NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: India recorded a significant 19.3 per cent drop in particulate pollution in 2022 compared to 2021, the second-highest reduction in the world after Bangladesh, adding an average of one year to the life expectancy of every citizen, according to a new report.

The annual report, ''Air Quality Life Index'' 2024, by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) also said that Indians are likely to lose 3.6 years of life expectancy if the country fails to meet the World Health Organisation's annual PM2.5 concentration standard of 5 micrograms per cubic metre.

The researchers attributed the decline in particulate levels in India and other South Asian countries primarily to favourable meteorological conditions and a reduced number of thermal inversions -- when a layer of warm air traps cooler air near the ground, causing pollution to build up.

PM2.5 concentrations in India in 2022 were around 9 micrograms per cubic metre (19.3 per cent) lower compared to 2021.

The most significant declines were observed in Purulia and Bankura districts of West Bengal, followed by Dhanbad, Purbi, Paschim Singhbhum, Paschim Medinipur and Bokaro districts in Jharkhand. In each of these districts, PM2.5 concentrations dropped by over 20 micrograms per cubic metre.

The report said that the northern plains, the most polluted region in India, saw a 17.2 per cent reduction in particulate levels in 2022 compared to 2021.

However, despite this improvement, the average resident in this region is still likely to lose about 5.4 years of life expectancy if the current pollution levels persist. On the other hand, if the decline in particulate levels continues at the same rate in the coming years, life expectancy in the northern plains could increase by 1.2 years, it said.

''The report clearly shows that even a modest reduction in air pollution levels could lead to increased life expectancy. Air pollution, even at low levels, significantly shortens lives and poses serious public health risks.

''Our current national air quality standards fall short of protecting public health and must be revised in line with World Health Organisation guidelines. We have the tools and technologies to solve the air pollution crisis, what we need now is the political will to implement them,'' said Avinash Chanchal, Campaign Manager, Greenpeace India.

The report said that PM2.5 concentrations declined by 19 per cent on average in districts with cities covered by India's flagship programme on air quality management, the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), while districts not covered by the programme saw a 16 per cent decline.

However, barring Dhanbad, none of the districts with the highest decline in PM2.5 concentrations are covered by the NCAP framework.

Launched in 2019, the NCAP is India's first national effort to set clean air targets, aiming for a 20-30 per cent reduction in particulate pollution by 2024, using 2017 as the base year. The revised target is a 40 per cent reduction by 2026, with 2019-20 as the base year.

The programme covers 131 non-attainment cities, which consistently failed to meet the prescribed national ambient air quality standards between 2011 and 2015.

''As of 2022, pollution in districts with non-attainment cities has declined by 18.8 per cent relative to 2017, adding 10.8 months to the life expectancy of 446.7 million residents of these districts and four months to India's national average life expectancy,'' the report said.

If India meets the NCAP target, residents in non-attainment areas could see their life expectancy increase by two years compared to 2017. India's national average life expectancy would also increase by an additional 7.8 months as a result, it said.

The EPIC team emphasised that in India, where the annual PM2.5 standard is 40 micrograms per cubic metre, more than 40 per cent of the population breathes air that exceeds this standard.

However, India is responding by implementing innovative policies. In 2019, Gujarat launched the world's first market for particulate pollution, which has since reduced pollution by 20-30 per cent in Surat and is rapidly expanding to other cities and states.

These types of innovative policies demonstrate that it is possible to achieve improvements in air quality and people's health, without unduly impeding economic growth, the researchers said.

The report also praised India's clean cooking programme, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, saying that the decline in emissions from the residential sector in India can largely be attributed to the nationwide rollout of this scheme.

It attributed the reduction in transport-related emissions to the decreased use of diesel in the transport sector.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The Space Applications Centre (ISRO) in Ahmedabad and AlphaMERS Ltd., Bengaluru, formalized their partnership with an MOU signed on July 4, 2024. The collaboration aims to leverage combined resources to develop and refine a robust Artificial Intelligence model designed to identify and profile marine pollution.

The cutting-edge AI technology will focus on detecting macro plastics and oil spills in India's coastal waters through remote sensing capabilities. This initiative underscores a significant step toward environmental conservation and technological advancement in the fight against marine pollution.

The partnership highlights the critical role of interdisciplinary cooperation in addressing environmental challenges, setting a precedent for future scientific collaborations aimed at preserving ocean health.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA officials may reach a definite decision as early as Saturday on whether they have approved Boeing's troubled Starliner can return to Earth with its flight crew Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams on board, or whether the spacecraft will be brought back to Earth unmanned and by remote control, the US space agency announced in an official blog. 

"NASA’s decision on whether to return Starliner to Earth with astronauts aboard is expected no earlier than Saturday, August 24 at the conclusion of an agency-level review chaired by Ken Bowersox, the associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate," the release said on Thursday. The agency flight readiness review is where any formal dissents are presented and reconciled, NASA said. 

