, where objects are less likely to hit spacecraft.
These rare events were presented by Dr. Brien Flewelling in a webinar hosted by the Center of Strategic and International Studies and Secure World Foundation last month. Flewelling is the chief space situational awareness architect of ExoAnalytic Solutions, a private U.S. company that tracks the position of satellites using a large global network of optic telescopes.
The Chinese SJ-21 satellite was seen on January 22 changing its usual place in the sky to approach decommissioned satellite Compass-G2. A few days later, SJ-21 attached to G2, altering its orbit.
Chinese officials haven’t yet confirmed that the apparent space tug occurred.
Over the course of the next few days, the spacecraft couple started dancing westward, ExoAnalytic’s video footage showed. By January 26, the two satellites separated, and G2 was kicked into oblivion.
The Compass-G2, or BeiDou-2 G2, is a spacecraft from China’s BeiDou-2 Navigation Satellite System that failed shortly after launching in 2009. For more than 10 years, the metal carcass has been wandering around Earth alongside millions of other pieces of space trash.
SJ-21, which launched in October 2021, has now returned to a geostationary orbit (GEO) just above the Congo Basin. GEO happens when a satellite orbits Earth over the equator at the same speed the planet rotates.
From the Earth’s point of view, satellites in GEO seem to be standing still, barring a wobble or two. This type of orbit is sometimes called a Clarke orbit, named after British sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke. He popularized the idea of GEO in a 1945 paper promising to revolutionize telecommunications.
Less than two decades later, the first geostationary satellite was launched.
There’s nothing wrong with throwing out the trash — many other countries have launched or are currently developing technologies to clear space junk.
Japan launched its ELSA-d mission in March 2021, designed to test space debris capturing and removal technologies. The European Space Agency plans to launch its own trash removal mission in 2025.
However, despite the seeming ubiquity of efforts to develop and implement space junk disposal technology, some U.S. officials have expressed worry over Chinese trash disposal satellites like the SJ-21.
James Dickinson, commander of the US Space Command said in April 2021 that technology like China’s SJ-21 “could be used in a future system for grappling other satellites.”
But is there a real threat?
In its 2021 counterspace report, the Secure World Foundation said that there is strong evidence that both China and Russia are working to develop technology with “counterspace capabilities” — the ability to destruct space systems.
However, the report said, Chinese official statements have remained “consistently aligned to the peaceful purposes of outer space” and there is no proof that they have facilitated any destructive or counterspace operations.
A 2021 report by the Chinese Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), a United States Air Force think tank maintained that SJ-21’s use will likely be restricted to testing methods of space garbage disposal.
The CASI report concluded that SJ-21 is most likely one of China’s On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM) satellites.
Many space agencies have been developing OSAM missions for decades. These could be, for example, spacecraft designed for refuelling or repairing existing satellites — or disposing of space waste.
Since the beginning of space activities in the ’60s, more than 6,000 launches have delivered over 50,000 objects in orbit, according to the US Space Surveillance Network. More than 30,000 artificial objects are orbiting our planet, of which only about 5,000 are functioning, according to the ESA’s Space Debris Office.
And that’s just counting the objects large enough to be tracked. The US, Russia, China and India have all blown satellites in space generating huge amounts of new smaller debris.
ESA numbers show that more than 300 million smaller objects are flying through space at incredible speeds of up to 30,000 km/h, almost 5 times the speed of the fastest bullet.
The ESA started testing OSAM projects in 1990 with the GSV (the Geostationary Servicing Vehicle) program, which was intended to grab and repair broken satellites in GEO.
The famous and successful optics repair of the Hubble Space Telescope in December 1993 is another example of an OSAM mission at work.
NASA has plans for several more OSAM missions, including OSAM-1 and OSAM-2. The latter is designed to 3D print components in space, with the hope of one day being able to build, directly in space, parts too big to fit inside any rocket.
Written by Aditya Sharma
NASA laid out the details of how it plans to retire the International Space Station (ISS) in an official transition plan for the station that was sent to US Congress this week.
The US space agency intends to retire the landmark research outpost within the next eight to nine years, plunging the massive structure into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, nicknamed Spacecraft Cemetery.
NASA is aiming for the space station’s re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere in January 2031, according to the agency’s budget estimates.
The ISS mission control will lower its altitude, before performing a final maneuver to ensure it lands in the “South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area (SPOUA),” in an area known as Point Nemo.
“ISS operators will perform the ISS re-entry burn, providing the final push to lower ISS as much as possible and ensure safe atmospheric entry,” according to the transition plan.
The space station travels at a speed of five miles per second (8 kilometers per second), orbiting Earth every 90 minutes at a distance of 400 km (248 miles) above the surface.
It is run by five space agencies with 15 countries involved, making it a symbol of decades of international cooperation.
The first module of the ISS was launched into orbit in November 1998, and three years later, the first crew took up residence there.
Since then, the space station has served as a hub for scientific research and has been staffed by a rotating crew of three to six astronauts.
NASA has described the retirement of the ISS as a “transition to commercial services.”
The space station will be replaced by “one or more commercially-owned and -operated” space platforms, NASA said in a statement.
“The private sector is technically and financially capable of developing and operating commercial low-Earth orbit destinations, with NASA’s assistance,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA headquarters.
“We look forward to sharing our lessons learned and operations experience with the private sector to help them develop safe, reliable, and cost-effective destinations in space,” he said.
Written by Clare Roth
Twenty-five years ago today, a sheep named Dolly became the first animal to be cloned, using an adult somatic cell. The Dolly experiment blew up in the news across the globe. It changed the world of stem cell research ― and on a more personal level, kept the institute that hosted the experiment alive.
“From a personal point of view, one of the most important things that came from Dolly was the survival of the research institute that I work in,” Alan Archibald, who was part of the 1996 experiment facilitated by the UK’s Roslin Institute, told DW with a laugh. “We were facing government cuts. And the money we made by selling the intellectual property to Dolly kept us going until we found alternative sources of money.”
Dolly was cloned using a cell taken from another sheep’s mammary gland. She was born in July 1996 with a white face ― a clear sign she’d been cloned, because if she’d been related to her surrogate mother, she’d have had a black face.
Researchers named her Dolly after Dolly Parton, who is known for her large “mammary glands” ― breasts. Dolly was the only baby sheep to be born live out of a total of 277 cloned embryos. She gave birth to six babies and died of lung disease at the age of six.
Biggest developments since
“It changed the scientific world’s view about how flexible [cell] development was,” said Archibald. “There was a view that once a fertilized egg had developed into a multicellular animal, into liver cells and blood cells and brain cells, for those…cells, that was it, it was a dead end. There was no way back to alternative places for those cells to be. So the reprogramming that was critical to the Dolly experiment stood long-standing scientific dogma on its head.”
Dolly’s cloning helped lead to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of iPS cells by a team led by Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka.
This is likely the most important development in stem cell research to result from Dolly’s cloning, Dr. Robin Lovell-Badge, who heads the Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told DW.
IPS cells offer a way to model human disease and are currently being used in biological research about premature aging, cancer and heart disease.
Additionally, Archibald said the genetically modified heart that was used in the world’s first pig-to-human heart transplant procedure in January was created using Dolly’s technology.
Cloning of humans
Although a human embryo was successfully cloned in 2013, there’s been no progress made so far to clone an entire human being. But monkeys have been replicated: in China, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua became the first primates to be cloned using the Dolly technique in January 2018. Out of nearly 150 cloned embryos, the monkeys’ surrogate mothers were the only ones to deliver live babies.
Some progress has also been made to clone animals on the verge of extinction. US researchers successfully cloned the black footed ferret in 2021 and the endangered Przewalski’s horse in 2020. Efforts are currently underway to clone the wooly mammoth, the giant panda and the northern white rhino.
Key to producing more food
Along with cell-cloning’s ability to study diseases, animal cloning allows major industry farms to produce more food.
The US Food and Drug Administration allows the cloning of cattle, pigs and goats and their offspring for the production of meat and milk. In 2008, the agency said the food is as safe as food derived from non-cloned animals ― and thus doesn’t need to be labeled.
It’s unclear how much meat and milk derived from cloned animals is sold in US markets. The practice isn’t allowed in Europe ― in 2015, the European Parliament voted to ban the cloning of all farm animals. But that doesn’t mean lab experiments aren’t being facilitated on EU grounds, said Lovell-Badge. “The field where the cloning procedures are actively being pursued (including in Germany) is for agricultural animals as a way to help generate or propagate pigs or cattle with valuable genetic characteristics,” he told DW.
For example, he said, cells from an animal could be edited by scientists. Then the cloning methods could be used to derive animals carrying the new genetic trait, such as disease resistance, or to make them more suitable as organ donors for humans.
Cloning of pets
A small industry has been created around the cloning of pets. Examples include the company ViaGen in the US, Sinogene in China, and Sooam Biotech in South Korea. Snuppy the dog was cloned in 2005 in South Korea, Garlic the cat in July 2019 in China, and US singer Barbra Streisand’s Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett after her dog Samantha died in 2017.
“The justification for doing this is to ‘replace a lost much-loved pet’,” said Lovell-Badge. “However, this is nonsense.”
He said that although it’s true that the cloned animal will essentially have the same genomic DNA as the original pet, animals “aren’t simply a product of [their] DNA.” Even if the cloning is successful, an animal’s nature is partly determined by its genes, but also by its environment, which means a clone will never be the exact same as the original animal, he said.
Archibald added that although cloning technology is more efficient now than when Dolly was made, the process is still pretty inefficient. “You would need a lot of female individuals to lay the eggs that would be used in the process,” he said.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of the galaxy merger IC 2431, which is happening over 618 million light years away from the Earth in the constellation Cancer, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The image captures a mixture of star formation and tidal distortions that are caused by the gravitational interactions of these three galaxies.
Even though the galaxies are merging with each other, there will be very few instances of celestial bodies crashing since they are spaced so far apart. In some of its educational material, NASA uses the metaphor of grains of sand separated by the length of football fields to help understand the massive scale of the distance between celestial bodies. When galaxies combine, they lose their own shape to form a new, usually elliptical shape.
But the thick cloud of dust that obscures the centre of the image indicates another phenomenon that happens when galaxies merge: the clouds of gas and dust that are part of galaxies collide into each other, sometimes resulting in the formation of new stars.
According to ESA, this image is part of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project that investigates “weird and wonderful” galaxies from Hubble observations.
It crowdsourced time from more than 100,000 volunteers to classify 900,000 unexamined galaxies. ESA claims that the project has achieved in 175 days what would have taken years if done by a professional astronomer.
The tiny, iridescent Ormyrus labotus always seemed suspicious for a parasitoid wasp. It wasn’t the wasp’s striking beauty — wasps can be conventionally attractive, too — but its life strategy. Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs on or inside other insects and arthropods, and the larvae eat their way out when they hatch. Each parasitoid wasp species tends to prefer one or a few hosts. But Ormyrus labotus had been observed laying its eggs in more than 65 different species of insects — far more than one or a few.
Ormyrus labotus parasitizes gall wasps, which lay their eggs on plants and induce them to form protective, swollen structures called galls around the larvae (a parasite, in a parasite!). When galls from different wasp species form, they take on a variety of sizes and shapes. Some are much tougher than others, some have unusual defensive strategies. There are galls that are chambered, secrete nectar or bristle with fibers. Parasitoid wasps often have specialized adaptations that allow them to broach certain kinds of gall.
But Ormyrus labotus, it seemed, had no problem penetrating an assortment of galls: lime-green and polka-dot round galls, spiky yellow galls on the blade of a leaf and stubbly galls on a twig. “It seemed weird that one species could be sort of effectively attacking all of these different galls,” said Sofia Sheikh, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago who did research on the wasps when she was at the University of Iowa.
It turns out that entomologists had good reasons to be suspicious. After extracting DNA samples from parasitoid wasps collected from oak trees around the country, Sheikh and colleagues at the University of Iowa have revealed that Ormyrus labotus is actually a complex of at least 16 genetically distinct species that, essentially, are indistinguishable to the eye. Their research was published Wednesday in the journal Insect Systematics and Diversity.
The paper, the researchers note, is the latest in a string of studies unmasking supposedly generalist parasitic insect species as complexes of many species. And the scientists are certain more of this hidden diversity lurks in insects that have not been studied for decades — there may be even more species of Ormyrus labotus.
These examples are teaching scientists to “be suspicious” of any parasitic wasp species believed to be generalists, said Josephine Rodriguez, an entomologist at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, who was not involved with the research.
The paper emerged out of a larger project studying the co-evolution of North American gall wasps and their parasites, said Andrew Forbes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Iowa. “Nobody has looked at these groups for 50 to 100 years,” said Miles Zhang, a research entomologist at the USDA Systematic Entomology Lab, adding that much of the work on gall wasps was completed by biologist Alfred Kinsey, who is much better known for his namesake human sexuality scale.
Sheikh and Anna Ward, a graduate student at Iowa, spent several years plucking galls from oak trees, which involved scouring iNaturalist, a social network of biologists and other scientists, and inviting themselves into people’s backyards. They brought the galls back to the lab, placed them in separate cups in a refrigerator-size incubator, and waited to see if the gall would hatch gall wasps, parasitoid wasps, or both — two wasps with one stone. “It’s often more like 20 wasps with one stone,” Forbes clarified. “Each gall wasp is attacked by between 10 and 25 different species of parasites.”
As the wasps hatched and chewed exit holes out of the galls, the researchers extracted samples of the insects’ DNA to examine the genetic variation among them. They then compared genetic results with the ecological findings, meaning which wasps were found on which types of galls on which trees. They also studied the insects’ anatomies, which were less helpful because the wasps looked extremely similar. This was how they found that the wasps most likely represented at least 16 species. (Potentially there were two more, but the researchers didn’t have enough samples to be certain.)
