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Subject: Science and Technology

  • [pib] Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) Galaxy

    Astronomers have discovered a new active galaxy identified as the farthest gamma-ray emitting galaxy that has so far been stumbled upon. This active galaxy called the Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) galaxy.

    Try this PYQ:

    Q.Recently, scientists observed the merger of giant ‘blackholes’ billions of light-years away from the Earth. What is the significance of this observation?

    (a) ‘Higgs boson particles’ were detected.

    (b) ‘Gravitational waves’ were detected.

    (c) Possibility of inter-galactic space travel through ‘wormhole’ was confirmed.

    (d) It enabled scientists to understand ‘singularity’.

    NLS1 Galaxy

    • Indian scientists have studied around 25,000 luminous Active galactic nuclei (AGN) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
    • They identified it as a gamma-ray emitting NLS1 galaxy, which is a rare entity in space.
    • It is about 31 billion light-years away, opens up avenues to explore more such gamma-ray emitting galaxies that wait to meet us.

    What makes it intriguing?

    • Ever since 1929, when Edwin Hubble discovered that the Universe is expanding, it has been known that most other galaxies are moving away from us.
    • Light from these galaxies is shifted to longer (and this means redder) wavelengths – in other words, it is red-shifted.
    • Scientists have been trying to trace such red-shifted galaxies to understand the early Universe.
    • Powerful relativistic jets, or sources of particles in the Universe travelling nearly at speed to light, are usually produced by AGN powered by large black holes and hosted in a giant elliptical galaxy.

    Why NLS1 is unique?

    • NLS1s are a unique class of AGN that are powered by the black hole of low mass and hosted in a spiral galaxy.
    • As of today, gamma-ray emission has been detected in about a dozen NLS1 galaxies, which are a separate class of AGN identified four decades ago.
    • All of them are at redshifts lesser than one, and no method was present to date to find NLS1 at redshifts larger than one.
    • This discovery opens up a new way to find gamma-ray emitting NLS1 galaxies in the early Universe.

  • Monkeydactyl: the flying reptile with the ‘oldest opposable thumbs’

    Researchers have described a pterosaur species with opposable thumbs, which could likely be the earliest-known instance of the limb.

    Monkeydactyl

    • The pterosaur species were reptiles, close cousins of dinosaurs and the first animals after insects to evolve powered flight.
    • They evolved into various species; while some were as large as an F-16 fighter jet, others were as small as paper aeroplanes.
    • The new pterosaur fossil was discovered in the Tiaojishan Formation of Liaoning, China, and is thought to be 160 million years old.
    • It has now been described by an international team of researchers from China, Brazil, the UK, Denmark and Japan, and has been named Kunpengopterus antipollicatus, also dubbed “Monkeydactyl”.

    What has the team found?

    • “Antipollicatus” in ancient Greek means “opposite thumbs”, and it was attached to the name because the researchers’ findings could be the first discovery of a pterosaur with an opposed thumb.
    • Researchers suggested that K. antipollicatus could have used its hand for grasping, which is likely an adaptation for arboreal life.

    What makes it special?

    • Opposability of the thumb enables the species to “simultaneously flex, abduct and medially rotate the thumb” in a way that one is able to bring the tip of the thumb to touch the tips of the other fingers.
    • Along with humans, some ancient monkeys and apes also had opposable thumbs. Humans, however, have a relatively long and distally placed thumb, and larger thumb muscles.
    • This means that humans’ tip-to-tip precision grip when holding smaller objects is superior to non-human primates.
    • This is the reason that humans are able to hold a pen, unscrew an earring stopper, or put a thread through a needle hole.
    • The grasping hands of primates developed as a result of their life in the trees — an opposable thumb made it easier for the common ancestor of all primates to cling on to tree branches.

    Try this PYQ:

    Q.Some species of plants are insectivorous. Why?

    (a) Their growth in shady and dark places does not allow them to undertake sufficient photosynthesis and thus they depend on insects for nutrition

    (b) They are adapted to grow in nitrogen deficient soils and thus depend on insects for sufficient nitrogenous nutrition

    (c) They cannot synthesize certain vitamins themselves and depend on the insects digested by them

    (d) They have remained in that particular stage of evolution as living fossils, a link between autotrophs and heterotrophs

  • [pib] NanoSniffer: A Microsensor based Explosive Trace Detector

    A Union Minister has launched NanoSniffer, the world’s first Microsensor based Explosive Trace Detector (ETD) developed by NanoSniff Technologies, an IIT Bombay incubated startup.