"Other agency leaders who routinely participate in launch and return readiness reviews for crewed missions include NASA’s administrator, deputy administrator, associate administrator, various agency center directors, the Flight Operations Directorate, and agency technical authorities," the blog said. NASA officials have already said Wilmore and Williams may stay on the International Space Station for another six months, making their stay nine months in all on what was due to have only been a visit of a few days before the Starliner developed five helium leaks and failures of five of its 28 maneuvering thrusters. NASA will host a televised news conference following the review’s conclusion to discuss the agency’s decision and next steps. More information on the news conference will be shared once confirmed. After the agency-level decision, program and flight control teams will continue preparing for Starliner’s return, including training sessions and other actions as appropriate.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: On 23 August last year, India became the fourth country to land on the moon and the first to reach its southern polar region. To honour this landmark achievement, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced August 23 as “National Space Day”. The country will celebrate its maiden National Space Day with the theme “Touching Lives while Touching the Moon: India’s Space Saga.
  
A myriad of events will be held highlighting India’s remarkable achievements in space, profound benefits to society, and boundless opportunities for people from all walks of life to engage with the Indian space programme. A distinguished Scientist of ISRO and Director of U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, M Sankaran spoke exclusively to Akashvani News on the relevance of National Space Day. Mr. Sankaran informed that the President will inaugurate the main event in New Delhi and as a run-up to this event robotic challenges and hackathons are being organised across the country to create awareness about India’s strides in the Space sector.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: In a first, NASA has used laser communication technology to send 4K video streams from an aircraft to the International Space Station (ISS) and back, a feat that will pave the way for providing live video coverage of astronauts on the Moon during the Artemis missions.

While the US space agency has historically relied on radio waves to send information to and from space, it for the first time streamed 4K video footage from an aircraft to the ISS and back using optical or laser communications.

Laser communications are 10 to 100 times more data faster than radio frequency systems as they use infrared light to transmit.

Led by a team of engineers at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the feat was achieved by installing a portable laser terminal on the belly of a Pilatus PC-12 aircraft, which flew over Lake Erie sending data from the aircraft to an optical ground station in Cleveland.

From there, it was sent over an Earth-based network to NASA's White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where scientists used infrared light signals to send the data, the agency said.

NASA noted that the signals travelled 22,000 miles away from Earth to NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), an orbiting experimental platform.

The LCRD then relayed the signals to the Integrated LCRD LEO User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) satellite that was mounted on the ISS, which then sent data back to Earth.

The signal could penetrate cloud coverage more effectively with the help of High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN) -- a new system developed at Glenn.

Daniel Raible, principal investigator for the HDTN project at Glenn called it a "tremendous accomplishment".

He noted that future experiments can "now build upon the success of streaming 4K HD videos to and from the space station".

This will enable future capabilities, "like HD video conferencing, for our Artemis astronauts, which will be important for crew health and activity coordination", Raible said.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced a transformative initiative for India's space sector in the Union Budget 2024-25, introducing a Rs 1,000 crore venture capital fund. This substantial fund aims to boost the space economy, targeting a fivefold increase in its size over the next decade.

The venture capital fund is designed to attract additional private sector investments, further galvanizing growth in the space economy. Siddharth Mody, Partner at JSA Advocates and Solicitors, praised this government commitment, highlighting its potential to bring India's space economy from USD 8.4 billion to USD 44 billion by 2033. Mody emphasized that the fund could mobilize capital and foster an environment conducive to early-stage space tech companies.

Industry experts like Sanjay Kumar, CEO of Geospatial World, also underlined the significance of geospatial technologies in driving citizen participation, social development, and economic transformation. Kumar pointed out that this budgetary allocation enhances the role of geospatial technologies, crucial for India's milestone of Viksit Bharat by 2047.

Saurabh Rai, CEO of Arahas, expressed optimism, underscoring the possibilities for collaboration and innovation in the space sector. The venture capital fund is set to support private sector-driven research and advanced space technologies, facilitating India's growing presence in space exploration and satellite services.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: ISRO's Aditya-L1 spacecraft has successfully captured stunning images of recent solar flares, the space agency announced on Monday.

Having reached the Lagrangian point (L1)—located 1.5 million km away from Earth—the spacecraft's onboard instruments, SUIT and VELC, documented the Sun's dynamic activities during May 2024.

The captured phenomena include several X-class and M-class flares, which resulted in significant geomagnetic storms, showcasing the mission's success in providing valuable solar observations.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, stated that artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually eliminate all jobs, but he believes this is not necessarily a bad development, reported CNN. Speaking at a startup and tech event in Paris on Thursday, Musk said, "Probably none of us will have a job,".

Elon Musk was speaking remotely via webcam at the Viva Tech event where he predicted a future where jobs would be "optional." He said, "If you want to do a job that's kinda like a hobby, you can do a job." Musk added, "But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want."