While the researchers expected Ormyrus labotus was not a single species, 16 to 18 distinct species came as a surprise. “Here are all these species in our small sampling,” Sheikh said. “It means there’s a lot more that we just haven’t captured yet.”
https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/show/0ygP4jm9c9SdqUM3C6DycM
The paper does not formally describe or give a name to any species in the complex, as such taxonomic work would require more evidence and microscopic measurements of the wasps’ body parts. And the DNA analysis looked at only a single bar-coding mitochondrial gene. But Forbes hopes someone will take up the taxonomic mantle and name each of these 16 to 18 long-overlooked wasps. “This research adds to the case that we need further support to train and fund more taxonomists,” Rodriguez said.
Distinguishing dozens of identical-looking wasps from the slush of a single species is not just a taxonomic exercise. Parasitoid wasps’ extreme specializations make them excellent pest managers; in Hawaii, the parasitoid wasp Eurytoma erythrinae has significantly reduced the populations of a gall wasp that threatened the native wiliwili tree.
In Zhang’s opinion, entomologists often focus on bees and ants — the flashiest insects in the order Hymenoptera — while neglecting tiny parasitoid wasps.
“They are so undervalued because they are so tiny,” Zhang said. “But they’re iridescent, with beautiful glowy eyes.”
Zhang, who works out of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, says the museum has at least 100 specimens labeled Ormyrus labotus. The tiny wasps are normally stored in drawers. But if brought into the light, their iridescent bodies will gleam, looking different from every angle.
A team of scientists from France have found skeletal remains of Homo sapiens in association with Neronian tools. The discovery (1) pegs the existence of Homo sapiens in Europe at around 56.8-51.7 kya (thousand years ago), nearly ten millennia prior to what has been conventionally thought. The site of the finding is a rock shelter named Grotte Mandrin in the Rhone Valley in France.
Homo sapiens appear in Europe much later, with a consistent fossil record found only ~45 kya. Palaeoanthropologists have attributed this to geographical barriers as well as the presence of archaic hominin species like the Neanderthals. It is important to contrast this with the dispersal of Homo sapiens from Africa to other regions of the world. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa ~300 kya, and their first remains outside Africa come from Israel ~194-177 kya (ref 3). Going by the current model, they are posited to have entered Asia around 80-60 kya. Their arrival in Australia was around 65 kya, and in the Americas (the ‘New World’) was only 25 kya.
The site consists of a 3 m deep stratigraphic sequence consisting of 12 archaeological layers. A considerable number of dental remains were recovered from all layers, with Layer E yielding a ‘deciduous maxillary second molar crown.’ The study examines characteristics like tooth morphology and enamel thickness to conclude that the single tooth found in Layer E was distinct from those of Neanderthals recovered from other layers as it came from a Homo sapiens individual.
The article elaborates that its ‘root gets thinner toward the apical part, either since it was still growing or because it was at an advanced resorption stage’ and most likely belonged to a child. The date of Layer E was determined – using the geochronological sequence and radiocarbon – to be 56.8-51.7 kya.
Layer E is marked by a lithic industry consisting of very small points that are no more than a centimetre in length. These are distinctively different from the Mousterian industry that characterise other layers.
Stone tools are conventionally classified into ‘lithic industries,’ based on their morphological characteristics and are associated with a particular group of hominins. For example, Aurignacian is associated with modern humans, Mousterian is associated with Neanderthals, and Acheulian with Homo erectus. The names of the industries typically come from the place where they were first discovered. The lithic industry found at Layer E was christened ‘Neronian,’ after Grotte de Neron where they were first documented. This tool typology is more akin to that of some younger sites.
Neronian tools recovered from Layer E show great homogeneity, which says a lot about the sourcing of rocks: almost half of the rocks come from a very large area, up to a radius of 90 kms. The ‘Layer E humans had a large territorial influence,’ the study argues. Furthermore, Neronian technologies stand apart from Mousterian ones in that they are extremely standardised to millimetric precision – and extremely light.
‘It is very likely that these points were used in advanced mechanical propulsion weaponry systems like the bow or spear-thrower, while Neanderthal groups had heavy hand-cast spears,’ clarifies Ludovic Slimak, lead author of the study, in an email exchange.
The authors also thought of employing DNA markers analysis to determine if the aforementioned molar found in association with the Neronian technology belonged to a Homo sapiens or a Neanderthal individual, but decided against it. ‘We did attempt paleogenetic analyses on a few horse teeth from the same level where the modern human tooth was found, but unfortunately it was impossible to recover a sufficient amount of DNA and we thus decided not to run aDNA analysis on the human tooth,’ said Clément Zanolli, one of the corresponding authors of the study in an email with indianexpress.com.
‘The tooth is very precious. There’s some chance there’s preserved DNA in it,’ adds Ludovic Slimak. The idea of DNA extraction has been put on hold until they have the technology to get a good DNA yield from the tooth.
All in all, the finding implies that the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens indeed shared the same space and time, albeit for just a few decades. Grotte Mandrin shows a scenario where the site was occupied by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in quick succession: a Neanderthal home, a brief modern human incursion at 56-51 kya, and Neanderthal reoccupation. The study argues that the reason behind this is that the Rhone river forms ‘the only natural path’ between continental Europe and the Mediterranean. Slimak asserts that it is no coincidence that the Rhone valley also houses the Chauvet cave, the oldest painted cave in the world, just 25 kms away from Grotte Mandrin.
1) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj9496
The author is a freelance science communicator. (mail@ritvikc.com)
Pluto’s atmospheric pressure on its surface is 80,000 times less than that on Earth, a study by a team of researchers from India, Brazil, and France has revealed.
They observed a stellar occlusion — a phenomenon where the planet coming in front of a bright star is viewed from Earth — on June 6, 2020, through a 3.6m Devasthal optical telescope and 1.3m Devasthal Fast Optical Telescope in Nainital.
The researchers studied the signal-to-noise ratio of the light curves to arrive at the accurate atmospheric pressure of Pluto. The atmospheric pressure of Pluto was found to be 12.23 μbar, which is over 80,000 times less than the pressure present on Earth.
The research, which has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, also shows that the pressure is less when it is close to the seasonal peak. There is seasonal variability in Pluto’s atmospheric pressure due to the vapour pressure from the nitrogen ice. Moreover, the poles of the dwarf planet remain in permanent sunlight or permanent darkness for decades during its 248-year-long orbit around the sun.
A compilation of twelve stellar occlusions by Pluto observed between 1988 and 2016 showed a three-fold steady increase in atmospheric pressure during this period. The atmospheric pressure on the dwarf planet had plateaued close to the peak since 2015, the researchers said in their paper. “It is in excellent agreement with the model values calculated earlier by the Pluto volatile transport model in 2019,” a release from the department of science read.
The study also pointed that the occlusion was seen as the dwarf planet is moving away from the galactic plane visible from Earth, making stellar occlusions rarer.
The team included researchers from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences-Uttarakhand, Physical Research Laboratory-Ahmedabad, and Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology-Thiruvanathpuram from India.
Written by Kenneth Chang
A year ago, NASA’s Perseverance rover was accelerating to a collision with Mars, nearing its destination after a 290-million-mile, seven-month journey from Earth.
Last Feb. 18, the spacecraft carrying the rover pierced the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph. In just seven minutes — what NASA engineers call “seven minutes of terror” — it had to pull off a series of maneuvers to place Perseverance gently on the surface.
Given the minutes of delay for radio communications to crisscross the solar system, the people in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California were merely spectators that day. If anything had gone wrong, they would not have had any time to attempt a fix, and the $2.7 billion mission — to search for evidence that something once lived on the red planet — would have ended in a newly excavated crater.
But Perseverance performed perfectly, sending home exhilarating video footage as it landed. And NASA added to its collection of robots exploring Mars.
“The vehicle itself is just doing phenomenally well,” said Jennifer Trosper, project manager for Perseverance.
Twelve months later, Perseverance is nestled within a 28-mile-wide crater known as Jezero. From the topography, it is evident that more than 3 billion years ago, Jezero was a body of water roughly the size of Lake Tahoe, with rivers flowing in from the west and out to the east.An undated photo provided by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS shows a selfie taken by the the space agency’s Perseverance rover over an area where the craft drilled rock samples. The past 12 months on Mars have been “exciting” and “exhausting” for scientists and engineers minding NASA’s Perseverance rover and the robotic helicopter Ingenuity. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS via The New York Times)
One of the first things Perseverance did was deploy Ingenuity, a small robotic helicopter and the first such flying machine to take off on another planet. Perseverance also demonstrated a technology for generating oxygen that will be crucial whenever astronauts finally make it to Mars.
The rover then set off on a diversion from the original exploration plans, to study the floor of the crater it landed in. The rocks there turned out not to be what scientists were expecting. It ran into trouble a couple of times when it tried to collect cores of rock — cylinders about the size of sticks of chalk — that are eventually to be brought back to Earth by a future mission. Engineers were able to solve the problems and most everything is going well.
“It’s been a very exciting year, exhausting at times,” said Joel Hurowitz, a professor of geosciences at Stony Brook University in New York and a member of the mission’s science team. “The pace of work has been pretty incredible.”
After months of scrutinizing the crater floor, the mission team is preparing for the main scientific event: investigating a dried-up river delta along the west rim of Jezero.
That is where scientists expect to find sedimentary rocks that are most likely to contain blockbuster discoveries, maybe even signs of ancient Martian life — if any ancient life ever existed on Mars.
“Deltas are, at least on Earth, habitable environments,” said Amy Williams, a geology professor at the University of Florida and a member the Perseverance science team. “There’s water. There’s active sediment being transported from a river into a lake.”
Such sediments can preserve carbon-based molecules that are associated with life. “That’s an excellent place to look for organic carbon,” Williams said. “So hopefully, organic carbon that’s indigenous to Mars is concentrated in those layers.”
Perseverance landed not much more than a mile from the delta. Even at a distance, the rover’s eagle-eyed camera could make out the expected sedimentary layers. There were also boulders, some as large as cars, sitting on the delta, rocks that were washed into the crater.
“This all tells a fascinating story,” said Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University.
The data confirm that what orbital images suggested was a river delta is indeed that and that the history of water here was complex. The boulders, which almost certainly came from the surrounding highlands, point to episodes of violent flooding at Jezero. “It wasn’t just slow, gentle deposition of fine grained silt and sand and mud,” said Bell, who serves as principal investigator for the sophisticated cameras mounted on Perseverance’s mast.
Mission managers had originally planned to head directly to the delta from the landing site. But the rover set down in a spot where the direct route was blocked by sand dunes that it could not cross.
The geological formations to the south intrigued them. “We landed in a surprising location, and made the best of it,” said Kenneth Farley, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who serves as the project scientist leading the research.
Because Jezero is a crater that was once a lake, the expectation was that its bottom would be rocks that formed out of the sediments that settled to the bottom.
But at first glance, the lack of layers meant “they did not look obviously sedimentary,” said Kathryn Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and who is the deputy project scientist. Nothing clearly suggested they were volcanic in origin either.
“It’s really turned into a detective story sort of about why this region is one of the most geologically unusual in the planet,” said Nicholas Tosca, a professor of mineralogy and petrology at the University of Cambridge in England and a member of the science team. An undated photo provided by NASA shows the Jezero Crater on Mars. The past 12 months on Mars have been “exciting” and “exhausting” for scientists and engineers minding NASA’s Perseverance rover and the robotic helicopter Ingenuity. (NASA via The New York Times)
As the scientists and engineers contemplated whether to circle around to the north or to the south, the team that built a robotic helicopter named Ingenuity got to try out their creation. The helicopter was a late addition to the mission, meant as a proof-of-concept for flying through Mars’ thin air.
On April 18, Ingenuity rose to a height of 10 feet, hovered for 30 seconds and then descended back to the ground. The flight lasted 39.1 seconds. Over the next weeks, Ingenuity made four more flights of increasing time, speed and velocity.
That was supposed to be the end of Ingenuity’s mission. Perseverance was to leave it behind and head off on its research.
But NASA decided five flights were not enough. When Perseverance set off to explore the rocks to the south, Ingenuity went along, scouting the terrain ahead of the rover. That helped avoid wasting time driving to unexceptional rocks that had looked potentially interesting in images from orbit.
“We sent the helicopter and saw the images, and it looked very similar to where we were,” Trosper said. “And so we chose not to drive.”
The helicopter just completed its 19th flight, and it remains in good condition. The batteries are still holding a charge. The helicopter has shown it can fly in the colder, thinner air of the winter months. It was able to shake off most of the dust that fell on it during a dust storm in January.
“Everything’s looking green across the board,” said Theodore Tzanetos, who leads the Ingenuity team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In the exploration of the rocks to the south of the landing site, scientists solved some of their secrets when the rover used its drill to grind shallow holes in a couple of them.
“Oh, wow, these look volcanic,” Stack Morgan said, remembering her reaction. “Exactly what you’d expect for a basaltic lava flow.”
The tools that Perseverance carries to study the ingredients of Martian rocks can take measurements pinpointed on bits of rock as small as a grain of sand. And cameras on the robotic arm can take close-up pictures.
Those observations revealed large grains of olivine, an igneous mineral that can accumulate at the bottom of a large lava flow. Later, fractures emerged between the olivine grains that were filled with carbonates, a mineral that forms through interactions with water.
The thinking now is that the Jezero crater floor is the same olivine-rich volcanic rock that orbiting spacecraft have observed in the region. It might have formed before the crater filled with water.