    Can you name some explosives?

    NanoSniffer

    • NanoSniffer is a 100% Made in India product in terms of research, development & manufacturing.
    • It can detect explosives in less than 10 seconds and it also identifies and categorizes explosives into different classes. It detects all classes of military, conventional and homemade explosives.
    • It gives visible & audible alerts with a sunlight-readable colour display.
    • NanoSniffer provides trace detection of the nano-gram quantity of explosives & delivers result in seconds.
    • It can accurately detect a wide range of military, commercial and homemade explosives threats.
    • Further analysis of the algorithms also helps in the categorization of explosives into the appropriate class.

  • Muon G–2 Experiment

    The results from the Muon g-2 experiment show that fundamental particles called muons behave in a way that is not predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

    After genetics, AI and the blockchain, Particle Physics is making several headlines these days. This is something intuitive.

    What is Muon?

    • Fermilab, the American particle accelerator, has released first results from its “muon g-2” experiment.
    • These results spotlight the anomalous behaviour of the elementary particle called the muon.
    • The muon is a heavier cousin of the electron and is expected to have a value of 2 for its magnetic moment, labelled “g”.
    • Now, the muon is not alone in the universe.
    • It is embedded in a sea where particles are popping out and vanishing every instant due to quantum effects.
    • So, its g value is altered by its interactions with these short-lived excitations.

    Main characteristic: Anomalous magnetic moment

    • The Standard Model of particle physics calculates this correction, called the anomalous magnetic moment, very accurately.
    • The muon g-2 experiment measured the extent of the anomaly and announced that “g” deviated from the amount predicted by the Standard Model.
    • That is, while the calculated value in the Standard Model is 2.00233183620 approximately, the experimental results show a value of 2.00233184122.
    • They have measured “g” to an accuracy of about 4.2 sigma when the results are combined with those from a 20-year-old experiment.
    • This makes physicists sit up and take note, but it is not yet significant enough to constitute a discovery – for which they need a significance of 5 sigma.

    The g factor

    • The muon is also known as the fat electron.
    • It is produced copiously in the Fermilab experiments and occurs naturally in cosmic ray showers.
    • Like the electron, the muon has a magnetic moment because of which, when placed in a magnetic field, it spins and processes, or wobbles, slightly, like the axis of a spinning top.
    • Its internal magnetic moment, the g factor, determines the extent of this wobble.
    • As the muon spins, it also interacts with the surrounding environment, which consists of short-lived particles popping in and out of a vacuum.

  • Xenobots: Robots developed from stem cells of frogs

    Researchers have developed robots from stem cells of frogs called Xenobots.

    Xenobots, the name itself suggests its peculiarity.

    Xenobots

    • Xenobots, named after the African clawed frog are synthetic organisms that are automatically designed by computers to perform some desired function and built by combining together different biological tissues.
    • They are less than a 1 millimeter (0.039 inches) wide and composed of just two things: skin cells and heart muscle cells, both of which are derived from stem cells harvested from early (blastula stage) frog embryos.
    • They can self-heal after damage, record memories and work together in groups.
    • These biological robots can record information about their surroundings and move using cilia – minute hair like particles present on their surface.

    Its applications

    • These soft-body living machines can have several applications in biomedicine and the environment.
    • They could be made from a human patient’s own cells, which would bypass the immune response challenges of other kinds of micro-robotic delivery systems.
    • Such xenobots could potentially be used to scrape plaque from arteries and with additional cell types and bioengineering, locate and treat disease.

  • [pib] What are Wolf–Rayet Stars?

    Indian astronomers have tracked a rare supernova explosion and traced it to one of the hottest kind of stars called Wolf–Rayet stars or WR stars.

    Space science-related terms these days are often focused on Gravitational waves, Black holes etc. But basic terminologies are very important and need to be taken care of. For example, a layman may hardly find any difference between Novae-Supernovae, Neutron star, Nebula etc. UPSC often tries to bust you with such basic differences.