Musk highlighted that for this scenario to succeed, there would need to be a "universal high income," which should not be confused with universal basic income, however, he did not elaborate much on this concept. The Universal basic income (UBI) refers to the government providing a certain amount of money to everyone, regardless of their earnings.

"There would be no shortage of goods or services," Musk stated. He highlighted that AI capabilities have advanced rapidly over the past few years, advancing so quickly that regulators, companies, and users are still figuring out how to utilize the technology responsibly. In the past also Musk expressed his concerns about AI. During his keynote on Thursday, he described the technology as his biggest fear. He cited the "Culture Book Series" by Ian Banks, a utopian fictionalized depiction of a society run by advanced technology, as the most realistic and "the best envisioning of a future AI."

Musk questioned whether people would feel emotionally fulfilled in a future without jobs. "The question will really be one of meaning - if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?" Musk said.

He added, "I do think there's perhaps still a role for humans in this - in that we may give AI meaning." He also advised parents to control and limit the amount of social media their children consume, saying that social media platforms "are being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI."

Industry experts are continuously raising concerns over how various industries and jobs will be transformed as AI proliferates in the market. CNN reports that in January, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab found that workplaces are adopting AI more slowly than some had expected and feared. The report also noted that many jobs previously identified as vulnerable to AI were not economically beneficial for employers to automate at that time.

Experts largely believe that many jobs requiring high emotional intelligence and human interaction, such as mental health professionals, creatives, and teachers, will not need replacing.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Shrinivas R Kulkarni, an Indian-origin professor of astronomy from the US will be bestowed the prestigious Shaw Prize in Astronomy for his ground-breaking discoveries about millisecond pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and other variable or transient astronomical objects.

Apart from Kulkarni, who is the George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, the other Shaw Prize awardees are Swee Lay Thein and Stuart Orkin, both from the US, who received the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine is awarded in equal shares, and Peter Sarnak, another US scientist who received the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences.

“The Shaw Prize in Astronomy is awarded to Shrinivas R Kulkarni, for his ground-breaking discoveries about millisecond pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and other variable or transient astronomical objects.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: India's rank on the World Economic Forum's Travel & Tourism Development Index 2024 has risen to 39th place, with global tourism activities returning to pre-pandemic levels, the annual report showed on Tuesday.

While the US topped the list, India is ranked highest in South Asia and among the lower-middle-income economies, the WEF said.

India was ranked 54th in the previously published index in 2021, though changes made to the index parameters limit its comparability to earlier years.

After the US, Spain, Japan, France and Australia figure among the top five in the 2024 list.

The index, prepared in collaboration with the University of Surrey, showed India is highly price-competitive (18th) and boasts competitive Air Transport (26th) and Ground and Port (25th) infrastructure.

In particular, India's strong Natural (6th), Cultural (9th) and Non-Leisure (9th) Resources help drive travel, and the country is only one of three to score in the top 10 for all the resource pillars, the WEF said.

Moreover, despite a decline compared to 2019, the country still scores well for travel and tourism demand sustainability, especially thanks to more sustainable long stays among inbound visitors.

It further said that as with many economies, travel and tourism enabling conditions in India have been impacted by global inflationary supply-side trends for the sector, with price competitiveness declining, while air transport and tourist services infrastructure are yet to recover to the 2019 level.

As a result, the country's overall TTDI (Travel and Tourism Development Index) score is 2.1 per cent below its 2019 level.

High-income economies in Europe and Asia-Pacific continued to lead the index.

''International tourist arrivals and the travel and tourism sector's contribution to global GDP are expected to return to pre-pandemic levels this year, driven by the lifting of COVID-19-related travel restrictions and strong pent-up demand,'' the WEF said.

The Middle East had the highest recovery rates in international tourist arrivals (20 per cent above the 2019 level), while Europe, Africa and the Americas all showed a strong recovery of around 90 per cent in 2023.

The biennial index analysed the travel and tourism sectors of 119 countries around a range of factors and policies.

Germany was ranked 6th, followed by the UK, China, Italy and Switzerland in the top ten.

The results highlighted that high-income economies generally continue to have more favourable conditions for travel and tourism development.

This was helped by conducive business environments, dynamic labour markets, open travel policies, strong transport and tourism infrastructure, and well-developed natural, cultural and non-leisure attractions.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Indian-origin astronaut Captain Sunita Williams and her fellow veteran NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore are set to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) on a brand new spacecraft, the Boeing Starliner on Monday.

The duo will launch into space from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida in the first crewed test flight of Starliner. The flight, if it succeeds, will become the second private firm being able to provide crew transport to and from the ISS.

The launch is scheduled to take place on 10:34 p.m. EDT Monday, May 6, ie May 7 at 8.04 am Indian Standard Time.

Boeing’s competitor Elon Musk’s SpaceX was able to fly its crew flight test in the year 2020. It has sent 12 crewed missions to the ISS since 2020. After a botched attempt in December 2019, Starliner made a successful second uncrewed test flight in May 2022.