Sediments from the lake probably did cover the rock, with water percolating through the sediments to fill the fractures with carbonate. Then, slowly, over a few billion years, winds blew the sediments away.
That the wispy air on Mars could erode so much rock is hard for geologists to wrap their minds around.
“You don’t find landscapes that are even close to that on Earth,” Farley said.
The most troublesome moments during the first year have occurred during the collection of rock samples. For decades, planetary scientists have dreamed that pieces of Mars could be brought to Earth, where they could study them with state-of-the-art instruments in laboratories.
Perseverance is the first step in turning that dream into reality by drilling cores of rock and sealing them in tubes. The rover, however, has no means to get the rock samples off Mars and back to Earth; that awaits another mission known as Mars Sample Return, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency.
During the development of Perseverance’s drill, engineers tested it with a wide variety of Earth rocks. But then the very first rock on Mars that Perseverance tried to drill turned out to be unlike all of the Earth rocks.
The rock in essence turned to dust during the drilling and slid out of the tube. After several successes, another drilling attempt ran into problems. Pebbles fell out of the tube in an inconvenient part of the rover — the carousel where the drilling bits are stored — and that required weeks of troubleshooting to clean away the debris.
“That was exciting, not necessarily in the best way,” Stack Morgan said. “The rest of our exploration has gone really well.”
Perseverance will at some point drop off some of its rock samples for a rover on the Mars Sample Return mission to pick up. That is to prevent the nightmare scenario that Perseverance dies and there is no way to extricate the rocks it is carrying.
The top speed of Perseverance is the same as that of Curiosity, the rover NASA landed in another crater in 2012. But improved self-driving software means it can cover longer distances in a single drive. To get to the delta, Perseverance needs to retrace its path to the landing site and then take a route around the sand dunes to the north.
It could arrive at the delta by late May or early June. Ingenuity will try to stay ahead of Perseverance.
The helicopter flies faster than the rover can drive, but after each flight, its solar panels have to soak up several days of sunshine to recharge the batteries. Perseverance, powered by the heat from a hunk of plutonium, can drive day after day after day.
The helicopter, however, might be able to take a shortcut across the sand dunes.
“We’re planning to get to the delta,” Tzanetos said. “And we’re discussing what happens beyond the river delta.”
But, he added that every day could be the last for Ingenuity, which was designed to last only a month. “You hope that you’re lucky enough to keep flying,” he said, “and we’re going to keep that streak going for as long as we can.”
Once Perseverance gets to the delta, the most electrifying discovery would be images of what looked to be microscopic fossils. In that case, “we have to start asking whether some globs of organic matter are arranged in a shape that outlines a cell,” said Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It is unlikely Perseverance will see anything that is unequivocally a remnant of a living organism. That is why it is crucial for the rocks to be brought to Earth for closer examination.
Bosak does not have a strong opinion on whether there was ever life on Mars.
“We are really trying to peer into the time where we have very little knowledge,” she said. “We have no idea when chemical processes came together to form the first cell. And so we may be looking at something that was just learning to be life.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
SpaceX engineer Anna Menon will be among the crew of a unique space mission announced on Monday by US billionaire Jared Isaacman, who had commanded a human spaceflight mission last year.
Menon is a Lead Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX, where she manages the development of crew operations and serves in mission control as both a Mission Director and crew communicator, a SpaceX release said.
Isaacman, the founder and CEO of American payment processing company Shift4, who had commanded the Inspiration4 mission, announced the Polaris Programme, “a first-of-its-kind effort to rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities, while continuing to raise funds and awareness for important causes here on Earth.”
The programme will consist of up to three human spaceflight missions that will demonstrate new technologies, conduct extensive research, and ultimately culminate in the first flight of SpaceX’s Starship with humans on board.
The first mission is named Polaris Dawn, which is targeted to launch no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2022 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Polaris Dawn mission has many first-time objectives, so the Polaris Programme chose a crew of experts who know each other well and have a foundation of trust they can build upon as they undergo the challenges of this mission. Menon is Mission Specialist and Medical Officer.
In addition to Isaacman, the crew includes Menon, a veteran member of Isaacman’s team Scott Poteet and SpaceX employee Sarah Gillis.
During her tenure at SpaceX, Menon has led the implementation of Dragon’s crew capabilities, helped create the crew communicator operator role, and developed critical operational responses to vehicle emergencies, such as a fire or cabin depressurisation. Anna served in mission control during multiple cargo and crew Dragon missions, including Demo-2, Crew-1, CRS-22, and CRS-23. Prior to SpaceX, she worked for seven years at NASA as a biomedical flight controller for the International Space Station.
She is the wife of Indian-origin physician Anil Menon, a lieutenant colonel at the US Air Force, who was selected by NASA in December last year along with nine others to be astronauts for future missions.
Anil Menon, 45, was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Ukrainian and Indian immigrants.
He was SpaceX’s first flight surgeon, helping to launch the company’s first humans to space during NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission and building a medical organisation to support the human system during future missions. He previously served NASA as the crew flight surgeon for various expeditions taking astronauts to the International Space Station.
SpaceX said the Dragon mission will take advantage of Falcon 9 and Dragon’s maximum performance, flying higher than any Dragon mission to date and endeavouring to reach the highest Earth orbit ever flown.
“Dragon and the Polaris Dawn crew will spend up to five days in orbit, during which the crew will attempt the first-ever commercial spacewalk, conduct scientific research designed to advance both human health on Earth and our understanding of human health during future long-duration spaceflights, and be the first crew to test Starlink laser-based communications in space, providing valuable data for future space communications systems necessary for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond,” the company said.
The Imperial College London has concluded the first study on 36 participants aged 18–29 years who were deliberately exposed to low dose of SARS-CoV-2 virus through the nose, and the various facets of infection were studied. All the volunteers had no previous infection or vaccination. In all, only 18 of 36 participants became infected, and the viral load in these people increased steeply before peaking on day five post-exposure.
Virus was first detected in the throat but the viral load increased to significantly higher levels in the nose than in the throat. Viral shedding began within two days of infection and the viral load increased to high levels and remained detectable for as long as 12 days after exposure to the virus. The results are posted as a preprint serverResearch Square. Preprints are yet to be peer-reviewed.
“This paper is the first of a series of deep analyses that this unprecedented consortium will produce. The manufacture of a Delta challenge agent is nearly complete,” immunologist Dr. Christopher Chiu from the Imperial College of London who led the team tweeted.
The study did not find any quantitative correlation between viral load and symptoms; high viral load and high viral shedding were seen even among participants who were asymptomatic. This suggests how wrong it is to consider asymptomatic people as less likely to infect others as such people are believed to have low viral load.
While it is estimated that the incubation period is about five days post-exposure before symptoms show up, the human challenge study found that symptoms were found to be associated with viral shedding within two–four days of inoculation. Importantly, virus was first detected in the throat and then the nose about two days before peak symptoms showed up. Viral load in the throat and nose increased steeply to achieve a sustained peak, in many cases before peak symptoms were reached. This corresponds to many modelling studies that indicated up to 44% of transmissions occur before symptoms show up.
“With virus present at significantly higher titres in the nose than the throat, these data provide clear evidence that emphasises the critical importance of wearing face coverings [masks] over the nose as well as mouth,” they write.
Mild-to-moderate symptoms were reported by 16 (89%) infected participants. The symptoms began two–four days after being deliberately exposed to the virus. Loss of smell developed “more gradually” in 12 volunteers. “In this first SARS-CoV-2 human challenge study, no serious safety signals were detected,” they write.
Since this is the first time a human challenge study is undertaken using the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and with incomplete understanding of long-term effects following COVID-19 disease, the study progressed in small steps. They investigators from the Imperial College of London undertook maximum risk reduction at the beginning and proceeded by adding more participants once clinical features of the disease were collected from the earlier sets of people who were deliberately exposed to the virus.
Initially three participants were enrolled followed by seven. All the 10 participants were given remdesivir pre-emptively once nose or throat swabs showed quantifiable SARS-CoV-2 virus. The purpose behind this was to mitigate any risk of progression to severe disease. External experts found that pre-emptive remdesivir treatment was unnecessary.
Of the first 10 participants who received pre-emptive remdesivir on PCR-confirmed infection, six became infected. There was no difference between the viral load between those who received pre-emptive remdesivir and those who did not. Among the six remdesivir-treated individuals, there was an apparent trend towards lower viral load in the nose during treatment and peaking of viral load was also delayed. But no such difference was observed in the throat. Hence pre-emptive remdesivir treatment was discontinued in other volunteers who were enrolled later.
“This study was not designed nor powered to assess the efficacy of early treatment with remdesivir so this remains to be tested,” they write.
Once pre-emptive remdesivir was no longer used, clinical severity criteria based on certain symptoms such as persistent fever, persistent severe cough, greater than mild CT imaging changes were used for providing treatment with monoclonal antibodies (Regeneron), but no such treatment was ultimately required, they write.
In the 18 infected individuals, viral shedding was detected from the throat 40 hours after deliberate introduction. Viral shedding from the throat was detected earlier than in the nose. This is because viral load peaked in the throat earlier than in the nose. Viral load peaked in the throat 112 hours (about 4.7 days) after inoculation, while viral load peaked in the nose 148 hours (about 6.2 days) after the virus was introduced into the nose of participants. “However, at its peak, viral load was significantly higher in nasal samples,” they write.
Since some participants continued to shed infectious virus even 12 days after virus introduction, and, on average, viable virus was detectable 10 days post-inoculation (up to eight days after symptom onset). “These data therefore support the isolation periods of 10 days post-symptom onset advocated in many guidelines to minimise onward transmission,” they note.
Neutralising antibodies were generated in all infected participants 14 days post inoculation and further increased at 28 days.
How did arthropod breathing system evolve?
Arthropods, the group of animals that includes creepy crawlies like spiders and woodlice, are the largest phylum in the animal kingdom and are found everywhere from the deepest ocean trench to the top of Mount Everest.
New research shows the newest addition to the group is a 520-million-year-old (about 10 times as old as the dinosaurs) organism calledErratus sperare (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences).Erratus sperare was discovered in the Chengjiang Fossil Site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Yunnan, China. The Chengjiang Fossil Site preserves an ancient underwater ecosystem which included the relatives of some well-known arthropod fossils like trilobites and anomalocarids.
Modern water dwelling arthropods have biramous limbs, legs that have two parts – one for breathing and one for walking – but how such specialised limbs evolved was a mystery. Some of the earliest fossil arthropods, like Anomalocaris, had swimming flaps that may have doubled as gills, but until now researchers didn't know how arthropods made the jump from these specialised flaps to the biramous limbs of modern arthropods.
Erratus sperare provides the missing link between arthropods that used such specialised flaps and arthropods with biramous limbs. It has both legs and flaps.
Now with the new fossil, researchers have finally solved the riddle. The gills also probably went on to evolve into the wings of insects and the lungs of terrestrial arthropods like spiders.
Limes, lemons and oranges are taste-giving and nutrition-enriching elements of our diet. It is estimated that there are about one billion trees of the citrus genus on earth. Over 60 different citrus fruits are popular in the world today, all of which are hybrids of the three fruits mentioned below, or hybrids of hybrids, and so on: (1) The large, sweet and spongy-skinned Pomelo (Citrus maxima ;chakotara in Hindi,bamblimas in Tamil); (2) the tasteless Citron, which is used in traditional medicine (Citrus medica ; Galgal,matulankam orkomatti-matulai ), and (3) the loose-skinned and sweet mandarin orange (Citrus reticulata ,Santra ,Kamala orange ) that we associate with Nagpur.
Each citrus variety has some distinguishing feature as a USP: for example, the rare Tahiti orange, a descendent of the Indian Rangpur lime, looks like an orange-colored lemon and tastes like a pineapple.
Where did the citrus originate? Botanist Chozaburo Tanaka was an early proponent of the Indian origin of the citrus. An exhaustive study of the genomes of many citrus varieties concluded that the last common ancestor of all the varieties we see today grew about eight million years ago in what is now Northeast India (overlapping Meghalaya, Assam, Arunachal, Nagaland and Manipur) and adjacent regions of Myanmar and Southwest China (Wu, et al,Nature (2018) 554, 311-316) This region is, famously, one of the world’s richest biodiversity hotspots. A biodiversity hotspot is defined as a region that contains at least 1,500 species of native plants, and has lost at least 70% of its vegetation. The Northeast corner has 25% of India’s forests and a large chunk of its biodiversity. Here you will find tribes such as the Khasi and Garo, and nearly 200 spoken languages. This area is also a rich repository of citrus genomes, with 68 varieties of wild and developed citrus found here today.
Of special interest is the wild Indian citrus, a progenitor species of citrus that is native to Northeast India (Latin nameCitrus indica Tanaka). Some experts believe that it may even be the original member of this group. Our own wild orange has been studied in the Garo hills of Meghalaya, where only scant patches remain (Kalkame Momin et al,International Journal of Minor Fruits, Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (2016) 2, 47-53).
Recent searches, along with detailed molecular comparisons, have led to its rediscovery in the Tamenglong district of Manipur, a thickly forested place with a population density of just 32 per square kilometre (Huidrom Sunitibala and colleagues,Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution , (2022) 69, 545-558). The Manipur team could find three isolated clusters ofCitrus indica , the largest of which had 20 trees. High rainfall and high humidity prevails here, with annual temperature extremes of 4 and 31 degrees Celsius.
The Manipuri tribes call itGaruan-thai (cane fruit), but they appear to have neither cultivated nor culturally assimilated this fruit, as has been done by the Khasi and Garo people. The Garo name for the fruit isMemang Narang (ghost fruit), because of its use in their death rituals. Traditional medical uses involve digestive problems and common colds. Villages attentively tend their memang trees.