    Wolf–Rayet Stars

    • Wolf-Rayet stars represent a final burst of activity before a huge star begins to die.
    • These stars, which are at least 20 times more massive than the Sun, “live fast and die hard”.
    • Wolf-Rayets stars are divided into 3 classes based on their spectra, the WN stars (nitrogen dominant, some carbon), WC stars (carbon dominant, no nitrogen) and WO where oxygen is in dominant quantities.
    • The average temperature of a Wolf-Rayet star is greater than 25,000 Kelvin, and they can have luminosities of up to a million times that of the Sun.

    What have Indian researchers studied?

    • Indian astronomers have conducted the optical monitoring of one such stripped-envelope supernova called SN 2015dj hosted in the galaxy NGC 7371 which was spotted in 2015.
    • They calculated the mass of the star that collapsed to form the supernovae as well as the geometry of its ejection.

    Their findings

    • The scientists found that the original star was a combination of two stars – one of them is a massive WR star and another is a star much less in mass than the Sun.
    • Supernovae (SNe) are highly energetic explosions in the Universe releasing an enormous amount of energy.
    • Long-term monitoring of these transients opens the door to understand the nature of the exploding star as well as the explosion properties.
    • It can also help enumerate the number of massive stars.

  • A missing science pillar in the COVID response

    The article deals with the emerging trends from the surge in Covid cases and suggests a data-driven policy approach followed by a national vaccination program to deal with the challenge.

    Surge in Covid cases

    • Recently, there has been a sharp increase in new cases and deaths from the disease.
    • Maharashtra seems to be particularly affected, but nearly all States are reporting increases.
    • The epidemiology of COVID-19 is poorly understood.
    • But some early understanding of the transmission of the virus can enable a more effective science-driven response.

    Variant of virus could be behind the spread

    • The surge is probably driven by variants from the original, as variants worldwide comprise much of the current wave.
    •  Evolutionary theory would expect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to mutate to become more transmissible.
    • However, the expected concomitant decrease in lethality has not yet been documented.
    • Anecdotal reports that the current surge is occurring more in younger adults and accompanied by unusual symptoms also support the idea that variants are responsible.
    • Direct evidence is needed from genetic sequencing of the virus.

    No herd immunity

    • Various serosurveys have consistently found that half or more of tested urban populations have antibodies to the virus.
    • However, this high level of infection is not the same as a markedly reduced level of transmission, which is what is required for herd immunity.
    • Notions of herd immunity do not fully capture the fact that for largely unknown reasons, viral transmission is cyclical.
    • Much of the infection in India might well be mild, with less durable immune protection than induced by vaccination.
    • Asymptomatic infection is more commonly reported in Indian serosurveys, exceeding 90% in some, in contrast to high-income countries, where about one-third of infections report as asymptomatic.
    • Milder infection might well also correlate with lower severity of clinical illness, helping to explain the Indian paradox of widespread transmission but with low mortality rates.

    Policy must be data-driven

    • Theories or mathematical models are hugely uncertain, particularly early on in the epidemic.
    • A better understanding of the unique patterns of Indian viral transmission has a few pillars, which can be achieved quickly.
    • First, collection of anonymised demographic and risk details like age, sex, travel, contact with other COVID-19 patients, existing chronic conditions, current smoking on all positive cases on a central website in each State remains a priority.
    • Second, greatly expanded sequencing of the viral genome is needed from many parts of India, which can be achieved by re-programming sequencing capacity in Indian academic and commercial laboratories.
    • Third, far better reporting of COVID-19 deaths is needed.
    • Daily or weekly reporting of the total death counts by age and sex by each municipality would help track if there is a spike in presumed COVID-19 deaths.
    • Fourth, the Indian Council of Medical Research’s national serosurvey had design limitations such that it probably underestimated the true national prevalence.
    • A far larger and better set of serial surveys is required.
    • Finally, we need to understand better why some populations are not affected.

    Counter the inequality in vaccination

    • Affluent and connected urban elites of India are vaccinating quickly, but the poorer and less educated Indians are being left behind.
    • Vaccination campaigns need to reach the poor adults over age 45, without having to prove anything other than approximate age.
    • Follow-up studies among the vaccinated can establish the durability of protection, and, ideally, reduction in transmission.
    • Similarly, India must capture and report data on who is vaccinated, including by education or wealth levels.
    • The poor cannot be left in the dark.