Williams, 59, a retired US Navy captain and Wilmore will pilot the flight, which Boeing is calling its Crew Flight Test (CFT) and that will be docked with the ISS for about a week. The Starliner flight to the ISS is expected to last about 26 hours, and the two astronauts will live and work on the ISS for 8 days before undocking and returning to Earth on May 15.

During the test flight, the astronaut duo will take the Starliner through a series of tests before NASA certifies it to be fit to fly to space on rotational missions to the ISS under the US space agency’s Commercial Crew Program.

Unlike previous US capsules that splashed down in the sea on returning to Earth, the Starliner will touch down on land at a site somewhere in the western part of the United States, NASA said.

Both the astronoauts will be launching on a United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket to the International Space Station.

Williams and Wilmore were both former commanders of the International Space Station.

Williams, from Needham, Massachusetts, earned a physical science degree from the US Naval Academy, and a master’s in engineering management from the Florida Institute of Technology. Her first spaceflight was Expedition 14/15 (from December 2006 to June 2007) launching on space shuttle Discovery’s STS-116 mission to reach the International Station, according to NASA.

While onboard, Williams established a world record for women at the time with four spacewalks. She concluded her tour of duty by returning to Earth with shuttle Atlantis’ STS-117 flight to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California on June 22, 2007.

Selected as an astronaut by NASA in June 1998, Williams has spent a total of 322 days in space on two missions and accumulated 50 hours and 40 minutes of cumulative EVA time on seven spacewalks.

Williams worked with Roscosmos on its contribution to the space station and with the first Expedition crew.

Meanwhile, 61-year-old, Wilmore has logged 178 days in space and has 25 hours and 36 minutes of time on four spacewalks.

Boeing has planned six manned missions for the platform over the next six years, the projected end of the ISS’ operating lifespan.

NASA plans to use both SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner to send up astronauts at least every six months from US soil. Both Boeing and SpaceX were given the responsibility in 2014 by NASA to send commercial crew missions to the ISS.

Boeing received over USD 4 billion in US federal funds to develop the Starliner, while SpaceX received about USD 2.6 billion.

Meanwhile, India has its own human spaceflight program, the Gaganyaan led by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It envisages demonstration of human spaceflight capability by launching crew of 3 members to an orbit of 400 km for a 3 days mission and bring them back safely to earth, by landing in Indian sea waters.

Earlier in February this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the names of the four astronauts who will be part of Gaganyaan, slated to be launched in 2024-25.

The four chosen Indian Air Force pilots – Group Captain Prashanth Nair, Group Captain Ajit Krishnan, Group Captain Angad Pratap, and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla- were trained at Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia. 
 

MUMBAI [Maha Media]: A team at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have developed a technique that improves the efficiency of robots, by helping them communicate with each other in a more efficient manner than earlier. In the new study, the team proposes three novel algorithms that help robots determine their task capability in real-time, allowing them to dynamically allocate tasks based on their individual strengths and limitations.

"Imagine two similar robots carrying an object. Sometimes because of small changes in the environment, like an uneven floor or the shape of the object, one robot may have a better grip on the object than the other. Our algorithms help identify these changes and make real-time adjustments to improve performance," said Keshab, member of developer team. The algorithm identifies less capable robots, thereby enabling task reallocation or determining the number of required robots for efficient utilisation of the robot group. The algorithms, residing on the robots and a central monitoring computer, collect data from each of the robots in the group in real-time to make decisions.

"Our algorithms are truly innovative compared to conventionally used ones because those (conventional) are much more computationally intensive. This makes our method much faster and more efficient in task allocation in response to real-time changes," said Prof. Anirban Guha, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Bombay. The first algorithm, called TaskCapability, assesses each of the robots in the group and determines various parameters, like grip strength and stability, and assigns a value to them.

Next, the second algorithm, called Online Task Capability, compares the parameters with other robots to determine which of the robots are underperforming. Finally, the third algorithm named Online Task Allocator, uses the information from the other two algorithms to determine how many robots are needed and what task each should perform.

The set of three algorithms ensures a balanced workflow where each robot contributes according to its ability, leading to an overall boost in productivity. Moreover, the real-time communication between various robots also helps to minimise the chance of errors and robot collisions, enhancing their cooperative work.

The team tested their new method on two well-known industrial robots - UR5 and FrankaEmika Panda. They demonstrated that the new algorithm was much faster at performing tasks than conventionally used algorithms. The new algorithm also significantly reduced the computation time of the robots by 85 per cent, enabling real-time adjustments in cooperative operation.

The new algorithms, if implemented, could boost the performance of cooperative robots by speeding up the task and removing inefficient and redundant robots from the task. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Russia test launched its Angara-A5 rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome on Thursday for the first time after technical glitches prompted officials to abort missions at the very last minute for two days in a row.