The fruit itself is small, weighing 25–30 grams, from dark orange to red in colour. The tribes relish the ripe fruit, with its intense sourness. The taste comes from phenolic compounds, which are strong anti-oxidants, and flavonoids (such phenolics and flavonoids are found in fashionable anti-aging skin lotions).
Mankind, however, seems to prefer sweetness, and orange breeders have responded. We Indians, however, are not that averse to sour tastes! We are very fond of the lime (Citrus aurantifolia Swingle;nimbu,elumichampalam ). India is the world’s leading producer, and our breeders have done very well, with new varieties (Vikram, Premalini, etc.) from agricultural Universities in Parbhani and Akola giving high yields even in semi-arid terrain.
As a result,Citrus indica remains obscure. Its status is severely threatened, it is cultivated in only a few villages, and the genome has not been sequenced.
Reducing the phenolic and flavonoid content in citrus fruit may not all be for the good, as they serve in defending the plants from pathogens. Carefully identifying, preserving the remaining wild varieties of citrus in the Northeast, and studying them in detail would not just provide knowledge. It would help future-proof the oranges and limes that are grown today, aiding in improving disease resistance as well as the health benefits that these wonderful fruits provide.
(The article has been written jointly with Dr. Sushil Chandani, dbala@lvpei.org, sushilchandani@gmail.com)
A car that dashes against an obstacle suffers damages, first to its fenders. There is a keen interest to develop materials that can be sandwiched in the fender system which will absorb the shock and prevent the interiors from being damaged. Origami metamaterials that crumple rather than tear, and take the impact, can play an important role in such situations. Researchers from Indian Institute of Technology Madras have developed such a material, which could have many such uses.
When you crush or stretch a material along a particular direction, it undergoes a modification in the perpendicular, or lateral, direction. For example, take a clay cube and compress it along one face, it will then bulge out in the sides. The ratio between the deformation along the force and the deformation in a direction lateral to the force is called the Poisson ratio. The Poisson ratio can be positive or negative. While, as in the example of the clay cube, we can easily visualise a material with a positive Poisson ratio, it is somewhat counter-intuitive to consider a material with a negative Poisson ratio. In fact, there is a lot of interest in such materials – they are called auxetics. One uses of auxetic materials is in lining the soles of sports shoes, where it offers better support when running or jumping. “If we try to crush or impact an auxetic material, it offers resistance to the crushing load as the material below will try to contract inwards, making it ‘denser’ and therefore, preventing the crushing load from moving further into the material,” says Phanisri Pradeep Pratapa from the Structural Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
In order to be useful, materials need to maintain a constant Poisson ratio when they crumble under pressure. However, they are prone not to do so, and the Poisson ratio varies as they deform. In the last decade, scientists have developed materials with constant Poisson ratio under pressure. But these are soft materials, which again limits their usability in preventing damage during an accident or impact, for instance.
Into this scenario enter a special class of materials called origami metamaterials. These combine the Japanese art of paper folding (origami) and the existing material of choice and fold it to obtain desired properties.
Dr. Pratapa, with his PhD student, has developed a special class of origami metamaterials which show a constant value of Poisson Ratio when subjected to stress. “The origami metamaterials we have developed are mechanism-based systems. These are manufactured by joining panels along their edges to form ‘creases’ about which the structure locally ‘folds’ or rotates about,” says Dr. Pratapa. The benefit is that the observed property does not depend on whether it is made from a sheet of paper, polymer or metal. What matters is that under impact the sheet folds up along the creases.
According to a paper published inJournal of Engineering Mechanics the material the researchers have developed has a “nearly constant Poisson function in the range –0.5 to 1.2 over a finite stretch of up to 3.0 with a minimum of 1.1.” An idea that the researchers had, played a crucial role in developing this origami metamaterial.
The crux of the idea is a unit cell called Morph that Dr. Pratapa and collaborators developed earlier. “This cell can transform into two contrasting geometries. One which exhibits positive Poisson ratio and the other which exhibits negative Poisson ratio,” explains Dr. Pratapa. It is possible to combine these two geometries to join and deform together as a single system, by joining them along their edges. This is what made it possible for the researchers to develop a material which showed a constant Poisson ratio when stress was applied. When the Morph cell undergoes folding, it attains two distinct configurations that look different, but have the boundaries in such a way that they can be combined without restricting its natural folding behaviour, he explains.
The story so far: Imagine creating an artificial sun on earth that can produce energy from the same process that gives us starlight and sunshine. Two recent achievements have taken us a step closer to this dream. China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) sustained the plasma at 70 million degrees Celsius for 1,056 seconds in January 2022. In February 2022, the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion experiment in Oxfordshire, U.K., produced 59 megajoules (MJ) of energy from thermonuclear fusion. These are dress rehearsals for the upcoming International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a global experiment to generate 500 MW of power by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms by 2035.
In a thermonuclear fusion reaction, lighter atoms like those of hydrogen fuse to produce slightly heavier atoms like that of helium. The whole is greater than the sums; sometimes, the sums are greater than the whole. The mass of one hydrogen atom is 1.007825 Atomic Mass unit (AMU). When four hydrogen atoms are combined, it transmutes into a helium atom. The sum of the mass of four hydrogen atoms is 4.03130 AMU, while the mass of one helium atom is just 4.00268 AMU. As we know, matter is neither created nor destroyed; hence the mass difference 0.02862 AMU is converted into pure energy by way of Einstein's famous formula E=mc2.
If we fuse four grams of hydrogen into helium, about 0.0028 grams of mass would be converted to 2.6x10^11 joules; with that energy, we can light a 60-watt light bulb for over 100 years! 600 million tons of hydrogen are fused every second in the Sun, producing 596 million tons of helium. If one-thousandth of a gram of mass can create energy to power a 60W bulb for a hundred years, imagine the amount of energy the remaining four million tons of hydrogen unleash every second by the Sun.
On March 24, 1951, then Argentinian president Juan Perón stunned the world by announcing the success of 'Proyecto Huemul' led by Nazi scientist Ronald Richter to harness energy from fusion. Not knowing that he had been tricked, he went on to say that the invention would bring “a greatness which today we cannot imagine”. People went on to believe that, with the technology at hand and two superpowers, the U.S. and USSR striving to one-up each other in technological progress, building the thermonuclear bomb were feasible, by harnessing energy from the fusion process. But this turned out to be science fiction. While the world wondered how a rural, backward Argentina could put together the technology, it soon became clear that Richter had pulled a fast one. Then in a politically precarious position, Perón had fallen for it.
But both the USSR and the U.S. stepped up their fusion research, not to be left behind. Soon, the Soviets came up with a viable design to kindle and sustain nuclear fusion—the Tokamak. Unlike the fission reactors, like the ones in Kalpakam and Koodankulam, the fusion reactors do not pose the dangers of a radioactive leak. Gram for gram, the thermonuclear power produces four million times more energy than burning coal. The only waste product is harmless helium.
“The Artificial Sun”: In stars such as the sun, hydrogen atoms combine to produce helium in the thermonuclear reaction and release immense energy in light and radiation. Ordinarily, the atoms cannot fuse. The like charges of the electron clouds surrounding the atoms would repulse and keep them at bay from coming too close. However, in the core of the stars, the temperature is some 15 million Kelvins. All the electrons are ripped away at these temperatures, forming what is known as plasma. Further, due to gravity, the pressure builds up 200 billion times greater than Earth's atmospheric pressure, making the density to become 150 times that of water. In this sizzling heat, intense pressure and dense core, the plasma of hydrogen fuse with each other to form helium, spewing colossal energy in the form of light and heat.
If only one can mimic the condition of the interior of the stars, we can artificially ignite fusion; and the fusion reactors which permits us to do so are Tokamaks.
If fusion has to occur, the first step has to be the creation of hot plasma. Heating a tiny pellet of hydrogen to millions of degrees and generating plasma is not that hard; lasers could do the job well. However, to keep the fiery plasma at millions of degrees from touching the container wall is another thing. Soviet physicists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov conceptualised that if one can create a magnetic field in the shape of a torus — like a south Indian vada—then the scorching plasma could be contained in the invisible magnetic bottle. The scalding of the walls of the container could be prevented. Based upon this theory, an experimental reactor was built and demonstrated by a Soviet team led by Lev Artsimovich at the Kurchatov Institute, Moscow.
The Tokamak is an acronym for tongue-twisting Russian terms 'toroïdalnaïa kameras magnitnymi katushkami', which means "toroidal chamber with magnetic coils". Although alternative designs such as z-pinch and stellarator have been designed and tested, tokamaks are still the rage for achieving fusion.
The research on fusion commenced by being shrouded in the worrying secrecy of the Cold War. But the effort to harness energy from thermonuclear fusion today, thankfully, is a global collaborative effort. Thirty-five countries, including India, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, European Union, are collaborating to jointly build the largest Tokamak as part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).
The idea germinated in 1985. After years of ups and downs since March 2020, the machine assembly is underway at Saint Paul-lez-Durance, southern France. With the installation of the Cryostat, a device to cool the reactor, covering the assembly is slated to be completed by 2025. If all goes well, the first plasma will be produced at the end of 2025 or early 2026. After testing and troubleshooting, energy production will commence in 2035.
The plant is expected to generate 500 MW power and consume 50 MW for its operation, resulting in a net 450 MW power generation. Although there are many experimental tokamaks worldwide, including one in India, none have demonstrated net energy production more than the input. Thus, the main task of the experimental ITER reactor is to get operational experience and train human resources. Scientists, engineers and technicians from all the 35 participating countries are working on the site learning along the way, hoping to lay the foundation for their own national fusion energy programmes.
The ITER fusion reaction will use the isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. Deuterium, also called heavy hydrogen, has a neutron and a proton in its nucleus. In contrast, ordinary hydrogen has only one proton. Tritium, another isotope of hydrogen, has two neutrons and one proton. To create plasma for fusion, the mixture of deuterium and tritium needs to be heated to temperatures 10 times hotter than the Sun's centre. Using strong magnets, the weltering plasma must be held in place, made to swill around, beams collide, fuse and release tremendous energy as heat. The heat must be removed from the reaction to boil water, produce steam and turn a turbine to generate electricity.
The plasma at high temperature needs to be sustained for a long time if commercial energy has to be obtained. One of the critical challenges in the Tokamak is the sudden appearance of plasma instabilities. We need to get experience and assess the probability of such disruptions and work out how we can manage them. Making plasma at higher and higher temperatures and sustaining it at that temperature for more and more time will provide insights on disruptions. The Chinese accomplishment of maintaining 2.8 times the Sun's temperature for 17 minutes is a milestone in this direction. For the first time, the Joint European Torus experiment used the tritium fuel mix, the same one that will power ITER. They could harvest one-third of the input energy as an output, a significant step from earlier results. The experimental results from this JET indicate that the models used to design ITER are robust, boosting our confidence in them. These experiments would help validate ITER's designs.
Way back in 1955, in the first 'Atoms for Peace' meeting in Geneva, Homi J. Bhabha saw a future in energy coming from thermonuclear fusion. The Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) in Gandhinagar and the Hot Plasma Project at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata, took the lead in nuclear fusion research in India.
T.V. Venkateswaran is Scientist F at Vigyan Prasar, Dept of Science and Technology
French researcher Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering the HIV virus and more recently spread false claims about the coronavirus, has died at age 89, according to local government officials in France.
Montagnier died Tuesday at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a western suburb of the capital, the area's city hall said. No other details have been released.
Montagnier, a virologist, led the team that in 1983 identified the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes AIDS, leading him to share the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine with colleague Francoise Barré-Sinoussi.
He was born in 1932 in the village of Chabris in central France.
According to his autobiography on the Nobel Prize website, Montagnier studied medicine in Poitiers and Paris. He said recent scientific discoveries in 1957 and inspired him to become a virologist in the rapidly advancing field of molecular biology.
He joined the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1960 and became head of the Pasteur Institute’s virology department in 1972.
“My involvement in AIDS began in 1982, when the information circulated that a transmissible agent – possibly a virus – could be at the origin of this new mysterious disease,” Montagnier said in his autobiography.
In 1983, a working group led by him and Barré-Sinoussi at the Pasteur Institute isolated the virus that would later become known as HIV and was able to explain how it caused AIDS.
American scientist Robert Gallo claimed to have found the same virus at almost exactly the same time, sparking a disagreement over which man should get the credit. The United States and France settled a dispute over the patent for an AIDS test in 1987. Montagnier was later credited as the discoverer of the virus, Mr Gallo as the creator of the first test.
Since the end of the 2000s, Montagnier started expressing views devoid of a scientific basis. His opinions led him to be shunned by much of the international scientific community.
As the COVID-19 spread across the globe and conspiracy theories flourished, Montagnier was among those behind some of the misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus.
During a 2020 interview with French news broadcasterCNews , he claimed that the coronavirus did not originate in nature and was manipulated. Experts who have looked at the genome sequence of the virus have said Montagnier's statement was incorrect.
At the time, AP made multiple unsuccessful attempts to contact Montagnier.
Last year, he claimed in a French documentary that COVID-19 vaccines led to the creation of coronavirus variants.
Experts contacted by The Associated Press explained that variants found across the globe began emerging long before vaccines were widely available. They said the evidence suggests new variants evolved as a result of prolonged viral infections in the population and not vaccines, which are designed to prevent such infections.
Earlier this year, Montagnier delivered a speech at a protest against vaccine certificates in Milan, Italy.
Montagnier was emeritus professor at the Pasteur Institute and emeritus research director at the CNRS. He won multiple awards, including France's highest decoration, the Legion of Honor.