    Prepare for future pandemics through adult vaccination plan

    • COVID-19 could well turn into a seasonal challenge and thus, the central government should actively consider launching a national adult vaccination programme.
    • The Disease Control Priorities Project estimates an adult national programme would cost about â‚č250 per Indian per year to cover routine annual flu vaccination, five-yearly pneumococcal vaccines, HPV vaccines for adolescent girls and tetanus for expectant mothers.
    • Per year, vaccines for one billion adults might save about 200,000 lives from the targeted diseases.
    • Indeed, we might already be in the era where major zoonotic diseases are not once-a-century events, but once a decade.
    • Thus, adult and child vaccination programmes are essential to prepare for future pandemics.

    Conclusion

    The resurgence of COVID-19 presents a major challenge for governments, yet the best hope is to rapidly expand epidemiological evidence, share it with the public and build confidence that the vaccination programme will benefit all Indians.

  • Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector

    Russian scientists have launched one of the world’s biggest underwater neutrino telescopes called the Baikal-GVD (Gigaton Volume Detector) in the waters of Lake Baikail, the world’s deepest lake situated in Siberia.

    Try this PYQ from CSP 2020:

    Q. The experiment will employ a trio of spacecraft flying in formation in the shape of equilateral triangle that has sides one million km long, with lasers shining between the craft.” the experiment in the question refers to?
    (a) Voyager-2
    (b) New horizons
    (c) LISA pathfinder
    (d) Evolved LISA

    Baikal GVD

    • The Baikal-GVD is one of the three largest neutrino detectors in the world along with the IceCube at the South Pole and ANTARES in the Mediterranean Sea.
    • The construction of this telescope, which started in 2016, is motivated by the mission to study in detail the elusive fundamental particles called neutrinos and to possibly determine their sources.
    • It will help understanding the origins of the universe since some neutrinos were formed during the Big Bang while others continue to be formed as a result of supernova explosions or because of nuclear reactions in the Sun.
    • An underwater telescope such as the GVD is designed to detect high-energy neutrinos that may have come from the Earth’s core, or could have been produced during nuclear reactions in the Sun.

    What are fundamental particles?

    • So far, the understanding is that the universe is made of some fundamental particles that are indivisible.
    • Broadly, particles of matter that scientists know about as of now can be classified into quarks and leptons.
    • Explorations has led to the discovery of over 12 such quarks and leptons, but three of these (protons, neutrons and electrons) is what everything in the world is made up of.
    • Protons (carry a positive charge) and neutrons (no charge) are types of quarks, whereas electrons (carry a negative charge) are types of leptons.
    • These three particles make what is referred to as the building block of life– the atom.

    Why do scientists study fundamental particles?

    • Studying what humans and everything around them is made up of gives scientists a window into understanding the universe a better way.
    • This is one reason why scientists are so keen on studying neutrinos (not the same as neutrons), which are also a type of fundamental particle.
    • Fundamental means that neutrinos, like electrons, protons and neutrons cannot be broken down further into smaller particles.

    So where do neutrinos fit in?

    • What makes neutrinos especially interesting is that they are abundant in nature, with about a thousand trillion of them passing through a human body every second.
    • In fact, they are the second most abundant particles, after photons, which are particles of light.
    • But while neutrinos are abundant, they are not easy to catch, this is because they do not carry a charge, as a result of which they do not interact with matter.
    • One way of detecting neutrinos is in water or ice, where neutrinos leave a flash of light or a line of bubbles when they interact.
    • To capture these signs, scientists have to build large detectors.

    Back2Basics: Lake Baikal

    • Lake Baikal is a rift lake located in southern Siberia, Russia, between Irkutsk Oblast to the northwest and the Buryat Republic to the southeast.
    • It is the largest freshwater lake by volume in the world, containing 22 to 23% of the world’s fresh surface water.
    • With a maximum depth of 1,642 m it is the world’s deepest lake.
    • It is among the world’s clearest lakes and is the world’s oldest lake, at 25–30 million years. It is the seventh-largest lake in the world by surface area.
    • Lake Baikal formed as an ancient rift valley and has a long, crescent shape, with a surface area of 31,722 km2 (12,248 sq mi), slightly larger than Belgium.
    • The region to the east of Lake Baikal is referred to as Transbaikalia or as the Transbaikal and the loosely defined region around the lake itself is sometimes known as Baikalia.
    • UNESCO declared Lake Baikal a World Heritage Site in 1996.