The launch of the Angara, a new post-Soviet launch vehicle, is intended to showcase Russia's post-Soviet space ambitions and the growing role played by Vostochny which sits in the forests of the Amur region of Russia's Far East. "There is an engine start, the flight is normal," Russian space agency, Roscosmos, said on its live translation. "All systems are functioning normally."

After minutes, the rocket was travelling at more than 25,000 kilometres per hour and entered orbit. Roscosmos said Angara-A5 launched with an test payload and had worked normally. The upper section separated and put the test payload into orbit.

On Wednesday the test launch of the space rocket was cancelled due to a malfunction of the engine launch control system. Russia began the Angara project a few years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union as a Russian-made launch vehicle that would ensure access to space even without the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which Russia rents from Kazakhstan.

The first Angara-A5 test flight took place in 2014, and another followed in 2020, both from Plesetsk. "With this launch, flight design tests of the Amur space rocket complex with Angara heavy-class launch vehicles on Vostochny began," Roscosmos said.

It said that Angara-A5 was much more environmentally friendly than Russia's Proton M as Russia's heavy-lift rocket, which has been in operation since the mid-1960s.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: SpaceX is targeting Friday, April 5, for two Falcon 9 launches of Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Florida and California.

The first Falcon 9 launch is set to take place from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This mission will send 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, with a liftoff time targeted for 5:12 a.m. Eastern Time (ET).

The first stage booster supporting this Starlink mission has previously facilitated the deployment of CRS-24, Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13F, OneWeb 1, SES-18 and SES-19, and nine Starlink satellites. This mission will be its 14th flight and after stage separation, the first stage will land on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

The second Falcon 9 rocket will launch 21 Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This launch, targeting a 7:31 p.m. PT liftoff, will carry 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, six of which are equipped with Direct to Cell capabilities.

For the unversed, Starlink satellites with Direct to Cell capabilities provide seamless access to text, voice, and data for LTE phones across the globe, be it on land, lakes, or coastal waters

This first-stage booster has previously supported several missions including Crew-7, CRS-29, PACE, Transporter-10, and a previous Starlink mission. Post-stage separation, it will attempt a landing on the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship, which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

A live webcast for both launches will be available on X @SpaceX, beginning five minutes before the scheduled launch time.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Skyroot Aerospace, a space-tech company, has successfully test-fired the Stage-2 of Vikram-1 space launch vehicle, called Kalam-250, at the propulsion testbed of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), at its Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.

The city-based firm in a press release on Thursday said Vikram-1 launch is slated to be a landmark event for the Indian space sector as its first private orbital rocket launch, and follows the remarkable suborbital space launch of India's first private rocket - the Vikram-S by Skyroot in November 2022.

The test, done on Wednesday, which lasted 85 seconds, recorded a peak sea-level thrust of 186 kilonewtons (kN), which will translate to a fully expanded vacuum thrust of around 235 kN in flight, it said.

The Kalam-250 is a high-strength carbon composite rocket motor, which uses solid fuel and a high-performance Ethylene-Propylene-Diene terpolymers (EPDM) thermal protection system (TPS).

Pawan Chandana, Co-Founder and CEO said, ''This is a significant milestone for the Indian space industry, marking the successful test of the largest propulsion system ever designed and manufactured by the Indian private sector so far, and the first carboncomposite-built motor tested at ISRO. ''All test parameters are within expected bounds, and this achievement takes us another step closer to the upcoming orbital launch of the Vikram-1 rocket,'' he said.

Naga Bharath Daka, Co-Founder and COO of Skyroot, said, ''In this landmark test, we validated the critical system for the launch—the flex nozzle control system—during firing for the first time, making this an important milestone in our journey. We have a few more milestones to cross and are focused on achieving them in the coming months to reach our maiden orbital launch of the Vikram-1 in 2024.'' The test also had an important contribution from another centre of ISRO, the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), which supplied its proprietary head-mounted safe arm (HMSA) for the test, used for the safe operation of the rocket stage, the release added.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Researchers at the Central University of Odisha (CUO) in collaboration with scientists from Kerala's Mahatma Gandhi University have unearthed two new earthworm species in the eastern state, officials said.

During an earthworm diversity study conducted in different parts of Koraput district, CUO student Ayusmita Naik collected a few large earthworm specimens from the Rani Duduma and the Jeypore ghat areas, said Sharat Kumar Palita, Dean of the School of Biodiversity and Conservation of Natural Resources.

The specimens were carefully examined in the laboratory by the researchers with support from retired scientist of the Zoological Survey of India R Paliwal and earthworm specialists Prasantha Narayanan and A P Thomas of the Advanced Centre of Environmental Studies and Sustainable Development, Mahatma Gandhi University, he said.

The earthworm varieties were subsequently identified as two new species – Megascolexjeyporeghatiensis and Megascolexquadripappilatus – which are completely new to science, Palita said.

The discovery of the two new species was recently published in the reputed international taxonomic journal 'Zootaxa', he said.

The total number of Megascolex species in the world has now increased to 70, of which 34 are found in India, Palita said.