China is planning to launch more than 50 space launches and six manned flights to complete the building of its space station, as it unveiled an ambitious plan on Thursday for its burgeoning space industry this year.
The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) said China will carry out more than 50 space launches in 2022, sending over 140 spacecraft into space.
"The year 2022 will see China's projects in space at the top of its game," Ma Tao, the deputy chief of the space department at CASC has been quoted by the official media here.
Among the several tasks planned for 2022, Mr. Ma noted that six launches will be dedicated to China's manned space project to build a space station, which is expected to be completed this year.
"We will complete the rendezvous and docking of the two lad modules with the core module under manned condition to complete the T-shaped design for the space station," said Bai Linhou, the deputy chief designer of space station system at CASC, state-run CGTN reported.
Last month, CASC said China will complete the building of the space station this year.
Once ready, China will be the only country to own a space station of its own. The International Space Station (ISS) of Russia, which is currently operational, is a collaborative project of several countries.
China Space Station (CSS) is also expected to be a competitor to the ISS.
Observers say the CSS may become the sole space station to remain in orbit once the ISS retires in the coming years.
Currently three Chinese astronauts, which included a woman, were busy building the station in orbit.
Last year, China had carried out 55 space launch missions, official media quoted a blue book on the space industry.
The CASC brought 103 aircraft into space with 48 launches in 2021, said He Yang, director of Beijing Institute of Space Science and Technology Information.
In 2021, the world saw 146 space launches, the highest number since 1957, with 1,846 spacecraft launched into space.
The United States carried out 51 space launch missions in 2021, with the total mass of spacecraft launched reaching 403.34 tonnes, according to the blue book.
Spacex’s newest fleet of satellites is tumbling out of orbit after being struck by a solar storm.
Up to 40 of the 49 small satellites launched last week have either reentered the atmosphere and burned up, or are on the verge of doing so, the company said in an online update Tuesday night.
SpaceX said a geomagnetic storm last Friday made the atmosphere denser, which increased the drag on the Starlink satellites, effectively dooming them.
Ground controllers tried to save the compact, flat-panel satellites by putting them into a type of hibernation and flying them in a way to minimize drag. But the atmospheric pull was too great, and the satellites failed to awaken and climb to a higher, more stable orbit, according to the company.
SpaceX still has close to 2,000 Starlink satellites orbiting Earth and providing internet service to remote corners of the world. They circle the globe more than 340 miles up (550 kilometers).
The satellites hit by the solar storm were in a temporary position. SpaceX deliberately launches them into this unusually low orbit so that any duds can quickly reenter the atmosphere and pose no threat to other spacecraft.
There is no danger from these newly falling satellites, either in orbit or on the ground, according to the company.
Each satellite weighs less than 575 pounds (260 kilograms).
SpaceX described the lost satellites as a “unique situation." Such geomagnetic storms are caused by intense solar activity like flares, which can send streams of plasma from the sun's corona hurtling out into space and toward Earth.
Since launching the first Starlink satellites in 2019, Elon Musk envisions a constellation of thousands more satellites to increase internet service. SpaceX is trying to help restore internet service to Tonga through this network following the devastating volcanic eruption and tsunami.
London-based OneWeb has its own internet satellites up there. And Amazon plans to start launching its satellites later this year.
Astronomers are distressed that these mega constellations will ruin nighttime observations from Earth. The International Astronomical Union is forming a new center for the protection of dark skies.
Data from human trials of India’s first homegrown mRNA COVID-19 vaccine are likely to be presented to authorities for evaluation by the end of the month, and company officials are aiming to roll out the product before April, two senior scientists connected to the Department of Biotechnology toldThe Hindu .
The mRNA vaccine being developed by Pune-basedGennova Biopharmaceuticals is currently in phase 2/3 trials to evaluate the safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of the candidate vaccine in healthy subjects. Around 4,000 volunteers have been recruited for the trial.
India has so far approved at least six vaccines that can be manufactured locally but only two — Covishield and Covaxin —have been administered to over 99% Indians. Globally, mRNA vaccines have been at the vanguard of inoculation programmes in the United States and Europe because they exploit recent advances in molecular biotechnology and are said to be quicker to manufacture than older, well-established vaccine design principles.
A limitation of the mRNA vaccines, or those made by Pfizer and Moderna, was that they were required to be stored in sub-zero conditions — a tough proposition in a country where such a degree of refrigeration is limited in availability. However, the prospective Gennova vaccine can be stored in ordinary refrigerators, the makers of Gennova have claimed earlier. The mRNA vaccine, can also purportedly be tweaked to be effective against newer variants, but so far, all the vaccines developed — including the prospective Gennova vaccine — have been customised to the original SARS-CoV-2.
Gennova has been funded with ₹125 crore from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).
One official said that the company had faced challenges in recruiting volunteers because, to evaluate the vaccine’s efficacy, it would be necessary to find volunteers who had neither been vaccinated nor exposed to the virus. Several serology surveys have shown 70%-90% of adults and children have been exposed to the virus, and hence express antibodies on being tested since March 2020.
“From what I know, the company is ready to roll-out the vaccine by March or April and will be approaching the Drug Controller General of India soon,” said Govindraj Padmanabhan, who chairs a vaccine committee of the DBT and has closely followed developments in the vaccine space.
Sanjay Singh, CEO, Gennova Biopharmaceuticals, did not respond to text messages for comment.
As of Wednesday, India has administered over 171 crore doses of COVID-19 vaccines.
Health Ministry figures suggest that while 77% of the eligible adult population in India are fully vaccinated, 95% have received at least one COVID-19 jab. Over 65% of adolescents in the 15-18 years category have also received their first dose. In those vaccinated, close to 86% have received Covishield while nearly 14% have availed Covaxin.
Scientists in the United Kingdom said they have achieved a new milestone in producing nuclear fusion energy, or imitating the way energy is produced in the Sun. Energy by nuclear fusion is one of mankind’s long standing quests as it promises to be low carbon, safer than how nuclear energy is now produced and, with an efficiency that can technically exceed a 100%.
A team at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility near Oxford in central England generated 59 megajoules of sustained energy during an experiment in December, more than doubling a 1997 record, the UK Atomic Energy Authority said in a statement on Monday. A kg of fusion fuel contains about 10 million times as much energy as a kg of coal, oil or gas.
The energy was produced in a machine called a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped apparatus, and the JET site is the largest operational one of its kind in the world. Deuterium and tritium, which are isotopes of hydrogen, are heated to temperatures 10 times hotter than the centre of the sun to create plasma. This is held in place using superconductor electromagnets as it spins around, fuses and releases tremendous energy as heat.
The record and scientific data from these crucial experiments are a major boost for ITER, the larger and more advanced version of the JET. ITER is a fusion research mega-project supported by seven members – China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the USA – based in the south of France, to further demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.
Ian Chapman, CEO, UK Atomic Energy Authority, said in a statement: “These landmark results have taken us a huge step closer to conquering one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them all. It is reward for over 20 years of research and experiments with our partners from across Europe... It’s clear we must make significant changes to address the effects of climate change, and fusion offers so much potential. We’re building the knowledge and developing the new technology required to deliver a low carbon, sustainable source of baseload energy that helps protect the planet for future generations. Our world needs fusion energy.”
Last August, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S. reported generating 1.3 megajoules in 100 trillionths of a second from fusion in an alternative approach to a tokomak by focussing 192 giant lasers onto a pea-size pellet of hydrogen.
The art of medicine is taught by the bedside. It involves detailed history-taking, followed by a physical examination which employs the senses of the physician. Humans, however, prefer concrete numbers to abstract skill and intuition. Unfortunately, most of these numbers do not have any clinical relevance. Yet, they continue to be used indiscriminately to drive irrational and often expensive treatments, including unnecessary hospitalisations. At present, the most often repeated number appears to be the cycle threshold value (Ct value) reported on an RT-PCR at the time of diagnosis.
An RT-PCR test detects genetic material in a sample (for COVID, the sample used is a swab from the throat and nose). The sample, after processing, is placed in an RT-PCR machine where the viral genetic material is amplified. So two copies of genetic material become four, four become eight in the next cycle and so on. There are fluorescent marker labels present in the mixture, which attach to the genetic material and release a fluorescent dye, which is measured by the machine as it happens (“real-time”). When the fluorescence crosses a certain threshold, the machine labels the sample as testing positive, and the number of cycles that the sample goes through before reaching this threshold is called the cycle threshold (or Ct value). It follows, therefore, that greater the quantum of genetic material (or virus) in the sample, fewer the cycles to reach the threshold of detection. For approximately every 3.3 rise in the Ct value, the quantum of starting genetic material is likely to be tenfold lower.
When a swab is done in a symptomatic individual at the peak of early symptoms, the Ct value is more often than not low. This leads patients to believe that they are at a high risk of having severe disease. The consequent fear and anxiety lead to frequent blood tests, scans and a gamut of unproven therapies. This is unscientific for several reasons.
Firstly, the Ct value is a dynamic measure and can evolve rapidly. A low Ct value at the time of diagnosis does not mean that it will stay low the next day (as the body’s immunity kicks in). Similarly, a swab done very early in the infection may reveal a high Ct value, which if repeated a day or two later, may reveal a lower Ct value. It is possibly for this reason that Ct values have not been convincingly correlated with disease severity, and serve no role in predicting the trajectory for a patient (yet, this is commonly used as an argument to prescribe tests and medicines). Secondly, several technical and logistical factors influence the value: the way specimens are collected (a quick superficial swab versus an aggressive swab), the type of specimen (nasal versus pharyngeal versus nasopharyngeal), the medium in which the swab is transported, the time lag between collection of the specimen and processing. All of this can influence the quantum of viral genetic material present, and subsequently, the Ct value. In a letter published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the College of American Pathologists (CAP) Microbiology Committee reports how a survey of 700 laboratories in the U.S. using standardised proficiency testing material from the same batch found a variability in Ct values by 14 cycles. Even within the same test at the same lab the Ct values could vary by 3 cycles for different target genes, and up to 12 cycles for the same target gene across labs. The letter reiterated the fact that these RT-PCR assays were not approved to be used quantitatively, but as a positive/negative test.
Does the Ct value have any real value at all? Studies suggest that when used early in the disease, it may correlate with transmissibility at the time of testing. This, again, needs to be viewed with the caveats of the dynamic nature of the value, and the unfeasibility of serial testing, in addition to the technical variability alluded to above. When used to decide when a person can come out of isolation in high-risk settings such as hospitals, the Ct value may be a guide in older patients, those who are immunocompromised and those who have severe disease, all of which are patient groups in whom prolonged viral shedding has been reported.
The knowledge of the Ct value offers no insight to the treating clinician or the patient, and amounts to “noise” without a meaningful clinical “signal”. It causes panic, and the value is being used to drive irrational testing and treatment measures. Labs should consider not reporting Ct values on a routine basis.
(Lancelot Pinto is a Consultant Respirologist at P.D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre, Mumbai)
A famous problem that has perplexed mathematicians since 1779 has been settled, but with a quantum twist, by a collaboration of six Indian and Polish researchers, two of whom are from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. The researchers have solved using matrix methods, the quantum equivalent of the classical problem. This could potentially be used in quantum secret sharing protocols – which will be useful when quantum computers come into play; parallel teleportation, which is a way to transferring information across distances; and even perhaps may come in useful in solving the problem of quantum gravity.
Numerical puzzles often appear simple when phrased but can occupy mathematicians for hundreds of years. The 36 officers puzzle was first posed by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler.
The puzzle can be described as follows:
There are six regiments, each containing six officers of six different ranks. The question is, can you place the 36 officers in a square arrangement with six rows and six columns such that no row or column repeats an officer’s rank or regiment?
This puzzle was guessed to be unsolvable by Euler in 1779 and proven to be so by the French amateur mathematician G. Tarry in 1901.
Euler was able to show that when you have odd number of rows and columns, as for example, 25 officers belonging to five regiments of five ranks each, the solution was easy to find. For the case of four officers, to be arranged in a two by two matrix, it was easily seen that no possible solution could be found. Euler himself believed solutions do not exist for those even numbers, n, which took the form n = 2+ 4k , for k taking values 1,2,3, etc. This was reinforced when Tarry showed that the case of n=6, the original problem of 36 officers had no solution. But two Indians, R.C. Bose and S.S. Shrikhande constructed solutions for n = 22, earning themselves the description “Euler spoilers”. Later these two mathematicians along with E. T. Parker proved that solutions exist for all n except for two and six.
Squares such as this are often encountered in Sudoku and other magic squares of size n. Euler’s 36 officers problem (for which n=6) and generalisations of it to other values of n = 2,3, etc are examples of Orthogonal Latin Squares (OLS). In this case, OLS solutions exist for all values of n except 2 and 6.
Now Tarry had explicitly shown that n = 6 (36 officers puzzle) has no solution. But suppose the officers were not classical objects but were quantum entities, would this still be true? This is what physicists who joined the group of problem solvers started asking.
Classically, this problem cannot be solved, but what if the officers were quantum entities?
Here, it is necessary to understand “quantum entanglement”.
To get an idea, take 2 boxes, one in Chennai and other in Shopian, one containing a red (R) cube and other a blue (B) one. We think of the state as RB or BR depending on if the Chennai box contains a red or blue cube. A quantum entangled state, is a weird “superposition” of these two which physicists represent by RB+BR. The strange thing about this state is that opening the Chennai box can randomly reveal it to contain a blue or red cube and the nature of entanglement is to ensure that the other distant box contains a cube of the opposite colour. Repeating the experiment with an identical set of boxes, can result in the reverse colours immediately. This leads to what is popularly known as ``spooky action at a distance”, and maximal entanglement leads to perfect correlation.