  • [pib] PRISM Scheme

    The Ministry of Science & Technology has inaugurated an Alignment and Awareness Event for the publicity of the DSIR-PRISM Scheme.

    Crux lies in the acronym. Remember the primary aim and objectives. UPSC can also go with numbers esp. the grants.

    PRISM Scheme

    • PRISM stands for Promoting Innovations in Individuals, Start-ups and MSMEs.
    • It is an initiative of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR).
    • It is aimed at transforming an individual innovator into a successful technopreneur by promoting, supporting, and funding implementable and commercially viable innovations created for society.
    • Under the initiative, an Indian innovator- student, professional and common citizen – is provided technical, strategic, and financial assistance by DSIR for idea development, prototype development and pilot scaling, and patenting.
    • The programme is implemented across various sectors from energy to healthcare to waste management and others.

    Grants under the scheme

    The grant is given in two phases:

    1. Phase I and Phase II, catering to both the initial innovation stage and the advanced enterprise setup phase through DSIR outreach-cum-cluster innovation centres available throughout India.
    2. The grant amount in Phase I is around Rs. 2.0 lakhs to Rs. 20.00 lakhs and in Phase II maximum of Rs. 50.00 lakhs.

    Success of the scheme

    • The scheme has been instrumental in supporting individual innovators enabling inclusive development of India.
    • It has extended its support to any citizen through direct benefit transfer in the core technology areas such as-

    Affordable Healthcare, Water, Sewage Management, Green Technology, Clean Energy, Industrially Utilizable Smart Materials, Waste to Wealth aligned with our national objectives

  • Large Hadron Collider beauty Experiment

    The LHCb experiment at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) has announced the results of their latest analysis of data.

    LHCb Experiment: An easy explanation

    • LHCb is an experiment set up to explore what happened after the Big Bang that allowed the matter to survive and build the Universe we inhabit today.
    • Fourteen billion years ago, the Universe began with a bang.
    • Crammed within an infinitely small space, energy coalesced to form equal quantities of matter and antimatter.
    • But as the Universe cooled and expanded, its composition changed.
    • Just one second after the Big Bang, antimatter had all but disappeared, leaving the matter to form everything that we see around us — from the stars and galaxies to the Earth and all life that it supports.

    What is the new finding?

    • CERN scientists are excited enough to reveal that if the anomaly they had detected was confirmed.
    • Because, if confirmed, it would require a new physical process, such as the existence of new fundamental particles or interactions.

    What is this excitement all about?

    It is necessary to delve into the world of elementary particles to understand this.

    (1) Particle zoo

    Until now it is believed that the electron, muon and tauon and their antiparticles, though they differ in mass, behave similarly in particle interactions.

    • Broadly speaking, elementary particles are classified into the particles called baryons – which include protons, neutrons and their antiparticles the antiprotons etc.
    • The “middle mass” particles, roughly speaking, are called the mesons and they include members such as the K and B particles.
    • We then have the leptons, which include the electron and its cousins the muon and tau particles and the anti-particles.
    • At a still smaller scale, there are tiny particles called quarks and gluons.
    • There are six flavours of quarks: up, down, truth, beauty, charm and strange. They too have antiquarks associated with them.

    In this particle zoo, while the baryons are made up of combinations of three quarks, the mesons contain two quarks, more accurately a quark and antiquark pair, and the leptons are truly fundamental and are thought to be indivisible.

    Do you know?

    Higgs Boson is called the god particle.

    (2) Colliding particle beams

    By interactions here, is meant the following:

    • If a huge particle accelerator such as the LHC were to accelerate beams of hadrons (such as protons) to very high speeds, a fraction of that of light, and then cause them to collide.
    • Basically, smash through the repulsive nuclear forces and shatter them, the hadrons would break up into constituents which would recombine to form short-lived particles, which would decay into stabler states.
    • Roughly speaking, during this process, they are imaged in a huge multistorey detector and the number of specific processes and particles are counted.

    (3) Lepton universality principle

    • One such process that was measured was the decay of a meson B (which contained the beauty quark) into K-meson (which contains the strange quark) and a muon-antimuon pair, and this was compared with the decay of B into K and an electron-antielectron pair.
    • The expectation is that the ratio of the strengths of these two sets of interactions would be just one.
    • This is because the muons are not essentially different from the electrons as per the Standard Model, the presently accepted theoretical model of all elementary particle interactions.
    • This is called the lepton universality principle.