Megascolex species are mostly restricted to the southern portion of the Western Ghats' mountain ranges in the southwest corner of Peninsular India, he added.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: ark matter, an invisible component of the universe that can only be explained through gravitational force, accounts for approximately 27% of the universe's mass-energy composition. However, a new study challenges this prevailing theory and suggests that the Universe has no place for dark matter.

Dark matter is neither visible nor is its composition known. However, it helps astronomers understand how galaxies, planets and stars behave. This University of Ottawa study challenges the need for dark matter in the universe and provides evidence for a new cosmological model, opening up new avenues for exploring the fundamental properties of the universe.

The new model combines two ideas - about how the forces of nature decrease over cosmic time and about light losing energy when it travels a long distance. It has been tested and has been found to be consistent with several observations, such as the distribution of galaxies and the evolution of light from the early universe.

"The study's findings confirm that our previous work (“JWST early Universe observations and ?CDM cosmology") about the age of the universe being 26.7 billion years has allowed us to discover that the universe does not require dark matter to exist. In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy," explains Rajendra Gupta, a physics professor at the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa.

"There are several papers that question the existence of dark matter, but mine is the first one, to my knowledge, that eliminates its cosmological existence while being consistent with key cosmological observations that we have had time to confirm," says Gupta.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Panic gripped the Ram Lal Anand College of the Delhi University after a staff member received a bomb threat message on his mobile phone on Thursday morning, police said.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southwest) Rohit Meena said the staff received a message on WhatsApp at 9:34 am.

Subsequently, police, along with an ambulance, the Bomb Detection Team and the Bomb Disposal Squad, rushed to the college and evacuated the students and staff, he said.

''Search and checking is being carried out. So far, nothing suspicious has been found,'' the officer said.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: SpaceX has announced that the third flight test of its Starship - a fully reusable space transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond - could take to the skies as early as March 14, pending the green light from regulatory authorities.

Starship's third flight test follows on the heels of a series of successful milestones achieved during its second flight, which took place on November 18, 2023, from Starbase in Texas.

The upcoming flight test will be broadcast live approximately 30 minutes before liftoff on X @SpaceX. Given the unpredictable nature of developmental testing, audiences are advised to stay alert to any schedule changes.

"The third flight test aims to build on what we’ve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship’s payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage’s coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship," SpaceX said in a statement on Wednesday.

During the third flight test, Starship will also embark on a new trajectory designed to culminate in a splashdown in the Indian Ocean, allowing SpaceX to explore new in-space maneuvers and ensure maximum public safety.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: A SpaceX rocket lifted off from Florida on Sunday night carrying a crew of three U.S. astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut on their way to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin a six-month science mission in Earth orbit.

The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Endeavor was launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, along Florida's Atlantic coast, at 10:53 p.m. EST (0353 GMT Sunday). A live NASA-SpaceX webcast showed the 25-story-tall rocketship ascending from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of vapor and a reddish fireball that lit up the night sky.

The four crew members were scheduled to reach the space station early on Tuesday after a 16-hour flight, docking with the orbital laboratory some 250 miles (420 km) above Earth. Designated Crew 8, the mission marks the eighth long-duration ISS team that NASA has flown aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle since the private rocket venture founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk and headquartered near Los Angeles began sending U.S. astronauts to orbit in May 2020.

The latest ISS crew was led by mission commander Matthew Dominick, 42, a U.S. Navy test pilot making his first trip to space, and veteran NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, 64, a physician who has logged two previous flights to the space station and two spacewalks. Barratt is serving as mission pilot. Rounding out the team are fellow NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps, 53, an aerospace engineer and former technical intelligence officer for the CIA, and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, 41, a former military aircraft engineer. Both he and Epps, like Dominick, are spaceflight rookies.

Grebenkin is the latest cosmonaut to fly aboard a U.S. spacecraft under a ride-sharing deal signed in 2022 by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Crew 8 will be welcomed aboard the space station by seven current ISS occupants - three Russians and the four astronauts of Crew 7, two from NASA, one from Japan and one from Denmark. The Crew 7 team is expected to depart the space station for a flight back to Earth about a week after Crew 8's arrival.

Crew 8 is expected to remain aboard the space station until the end of August, collectively performing about 250 experiments in the microgravity environment of the orbital platform. The ISS, about the length of a football field and the largest human-made object in space, has been continuously operated by a U.S.-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

The first hardware for the outpost was launched 25 years ago. It was conceived in part as a multinational venture designed to improve relations between Washington and Moscow following the Soviet Union's collapse and the end of Cold War rivalries that gave rise to the original U.S.-Soviet space race in the 1950s and 1960s. NASA has said it is committed to keeping the space station in operation for at least six more years.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: About 90 per cent of the Himalayan Region will experience drought lasting over a year if global warming increases by 3 degrees Celsius, according to new research.