Another famous example is that of Schrodinger’s cat. A locker with a cat and a vial of poison, the state of the broken vial and a dead cat is superposed with an unbroken vial and a live cat in one entangled quantum state. Only when the locker is opened, the state collapses randomly into a state where the cat is dead or alive, and the vial of poison, broken or whole. The unopened locker is in a quantum state where dead and alive coexist uneasily!
In the case of quantum officers, the state may similarly exist in a superposition of officer states. One of the things the researchers have shown is that there is a connection between the classical OLS solutions, whenever it exists, and the nature of the quantum state associated with it. It can be used to construct what are called Absolutely Maximally Entangled (AME) states. These are states in which any subset of the entities is maximally correlated with the others in the sense of the red and blue cubes above.
In the case Euler’s problem, starting from the quantum equivalent of what is nearly an OLS solution, the researchers run an algorithm that tunes it and tries to approach the perfect AME state which will be the quantum OLS in the forbidden dimension n=6. “Given that we were studying a 36-dimensional matrix, which contained 1,296 entries, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Arul Lakshminarayan from IIT Madras, who led the study along with Karol Zyczkowski of Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. It is an interesting fact that JU, Krakow counts among its alumni, the legendary Copernicus. “When we found the state, there were some people who lost money, for they were betting that such a state does not exist,” he quips. Four other researchers who were involved in the work include Suhail Ahmad Rather from India and Adam Burchardt, Wojciech Bruzda and Grzegorz Rajchel-Mieldzioc from Poland.
“When we ran the algorithm, we realized that we should not start from the neighbourhood of the approximate solution but somewhat away from it,” says Suhail Ahmad Rather, who is a PhD student in his fourth year at IIT Madras and one of the first authors of the paper which has been accepted for publication inPhysical Review Letters. “There is an art involved in it,” says Prof. Lakshminarayan. “One should imagine a complex landscape of valleys, passes and peaks in 1296 dimensions. We wanted to reach the peak, but were seemingly getting stuck in shallow valleys, but more importantly we did not even know if there was a peak”
An amusing twist to the story comes in when you consider the three amplitudes a, b and c, that made up the solution. The three form a Pythagorean triad, that is, a2 + b2 = c2. Further the ratio b/a was the golden mean (approximately equal to 1.618) which is seen in many natural and constructed patterns. Is there then something more to the story? Is this, as Prof. Lakshminarayan feels, the tip of an iceberg?
What is the earliest record of a solar storm?
Through analysis of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, a research team has found evidence of an extreme solar storm that occurred about 9,200 years ago. What puzzles the researchers is that the storm took place during one of the sun's more quiet phases — during which it is generally believed our planet is less exposed to such events. It is currently believed that solar storms are more likely during the so-called sunspot cycle. Research now shows(Nature Communications) that this may not always be the case for very large storms.
“We have studied drill cores from Greenland and Antarctica, and discovered traces of a massive solar storm that hit Earth during one of the Sun’s passive phases about 9,200 years ago,” Raimund Muscheler, geology researcher at Lund University says in a press release.
The researchers scoured the drill cores for peaks of the radioactive isotopes beryllium-10 and chlorine-36. These are produced by high-energy cosmic particles that reach Earth, and can be preserved in ice and sediment. Cosmogenic radionuclides, such as carbon-14, beryllium-10 and chlorine-36, are produced within the Earth’s atmosphere as a result of the interactions of galactic cosmic rays (GCR) with its constituents and are modulated by the solar and the Earth’s magnetic fields. The enhanced flux of relatively lower energy particles during a solar energetic particle event (SEP) can trigger additional production of cosmogenic radionuclides, leaving an imprint in environmental archives.
India plans to execute the Chandrayaan-3 mission this August, Minister Jitendra Singh told the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.
Though the government had stated that the mission was scheduled for 2022, this is the first time that a specific month has been announced.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission is a follow-up of Chandrayaan-2 of July 2019, which aimed to land a rover on the lunar South Pole. It was sent aboard the country’s most powerful geosynchronous launch vehicle, the GSLV-Mk 3. However, lander Vikram, instead of a controlled landing, ended up crash-landing on September 7, 2019, and prevented rover Pragyaan from successfully travelling on the surface of the moon. Had the mission been successful, it would have been the first time a country landed its rover on the moon in its maiden attempt.
“Based on the learnings from Chandrayaan-2 and suggestions made by the national level experts, the realisation of Chandrayaan-3 is in progress. Many related hardware and their special tests are successfully completed. The launch is scheduled for August 2022,” Mr. Singh said in reply to a query from Ravneet Singh and Subburaman Thirunavukkarasar who wanted to know what delayed the mission. The Minister attributed them to “pandemic linked” delays and a “reprioritisation” of projects.
The last major satellite launches by the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) were the Earth Observation Satellite-3 in August last and the Amazonia satellite in February.
The ISRO has planned 19 missions until December consisting of eight launch vehicle missions, seven spacecraft missions and four technology demonstrator missions.
The ISRO has been allotted ₹13,700 crore for this financial year, nearly ₹1,000 crore more than it spent last year. Despite the several missions planned this year, the budgeted outlay this year is less than the ₹13,949 crore allotted last year.
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) has installed and commissioned Param Pravega, one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, and the largest in an Indian academic institution, under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The system is expected to power diverse research and educational pursuits. It has a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion, or 10^15 floating-point operations per second).
It has been designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). A majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within India, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative. NSM is steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and implemented by C-DAC and IISc.
The Mission has supported the deployment of 10 supercomputer systems so far at IISc., in IITs, IISER Pune, JNCASR, NABI-Mohali and C-DAC, with a cumulative computing power of 17 petaflops. About 31,00,000 computational jobs have successfully been carried out by around 2,600 researchers across India till date.
These systems have greatly helped faculty members and students carry out major R&D activities, including developing platforms for genomics and drug discovery, studying urban environmental issues, establishing flood warning and prediction systems, and optimising telecom networks.
The Param Pravega system at IISc. is a mix of heterogeneous nodes, with Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors for the CPU nodes and NVIDIA Tesla V100 cards on the GPU nodes. The hardware consists of an ATOS BullSequana XH2000 series system, with a comprehensive peak compute power of 3.3 petaflops. The software stack on top of the hardware is provided and supported by C-DAC. The machine hosts an array of program development tools, utilities, and libraries for developing and executing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. IISc. already has a cutting-edge supercomputing facility established several years ago; in 2015, the institute procured and installed SahasraT, which was at that time the fastest supercomputer in India.
Faculty members and students have been using this facility to carry out research in various impactful and socially-relevant areas. These include research on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, such as modelling viral entry and binding, studying interactions of proteins in bacterial and viral diseases, and designing new molecules with antibacterial and antiviral properties. Researchers have also used the facility to simulate turbulent flows for green energy technologies, study climate change and associated impact, analyse aircraft engines and hypersonic flight vehicles, and many other research activities. These efforts are expected to ramp up significantly with Param Pravega.
Scientists have detected what appears to be an incredibly dense star behaving unlike anything else ever seen - and suspect it might be a type of exotic astrophysical object whose existence has been only hypothesised until now.
The object, spotted using the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in outback Western Australia, unleashed huge bursts of energy roughly three times per hour when viewed from Earth during two months in 2018, the researchers said.
It may be the first known example of what is called an ”ultra-long period magnetar,” they said. This is a variety of neutron star - the compact collapsed core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova - that is highly magnetised and rotates relatively slowly, as opposed to fast-spinning neutron star objects called pulsars that appear from Earth to be blinking on and off within milliseconds or seconds.
“It's mind-bogglingly wonderful that the universe is still full of surprises,” said radio astronomer Natasha Hurley-Walker at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia, lead author of the study published in the journalNature .
The object may be continuously beaming strong radio waves from its north and south poles. As that beam swept through the line of sight from Earth's vantage point, it appeared to switch on every 18 minutes and 11 seconds for about 30 to 60 seconds, then off again. That is an effect similar to a lighthouse with a rotating light that seems to blink on and off from the perspective of a stationary observer.
It was found in a broader research effort mapping celestial sources of radio waves.
‘This is an entirely new kind of source that no one has ever seen before,” Hurley-Walker said. “And while we know the Milky Way must be full of slowly spinning neutron stars, no one expected them to be able to produce bright radio emission like this. It’s a dream come true to find something so totally unexpected and amazing.”
It is located relatively close to Earth in cosmic terms, roughly 4,200 light years away, where a light year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km.
“It's incredibly bright when it’s ‘on’. It’s one of the brightest radio sources in the sky,” said study co-author Tyrone O'Doherty, a Curtin ICRAR node doctoral student who found the object.
It fits into a category called “transients” - astrophysical objects that appear to turn on for limited amounts of time. “Slow transients” like a supernova can suddenly appear then disappear a few months later as the stellar explosion dissipates. Pulsars are “fast transients,” rapidly blinking on and off. Transients between these two extremes had remained elusive until now.
Neutron stars including pulsars are among the universe's densest objects. They are roughly 12 km in diameter - akin to the size of a city - but with more mass than our Sun. A neutron star with an extreme magnetic field, a magnetar, could potentially power the radio pulsations, the researchers said.
As for why its rotation is so slow, it could be that it is very old and has slowed over time, according to Curtin ICRAR node astrophysicist and study co-author Gemma Anderson.
“This is more likely to be the ‘first of its kind’ rather than ‘one of a kind’,” Anderson said. It also perhaps could be another type of dead star called a white dwarf or something completely unknown, Hurley-Walker said.The researchers have not detected it since 2018.“We are now monitoring this object using many different radio telescopes in the hope it switches ‘on’ again,” Anderson said.
Readers may recall our write-up in the column dated July 30, 2009 on Asafoetida (hing in Hindi,perungayam in Tamil,inguva in Telugu,ingu in Kannada) and how this smelly spice has been of use in our cuisine and also in traditional medicine. It has been known since the Mahabharata times, and has been imported from Afghanistan. The Bhagavata Purana says that one should not eathing before worshipping deity. Indian historical records suggest that we have been importing asafoetida since the 12th century BCE. The word asa comes from Persian, meaning mastic, while foetidus r efers in Latin to its strong and stinking smell. And Wikipedia s uggests that Jewish early literature mentions it asMishnaha. Rabindranath Tagore wrote about how he would buy from “Kabuliwala” dry fruits, but did not mention asafoetida, since it was surely in his family kitchen already!
It is a thick gum, or a resin, which comes from the perennial taproots of theFerula family. The article inIndian Mirror titledAsafoetida points out that asafoetida has a wide range of applications in the field of medicine. It has been suggested to fight viruses such as influenza. It may thus be worthwhile for current day drug chemists and molecular biologists to study its mode of action. (Indeed, this has been done by Professor M. S. Valiathan of The Manipal Academy of Higher Education, and his collaborators). Ayurveda specifies three types ofDosha, or deficiencies in the body, namelyPitta, Vata andKapha each of which has specific functions.
Asafoetida is believed to be one of the best spices to balance theVata Dosha. The site Home Remedies for Hiccups says that asafoetida is good to stop hiccups! You mix it well with butter, and swallow –and the hiccups stop!
How long do we need to import it? Well, it appears no longer! In a report that has appeared inThe Hindu dated November 10, 2020, and cited inThe Wire, Science, Dr Sanjay Kumar, who is the Director of the CSIR Institute of Himalayan Biotechnology (CSIR- IHBT), says that the cold desert climatic conditions in the Lahaul–Spiti area in Himachal Pradesh are remarkably similar to those in the Iran and Afghanistan, and wondered whether asafoetida cannot be grown in India too. This led the IHBT to import its seeds from Afghanistan and began growing the plant in the research centre under the guidance of the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources. The experiment was a success. Two types of asafoetida resins became available – the milky white type and the red type. He further points out that since currently the farmers in Himachal Pradesh largely limit themselves to growing potatoes and peas, motivating them to grow asafoetida and offer technical support will increase their income. The article mentioned above describes these efforts of the laboratory, colour photographs of the flowers and the large-scale production of the plant at the Centre. Dr. Kumar also told this to the Times of India in the article, Why ‘made-in-India’ heeng is a big thing.
That this herb has been used for long in traditional medicine has a long history. Groups in Egypt have used it since long. Ayurveda scholars have known it for centuries. We had discussed earlier how Prof. M.S. Valiathan and collaborators had shown, using fruitflies as models, that Ayurvedic formulations are effectivein vivo. Likewise, Eigner et al., have shown how the herb is effective in the traditional medical practices and diet in Nepal (Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 1999; 67:1-6). It is in this context that an excellent and updated report by Dr. Poonam Mahendra and Dr. Shradha Bisht of the School of Pharmacy, Suresh Gyan Vihar University, Jaipur, titled,Ferula asafoetida: Traditional uses and pharmacological activity, in the journalPharmacognosy Reviews, July-December 2012, Vol. 6, Issue 12, is of value.
Their analysis of its chemical constituents shows that the raw herb has about 70% carbohydrates, 5% proteins, 1% fat, 7% minerals, and has compounds of calcium, phosphorus, sulphur and various aliphatic and aromatic alcohols. It is the sulphide content in the fat that leads to the fecal odour. Chemical trials using rats in the laboratory suggests asafoetida plays an essential role in digestion. The group cites references to the role that the herb might play as an anti-cancer agent, and also against some women’s ailments. They list about 30 molecules which form the chemical constituents in the herb that play roles as anti-oxidants, anticarcinogenic, antibacterial and antiviral and even anti-HIV. Given this list, it is time for groups across India to isolate these molecules from this herb and study their roles in these diseases, using modern methods of molecular biology, immunology and drug design. Let us go for it!
dbala@lvpei.org
Frogs have different types of call to suit different occasions, a new study finds. It was known that birds sing different songs depending on context, yet this kind of behaviour has not been documented among the so-called simpler animals, the anurans (frogs and toads). This study, conducted by researchers from Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, has been published in the journalAnimal Behaviour.