The findings, published in the journal Climatic Change, show that 80 per cent of the increased human exposure to heat stress in India can be avoided by adhering to Paris Agreement's temperature goals of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to 3 degrees Celsius warming.

The team led by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK quantified how climate change risks to human and natural systems increase at a national scale as the level of global warming increases.

A collection of eight studies -- all focusing on India, Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Ghana -- shows that the risks of drought, flooding, declines in crop yields, and loss of biodiversity and natural capital greatly increase for each additional degree of global warming.

It found that in India pollination is reduced by half at 3-4 degrees global warming compared to a quarter reduction at 1.5 degrees.

Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius allows half the country to act as a refuge for biodiversity, compared with 6 per cent at 3 degrees, the researchers said.

The team found very large increases in the exposure of agricultural land to drought with 3 degrees Celsius warming – more than 50 per cent of the agricultural land in each of the countries studied is projected to be exposed to severe droughts of longer than one year over a 30-year period.

However, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would reduce the increase in exposure of agricultural land to drought by between 21 per cent (India) and 61 per cent (Ethiopia) as well as reduce economic damages due to fluvial flooding. This happens when rivers and streams break their banks and the water flows out onto the adjacent low-lying areas.

Avoided increases in human exposure to severe drought are also 20–80 per cent lower at 1.5 degrees Celsius than 3 degrees Celsius across the six countries, the researchers said.

Economic damages associated with sea-level rise are projected to increase in coastal nations, but more slowly if warming was limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, they said.

The researchers warned that more effort is needed to reduce global warming, as currently the policies in place globally are likely to result in 3 degrees Celsius of global warming.

One paper explored the risks to plants and vertebrates due to increases in global warming, and another developed a new natural capital risk register for each of the six countries that also included the projected changes in the risk stemming from future human population changes.

This combination shows that many areas in the six countries are already at high natural capital risk at 1.5 degrees Celsius when effects of increasing human population are accounted for.

The findings also showed that an expansion of protected area networks is necessary in order to deliver climate resilient biodiversity conservation.

''The results presented in this collection confirm the need for the implementation of climate policies aligned to the Paris Agreement limits if widespread and escalating climate change risk is to be avoided,'' said lead author of the paper, Professor Rachel Warren, from the UEA.

“They provide additional confirmation of the rapid escalation of climate change risks with global warming found in the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) 2022 report, which identifies how the risk of severe consequences increases with every additional increment of global warming,” Warren said.

Although these studies focus on the risks to six countries only, other nations are projected to experience similar issues, the researchers said.

Greater emphasis needs to be placed on both climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation to avoid large increases in risk to both human and natural systems, they said.

“For example, a good way to combat the effects of climate change on natural systems and soak up carbon from the atmosphere is to restore ecosystems to their natural state, especially if warming can be held to 2 degrees Celsius or less. This has the additional benefit of restoring the natural capital bank in these areas,” said study co-author Jeff Price, also from the UEA.

The work focuses on developing countries as they tend to be more vulnerable to climate change than others. Spanning the continents of Asia, Africa, and South America, the case studies present examples of both large and small countries and cover a range of levels of socioeconomic development.

The risks assessed are the additional risks due to anthropogenic or human-induced climate change corresponding to the elevated global warming in comparison with a baseline of levels of risk in 1961-1990, when warming was approximately 0.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Together the studies provide a harmonised assessment for the six countries of projected changes in exposure of humans and land to climate-related hazards, such as drought, water stress, fluvial and coastal flooding, and the projected effects of climate change on biodiversity, as well as the economic and societal implications of climate risks.
 

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM [Maha Media]: India on Tuesday introduced four crew members for its maiden 'Gaganyaan' space voyage, as it aims to become the world's fourth country to send a crewed mission into space just months after a historic landing on the south pole of the moon.

Gaganyaan, or "sky craft" in Hindi, is the first mission of its kind for India and will cost about 90.23 billion rupees ($1.1 billion). It involves the launch of a habitable space capsule over the next year to an orbit of 400 km (250 miles) and its return via a landing in the Indian Ocean. Prime Minister Narendra Modi awarded the four crew members, all of them air force officers, "astronaut wings" at a space centre in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala state on Tuesday, in their first public appearance after months of rigorous training.

Addressing the audience at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) at Thumba near here, the Prime Minister introduced to the nation the esteemed astronauts: Group Captains Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, Angad Pratap, Ajit Krishnan, and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla.

Bestowing them with the prestigious 'astronaut wings,' Modi hailed these astronauts as ''four forces'' representing the aspirations of India's 1.4 billion people.

He emphasised the significance of this mission, noting that after four decades, an Indian is poised to venture into space.

''This time around, the countdown, the timing, and even the rocket would be ours,'' Modi declared.

Reflecting on the symbolic importance of the astronauts' mission, PM Modi described them as not merely individuals but as four 'Shakti' carrying the hopes and dreams of 140 crore Indians into space.

The four officers are Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap and Shubhanshu Shukla, a government statement said. It was not clear if all four astronauts would be on board the mission.