When we humans speak, we use words to build up sentences. Only some arrangements of words have meaning and this is what we use. The same appears to be true of frogs, too. Some typical needs among frogs are to communicate a mating call to attract a member of the opposite sex and to guard one’s territory against other males. It is important that the calls given out in such different contexts be unambiguous, so that both, the calling frog and the listening frog, understand the difference. However, frogs have a limited repertoire of “notes,” and hence, using different notes for different contexts is impossible. “We wished to address whether these frogs arrange their notes into sequences in different ways in different contexts,” says Ananda Shikhara Bhat, the first author of the paper, who is with the Department of Biology, IISER Pune.
The group studied two species of frog – Humayun’s Night Frog(Nyctibatrachus humayuni) and Amboli Bush Frog(Pseudophilautus amboli).
“WhileN. humayuni produces calls with two notes (ascending and descending),P. amboli produces calls with six-note types,” says K.S. Seshadri from Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc, Bengaluru, who along with Anand Krishnan of Department of Biology, IISER, Pune, led the study. Dr. Seshadri explains that they found that alone, individuals of N. humayuni produce a single ascending note but in the presence of another male of the same species, the individual adds up to seven descending notes to the ascending note. “In contrast, individuals of P. amboli use a different set of note types [note type 1–3, as classified by the authors] when alone or when in the presence of another male but use note types 4–5 when engaging in a physical fight with another male,” he adds.
Shikhara Bhat and Varun Sane who is now a researcher at the University of Cambridge, U.K., recorded the calls ofN. humayuni in June–July 2019 from roadside streams in Adarwadi and Matheran in Maharashtra. The calls ofP. amboli were recorded at Sirsi in Karnataka, in July 2020. “Calls from 19N. humayuni and 50P. amboli individuals were recorded and used for analysis,” say the researchers.
This is the first study to examine “sequences” of vocalisations in frogs. “To the best of our knowledge, our novel data analysis method, named ‘co-occurrence analysis’, is the first of its kind that is free of assumptions about the underlying data, and is widely applicable to analysing vocal sequences of all sorts of animals,” says Shikhara Bhat.
“Both species of anurans are endemic to the Western Ghats. The two species were chosen intentionally because they were common where they are found and belong to two distantly related lineages of anurans,” says Dr. Seshadri. This allowed the researchers to examine if and to what extent the vocalisations varied.
“Ask anyone if they know how frogs call, and they will likely say ‘Croak’ or ‘Ribbit’. Our work shows that anurans go beyond this simplistic [picture]. Some of the anurans, half the size of our thumb, are capable of stringing together sounds with varying levels of complexity depending on the context.” says Dr. Seshadri.
NASA’s new space telescope has captured its first starlight and even taken a selfie of its giant, gold mirror.
All 18 segments of the primary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope seem to be working properly 1 1/2 months into the mission, officials said Friday.
The telescope’s first target was a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.
Over the next few months, the hexagonal mirror segments each the size of a coffee table will be aligned and focused as one, allowing science observations to begin by the end of June.
The $10 billion infrared observatory considered the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope will seek light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. It will also examine the atmospheres of alien worlds for any possible signs of life.
NASA did not detect the crippling flaw in Hubble’s mirror until after its 1990 launch; more than three years passed before spacewalking astronauts were able to correct the telescope’s blurry vision.
While everything is looking good so far with Webb, engineers should be able to rule out any major mirror flaws by next month, Feinberg said.
Webb’s 21-foot (6.5-meter), gold-plated mirror is the largest ever launched into space. An infrared camera on the telescope snapped a picture of the mirror as one segment gazed upon the targeted star.
Pretty much the reaction was ‘Holy Cow!’, Feinberg said.
NASA released the selfie, along with a mosaic of starlight from each of the mirror segments. The 18 points of starlight resemble bright fireflies flitting against a black night sky.
After 20 years with the project, it is just unbelievably satisfying to see everything working so well so far, said the University of Arizona’s Marcia Rieke, principal scientist for the infrared camera.
Webb blasted off from South America in December and reached its designated perch 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away last month.
A recent study from a team of environmental economists at the London School of Economics and University of Exeter examines whether Norway’s pledge to contribute $300 million per annum towards ‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation’ (REDD+) have borne fruit at the grass-roots level. In the agreements inked at the 2007 Conference of Parties (COP-13) in Bali, Norway had pledged this amount in bilateral agreements with tropical countries like Brazil, Guyana, Tanzania and Indonesia; in exchange for their efforts in mitigating global warming.
The COP is an annual conference of all countries that are members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and is the ‘supreme decision-making body of the Convention.’ The first COP was held in Berlin, Germany in 1995 and has since been convened annually; and the COP this year (COP-27) will be held in Egypt.
REDD+ constitutes an important milestone in the history of COPs. Adopted at the 13th Conference of Parties (COP-13) in Bali, REDD+ aims at ‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation,’ with the ‘+’ referring to ‘enhancing forest carbon stocks due to sustainable management of forests’.
As part of the agreements between Norway and other partner countries, Norway had pledged $1 billion ‘to fund results based REDD+ payments’. Apropos of Indonesia in particular, one of the key instruments in this system was the moratorium on granting any new licenses to convert dryland and peatland forests into centres for production of timber and palm oil.
But, the study questions, is the method working? Having paid Indonesia $56.2 million (at the rate of USD 5/ton CO₂ equivalent), is Norway getting its money’s worth? Evidently, monitoring of forest land management has been beset by the usual problems of corruption and weak law enforcement. There is also, as Groom et al (2022) note, a lack of coordination between different tiers of the government.
What if the observed differences between moratorium and non-moratorium areas just reflect the contrasts that already existed before the agreement kicked in? What if the deforestation measured is merely a reflection of natural processes (e.g. weather patterns) or economic exigencies (e.g. plummeting demand), and not a result of the moratorium?
In order to answer these questions, researchers examined the Global Forest Change Data from 2004 to 2018, which also includes the period before the moratorium. They considered factors like topography and proximity to markets in order to assess how likely each area was to be subject to forest loss due to timber culture. Of special focus was a phenomenon called ‘leakage,’ whereby licenses for producing timber and palm oil are granted for areas outside the moratorium, even as these activities cease in the moratorium areas. Leakage, as the study recognises, is a major impediment in forest conservation efforts, and brings an artificial contrast to the observed forest cover in the moratorium versus non-moratorium areas.
The results are not surprising: ‘overall, the proportion of forest cover has declined, both inside and outside the moratorium’s boundaries, by ∼10 to 15 percentage points between 2000 and 2018.’ However, the decline is much steeper outside moratorium boundaries and outside concession areas (i.e. the areas where agriculture was allowed).
Contrasting dryland forests and peatland forests – the two forest types studied here – Groom et al (2022) find that dryland forest cover is comparable between concession areas inside and outside moratorium regions. However, the same cannot be said for peatland forests, where cover is higher in concessions outside moratorium regions than those inside. They conclude that the moratoriums, while being cost effective, were effective in protecting no more than 0.01 sqkm of dryland forest in each 1.2 km x 1.2 km grid cell; while the estimates for peatland forests were not statistically significant. As for leakage, the analysis failed to ‘identify significant leakage from the moratorium to the surrounding areas.’
Calling to question Norway’s payment of $56.2 mn, which includes the reductions from avoided peat decomposition and forest fires, the study therefore argues that ‘viewed purely in terms of performance, this share of the payment could be justifiably withheld.’ The trouble lies, primarily, in the choice of baseline data adopted by the Indonesian-Norwegian partnership that, the researchers believe, could reflect natural and economic factors unrelated to REDD+, and, therefore, susceptible to biased interpretation.
The moratorium was unilaterally revoked by the Indonesian government in 2021 and is likely to be replaced by other REDD+ initiatives. It is argued, in order to be able to meet Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) targets, future schemes need to engage local smallholders whose activities contribute to nearly one fifth of total nationwide forest loss. Lastly, fund allocation mechanisms need to be formalised and consolidated further. However, a lot of it depends on the individual countries participating in REDD+ initiatives.
The author is a freelance science communicator. (mail@ritvikc.com)
Written by Kenneth Chang
On an outdoor stage in South Texas between screens with polished computer animations and a real gigantic shiny rocket behind him, Elon Musk provided his latest update on his dreams to send people to settle Mars on Thursday evening.
But while Musk’s presentation was vivid in detailing his vision of humanity’s interplanetary future, he was more circumspect about the operational details of the massive SpaceX rocket Starship that is central to those and other goals. The spacecraft must overcome numerous technical and regulatory hurdles before it can fly to orbit or fulfill a contract worth billions of dollars to land NASA astronauts on the moon, let alone colonize the red planet.
But on the stage Thursday night, Musk said he thought that Starship would be capable of establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars, which he said would require taking a million tons of material there from Earth.
“This is the first point in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth that it has been possible,” Musk said. “We need to seize the opportunity and do it as quickly as possible. I want to be frank: Civilization is feeling a little fragile these days.”
After an animated video of an imaginary Mars colony serviced by SpaceX vehicles, Musk shouted, “Let’s make it real!”
For several years, SpaceX has been working on Starship, which would be the most powerful rocket ever. It would also, unlike any previous rocket, be entirely reusable. That has the potential for greatly cutting the cost of sending payloads to orbit — less than $10 million to take 100 tons to space — and it may be possible within a few years, Musk said.
Over the past few years, SpaceX has made a series of test flights of the top part of the spacecraft that is to go to orbit and then return, showing how it might belly-flop in the atmosphere and then land. One of the flights, in May 2021, was a success while the others ended in explosions. To reach orbit requires the use of an even larger booster stage, known as Super Heavy, with dozens of engines. That has not yet been tested.
Musk has, however, routinely made schedule predictions that were far too optimistic. When he first talked of his Mars rocket in 2016 — then an even larger design — he said that the first test trip to Mars, without people aboard, would launch in 2022, and that the first people going to Mars would be leaving two years later.
When Musk gave an update in September 2019, he predicted that the first orbital flight would occur within six months.
But with 2022 already here, SpaceX has yet to try an orbital launch of Starship.
In Thursday’s talk, he expressed confidence that would occur this year, but he remained vague about details.
His talk, at the site that SpaceX calls Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, near Brownsville, mixed in a variety of bawdy remarks while largely rehashing the vision he had described in the past including his arguments for why humanity needed to expand beyond Earth, as a backup plan for the survival of humankind.
He also responded to critics who say space is a waste of time and money, noting how little of the federal budget is actually directed to spaceflight and exploration.
“I’m just suggesting we’d like maybe half a percent or something, like that would probably be OK,” Musk said, referring to budgeting for space.
He mixed in technical details about improvements the company has made on the next version of the engines used for Starship. “So the only remaining issue that we’re aware of is melting the chamber,” Musk said, describing the intense heat generated by the engine. “Just not melting the chamber is very difficult,” Musk continued. “It’s kind of the last remaining challenge. But I think we’re very close to solving that.”
He was hopeful that an environmental review by the Federal Aviation Administration would soon give SpaceX the go-ahead to try a launch to orbit from Boca Chica. “We have gotten sort of a rough indication that there may be an approval in March,” Musk said.
If that occurred, an orbital launch attempt could occur in “a couple of months” or potentially May, he said.
But he also conceded that if the FAA decided a more comprehensive environmental review was needed, SpaceX would shift the launches to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and that would cause a delay of six to eight months in order to modify the launching pad there for the massive Starship.
In addition to the eventual trips to Mars, Starship is to be used by NASA to ferry astronauts from orbit around the moon to the surface of the moon. The company won a $2.9 billion contract for the mission, outcompeting other bidders that included Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and defense contractor Dynetics. The moon landing is scheduled, on paper, for 2025, but it is expected to be delayed. In addition to work on Starship, the return of astronauts to the moon requires the Space Launch System, another large rocket under development by NASA that is also behind schedule.
For the moon mission, SpaceX would also have to be able to refill the propellant tanks of a Starship while in orbit around Earth. Musk said a series of Starship tankers would launch every few hours taking propellant for the moon-destined rocket.
Musk said he did not see a conflict between the NASA work and his bigger dreams.
“We’re going to make a lot of ships, a lot of boosters,” he said. “Adding legs to land on the moon, that can be done pretty quickly.” And Musk remained confident that his giant rocket would work. Even though there would most likely be bumps in the road along the way, he said, “we’ll get it done.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Insecticide resistance among mosquitoes and other crop-devouring insects is a major scourge in agriculture, and costs the food production industry millions of dollars each year. In a recent study in Nature Communications, a team of geneticists report a new development employing CRISPR/Cas9 – a technology that splices, or cuts, the genetic code and inserts a sequence of interest – whereby the mutation that is responsible for insecticide resistance is reversed. This, according to the study, provides an alternate solution to the standard method of developing newer and newer pest-/insecticides.
The gene in question is the voltage gated sodium channel (vgsc), wherein a mutation makes the insect resistant to the insecticide. This is so because the insecticides DDT and pyrethroids acts by binding itself to the protein coded by the vgsc gene, and the kdr alleles does not allow the insecticide to do so anymore. Here, kdr refers to ‘knockdown resistant,’ so named because ‘knocking down’ the normal, wild-type, allele renders the insect the aforementioned resistance
Allele refers to the variant(s) of a gene. Assuming that there is just one gene responsible for fruit colour (most traits in actuality are usually governed by multiple genes acting in cohesion), one ‘allele’ at that locus (the specific place on the chromosome where the gene lives) will be responsible for white colour, while another allele will be responsible for blue colour and another still will code yet another colour. The number of alleles that occur in a population at that locus is referred to as allelic diversity.
The experiment was conducted on the common fruitfly, the Drosophila melanogaster, a model species for genetic studies. It was first used as a model organism in 1910, and since then it has become a staple in genetic research for it can be bred relatively easily even in small laboratories.
The behaviour of the three insecticide-resistant (IR) mutants, commonly found in mosquito and fly species, was tested in fruitfly populations. It was found that L1014F allele was ‘highly resistant to DDT, moderately resistant to permethrin’ but ‘susceptible to deltamethrin.’ I1011M was moderately resistant to DDT and permethrin, while I1011V mutants were quite susceptible to ‘all three insecticides even at low concentrations.’
Authors argue that the different behaviour of these alleles is because ‘substitution of different amino acids even at the same position can have different impacts on DDT binding’. These alleles had been sourced from ‘different insect species in the field… displaying [insecticide resistance],’ says Professor Ethan Bier, the corresponding author of the study, in an email conversation with indianexpress.com.
‘These alleles have not previously been characterised in flies[,] so we generated them to see how they behaved in flies and some of them display different phenotypes than they did in the field caught species,’ Professor Bier added. (Phenotype refers to the outward, physical characteristics of an individual; while genotype refers to the genetic makeup.)
Next, the study took a set of Drosophila melanogaster flies that carried the L1014F allele and used CRISPR-based tools to revert the mutation to a wild-type allele that is susceptible to insecticide. In parallel, an allele drive element was inserted at another locus on the chromosome that promotes self-copying and ‘super Mendelian inheritance’ of that element. Allele/gene drive is a technology whereby genes in a subset of a population can be modified in order to ‘drive’ its spread across the population – or even the entire species – after a few generations.
This line of fruitflies was then bred twice further, and it was observed that their progeny showed very low survival in the presence of DDT. The survival in presence of DDT was much higher in the case of the control experiment that carried the unmodified insect resistant allele.
‘These results demonstrate biased inheritance of the [wild type] allele mediated by cleavage and conversion of the [insect resistant] allele to [wild type] allele,’ the paper states. When the performance of fruitflies in population ‘cages’ was examined, it was found that the gene drive properties conferred by the gene drive allele as well as the wild-type gene dramatically reversed insecticide resistance. By the time the twelfth generation was bred, DDT resistance had reduced 68.1 per cent in males and 32 per cent in females (in comparison with the first generation).
Other species have come under the gene drive scanner as well. It has been demonstrated, albeit under laboratory conditions, that gene drive systems in mosquitoes and fruit flies can effectively disseminating anti-malarial effector genes in the entire populations. It has been claimed that if applied to even 1 per cent of the population of mosquitoes, malaria could be quickly eradicated.
But, as they say, evolution is messy. The paper does acknowledge that drawing correlations between insecticide resistance and fitness can be hard to draw conclusively. When no insecticides were present, the L1014F and the I1011M alleles led to a reduced lifespan in males. In an experiment with the herbicide paraquat, L1014F mutants remained resistant but I1011M ones were susceptible.
In a 2020 study on Aedes aegypti , the primary vector of dengue, chikungunya and Zika, it was found that the larvae of wild type (i e insecticide susceptible) populations that were crossed with insect resistant mutants took longer to develop. They also had fewer individuals reaching adult stages, had smaller wing lengths and their females had shorter lifespans on an average. Bier asserts in a press release that insecticide resistance could actually impose a fitness cost, ‘making those insects less fit in a Darwinian sense.’
The highly anticipated rollout of NASA’s big new moon rocket to its launch pad in Florida for final tests before a first flight has been delayed by at least a month, until March at the earliest, the US space agency said on Wednesday.
NASA, which late last year had targeted liftoff this month for its uncrewed Artemis 1 mission around the moon and back, declined to set a revised launch date, but the delay would preclude a flight before April.
At a briefing for reporters, NASA executives said there were no specific, major difficulties slowing their schedule, but rather a higher-than-usual volume of technical hurdles to clear in preparing a large, complex rocket system for its very first launch.
“It’s really what I would call a kind of punch list of a whole bunch of things that we absolutely need to finish up and then we’ll be ready to roll the vehicle out,” said Tom Whitmeyer, a deputy associate NASA administrator.
NASA officials said workforce and supply disruptions related to the recent Omicron-driven surge in COVID-19 infections also were factors in slowing down the work.
At stake is the combined fate of NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion crew capsule it will send aloft for the Artemis program, aimed at returning humans to the moon and eventually establishing a long-term lunar colony as a precursor to sending astronauts to Mars.
The US Apollo program sent six astronauts to the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972, the only crewed spaceflights yet to achieve that feat.
In November, NASA announced that it would aim to achieve the first crewed lunar landing of Artemis, named for the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, as early as 2025.
But the space agency has several spaceflight stepping stones to meet before it gets there, starting with a successful maiden flight of the SLS and Orion, now in the final stages of pre-launch preparations.
Rollout of the towering spacecraft, a key milestone marking the public’s first glimpse of the newly assembled, 36-story-tall rocket-and-capsule vehicle as it is moved, had recently been planned for mid-February.
Under the updated timeframe outlined on Wednesday, the SLS-Orion will be trundled out on a giant crawler-transporter in March – probably around the middle of the month – from its assembly building to Launch Pad 39-B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Once there, it will take about two weeks for technicians to ready the launch vehicle for a “wet dress rehearsal” that includes fully loading the rocket’s fuel tanks with propellant and running through a simulated countdown.
Afterward, NASA will roll the SLS-Orion stack back into the assembly building for a last round of checks before officially setting a new target liftoff date. In a statement on Wednesday, NASA said it was reviewing launch windows in April and May, but the timeline could slip further depending on the outcome of the dress rehearsal, space agency officials said.
Written by Brandon Keim
Groundhog Day may be a tongue-in-cheek holiday, but it remains the one day earmarked in the United States for an animal: Marmota monax, the largest and most widely distributed of the marmot genus, found munching on flowering plants — or, at this time of year, snuggling underground — from Alabama to Alaska.
Yet for all their cultural prominence, groundhogs remain, as it were, in a bit of a shadow. Relatively little is known about their social life. They are thought of as solitary, which is not precisely wrong, but neither is it entirely accurate.
“These guys are much more social than we thought,” said Christine Maher, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Southern Maine and one of the few scientists to study groundhog behaviour.
Maher arrived in Maine in 1998 with a keen interest in animal sociality. Marmots, a genus spanning 15 species of varying sociality — including alpine marmots living in multigenerational family groups, semi-social yellow-bellied marmots and ostensibly anti-social groundhogs — were a natural subject.
She found an ideal study site at the Gilsland Farm Audubon Center, a 65-acre sanctuary of rolling meadows and forests on the coast of Falmouth. There, she has tagged no fewer than 513 groundhogs, following their fates and relationships in fine-grained detail.
The resulting family trees and territorial maps, along with the records of their interactions and daily activities, are singular. “Nobody had looked at them over time as individuals,” Maher said.
Gilsland’s groundhogs won’t emerge until late February, but one morning over the summer, Maher was out setting peanut butter-baited live traps around a shrub-hidden burrow beside the visitor center. The peanut butter soon proved irresistible.
The trap afforded a rare up-close view of a groundhog: sleekly sturdy, with small, serious eyes, delicate whiskers and fur that shaded from auburn on her broad chest to a mélange of chestnut, straw and russet across the rest of her body. One round ear bore a tiny bronze tag inscribed No.580.
“This is Torch,” said Maher, who names each of her study subjects. Torch was a first-time mother. Maher deftly transferred her to a thick bag to allow for safe weighing. She also took a hair sample for later DNA analysis and measured how much Torch wriggled during several 30-second intervals — a simple test of personality.
After returning Torch, irritated but unharmed, to her burrow, Maher started a circuit of Gilsland. She checked several still-empty traps for Barnadette, who was raising her pups beneath an old barn. Near the barn was a sprawling community garden and the smorgasbord of their compost pile.
As anyone whose vegetable garden is visited by groundhogs can attest, the arrangement created a certain tension. Charles Kaufmann, one of the garden’s coordinators, acknowledged that conflicts with gardeners had occurred but had been resolved peacefully. Among their peacekeeping tools are floppy fences that groundhogs struggle to climb.
“Audubon is for the preservation and appreciation of the natural world,” Kaufman said. “We feel bound to live within that perspective and philosophy.” Also, “groundhog pups are just the cutest things in the world.”
Along a freshly mowed path leading from the gardens into a meadow, Maher spotted a groundhog. Through her scope she identified Athos, a yearling and a sibling to Porthos and Aramis.
She named them after the Three Musketeers, which was a trick to help her remember them — but it was also fitting. A few days prior, she had observed them hanging out together at the burrow where they were born.
Such interactions belie the species’ solitary reputation, and conventional wisdom holds that juvenile groundhogs leave home to seek new territories just a few months after they are born. At Gilsland, Maher has found that roughly half the juveniles remain for a full year in the territory of their birth. When they finally depart, they often stay nearby.
“It depends on whether they can strike an agreement with their mother,” Maher said. “Some moms are willing to do that. Others are not.” Mothers may even bequeath territories to their daughters. Maher suspected that Athos’ mom had left Athos the family burrow.
As groundhogs mature, their interactions become less amicable — the Three Musketeers most likely would not lounge together for much longer — but neither are they entirely antagonistic. Maher has also found her groundhogs to be friendlier to relatives than to unrelated individuals.
The result is a community of related groundhogs whose territories overlap. Some individuals do venture farther afield or arrive from afar, which helps keep the gene pool fresh — but a kinship-based structure remains. Gilsland Farm’s groundhogs could be understood as living in something like a loose-knit clan, its members keeping their distance but still crossing paths and maintaining relations.
“You have these whole networks of sisters living together, aunts, cousins, extending outward,” Maher said. “This had been hinted at, but I don’t think people knew just to what extent it was happening.”
Daniel Blumstein, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, who leads a long-term study of yellow-bellied marmots at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, said that Maher’s data was “increasing our understanding of the benefits of having subtle social relationships.” He added, “She is allowing us to appreciate more the nuanced complexity of less in-your-face social relationships.”
An open question is whether the patterns Maher sees at Gilsland Farm are common in other groundhog populations. Their behaviours may vary depending on local circumstance, she said.
Gilsland Farm’s groundhogs live on what amounts to a habitat island; to the west is an impassable estuary, to the east is a dangerous highway. North and south are suburban neighbourhoods rich in potential habitat but bristling with unwelcoming homeowners. “They’re seen as varmints,” Maher said of the groundhogs. “People don’t seem to give them much thought.”
When young groundhogs do leave Gilsland Farm, they tend to end up run over or shot. So there are advantages to staying home, provided there is enough food. There are also mutual benefits to be shared: For example, a whistle of alarm occasioned by an approaching fox would be heard by all nearby.
From the bird’s-eye vantage of evolution, the genes of somewhat-social groundhogs spread more readily than more solitary ones, and Maher thinks that it actually represents a return to something like an ancestral state. Before European colonisation, groundhogs would have lived in clearings — created by fires, storms, beaver activity and Indigenous practices — separated by inhospitable forests.
“They were forced to live closer together, so they were more tolerant of each other and more social,” she said. “When Europeans cleared all that forest, they actually increased the amount of habitat available for groundhogs. Perhaps they became less social because they could spread out.”
The neighbourhoods don’t have to be dangerous, though. Maher hopes that a deeper appreciation of groundhog sociality may help people become more sympathetic to them and even graciously share the suburban landscape with them, the way the Gilsland Farm gardeners do.
Her work also intersects with some nonscientific efforts, such as the social media presence of Chunk the Groundhog — followed by more than 500,000 people on Instagram — and the amateur naturalists whose 15 years of backyard observations yielded the uniquely intimate accounts of Woodchuck Wonderland.
“People don’t usually have that insight into the way they live,” said John Griffin, director of Urban Wildlife Programs at the Humane Society of the United States. In his own work, Griffin often encounters a sense of groundhogs as intruders. He thinks that a lack of familiarity — for all their ubiquity, groundhogs are often glimpsed only along roadside verges or dashing for cover — leads to intolerance or an exaggerated sense of risk.
Appreciating that animals have social lives can change how they are perceived, Griffin said. “I don’t know how to quantify it, but I think it’s valuable,” he said. “Conflict resolution is all about perspective.”
Tolerance would benefit more than groundhogs. Their digging helps aerate and enrich soil, Maher said, and many other creatures use their burrows. Groundhog burrows may even create hot spots of local biodiversity.
Athos, at least, would be spared the suburban gauntlet. “The fact that she hasn’t left yet makes me think she’ll stick around,” Maher said.
Athos moved slowly along the path, eating the clover and dandelions that would sustain her through the coming winter. Every so often she stood on two legs and looked around. Maher noted her activities on a hand-held computer.
When an approaching pedestrian sent Athos scurrying into the tall grass, Maher explained how the system worked. “I just key in two-letter codes for their behaviour,” she said. “Feed. Walk. Alert. Run. Groom. Dig, occasionally. They don’t have a huge repertoire.”
She sounded slightly self-conscious about this. Passersby, she admitted, are sometimes amused that she spends so much time watching seemingly boring creatures.
With a rustle Athos returned to the path. “Oh, there she is!” Maher said, the enthusiasm in her voice suggesting that, after all these years, she still finds groundhogs quite interesting indeed.