Gaganyaan is a "historic" achievement for India, Modi said on X and in a statement, coming four decades after air force officer, Rakesh Sharma, became the first Indian to travel to space - with a Soviet mission. "Time is ours, countdown is ours and so is the rocket," Modi told space scientists.

Only the United States, Russia, and China have sent their own crewed missions into space. Astronauts from more than three dozen other countries have made space trips aboard either U.S. or Russian missions.
 

GUWAHATI [Maha Media]: Rajya Sabha MP Prakash Javadekar said as the world grapples with severe climatic upheavals, India's three per cent contribution to carbon emissions demand urgent action.

The brunt of climate change falls on the poor and as a responsible nation, it is ''incumbent for us to lead the change'', the former Union minister for environment, forest and climate change said at the National Movement of U75: Net Zero Workshop for NE Region at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (IITG), here on Tuesday. ''With the rise of electric vehicles, infrastructure, and energy efficiency, India is making strides in reducing carbon emissions and achieving G20 targets'', he said. 

As custodians of the environment, Javadekar urged everyone to prioritise watershed development, advocating the mantra, 'save water, generate water; save electricity, generate electricity.' He praised initiatives such as the climate-tracking app for universities and the net-zero workshop as demonstrations of collective commitment to green action and a sustainable future. The workshop, organised by IITG in collaboration with the Green Terre Foundation (GTF), focused on empowering universities and colleges to achieve carbon neutrality under the U75 initiative, which stands for 'Universities for carbon neutrality during the Amrit Kal after 75th anniversary of India’s Independence.' 

The one-day workshop showcased insightful presentations by distinguished speakers from across the country.
 

CHENNAI [Maha Media]: Cartosat-2, ISRO's first satellite in the second generation of high-resolution imaging satellites launched 17 years ago, has been brought down from space to the earth's atmosphere, an official of the space agency said on Friday.

“The satellite entered the earth's atmosphere at 3.48 pm IST on February 14 over the Indian ocean. Either it would have burnt out or its leftovers might have fallen in the sea, which we may not be able to find,” the official said.

According to ISRO, the satellite was launched on January 10, 2007. It weighed 680 kg at launch and operated in a sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of 635 km. Until 2019, it provided high-resolution imagery for urban planning, ISRO said in a statement.

“Initially, Cartosat-2 was expected to take about 30 years to naturally de-orbit. However, ISRO opted to lower its perigee using leftover fuel to comply with international guidelines on space debris mitigation,” it said.

''This exercise involved reducing collision risks and ensuring safe end-of-life disposal, following recommendations from organisations like the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN-COPOUS) and the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC),'' ISRO said.

ISRO said its System for Safe and Sustainable Space Operations (IS4OM) team at ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) predicted Cartosat-2's atmospheric re-entry for February 14.

“Electrical passivation was completed on February 14th, and tracking continued until re-entry. The final telemetry frames confirmed successful passivation, with the satellite reaching about 130 km altitude,” ISRO said.

This exercise provided an opportunity to assess indigenous tracking capabilities, with the multi-object tracking radar at the spaceport of Sriharikota utilised for tracking.

“The final prediction placed Cartosat-2's re-entry over the Indian Ocean at 10:18 UTC / 3:48 pm IST on February 14, 2024. Analysis indicated that all major spacecraft components would demise (sic) during atmospheric re-entry,” ISRO said.

According to the space agency, Cartosat-2's successful de-orbiting at its end-of-life represents a significant step for ISRO in ensuring the long-term sustainability of outer space activities.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Intuitive Machines' IM-1 mission will carry multiple payloads to the Moon, including a NASA experiment that could change the way astronauts, rovers, and spacecraft independently track their precise location on the Moon and in the space around it, called cis-lunar space.

The groundbreaking experiment, called Lunar Node-1 (LN-1), will demonstrate autonomous navigation via radio beacon to support precise geolocation and navigation among lunar orbiters, landers, and surface personnel.

Currently, navigation beyond Earth relies on point-to-point services provided by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), which provides point-to-point communication, sending positioning data to spacecraft traversing interplanetary space to ensure they remain on their intended path. These measurements typically are relayed back to Earth, where they are processed and then sent back to the spacecraft to guide its journey.

LN-1 relies on networked computer navigation software called Multi-spacecraft Autonomous Positioning System (MAPS). Developed by Anzalone and researchers at NASA Marshall, MAPS was successfully tested on the International Space Station in 2018 using the agency's Space Communications and Navigation testbed.

"Imagine getting verification from a lighthouse on the shore you're approaching, rather than waiting on word from the home port you left days earlier. What we seek to deliver is a lunar network of lighthouses, offering sustainable, localized navigation assets that enable lunar craft and ground crews to quickly and accurately confirm their position instead of relying on Earth," said Evan Anzalone, principal investigator of LN-1 and a navigation systems engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

LN-1 is one of six payloads included in the NASA delivery manifest for Intuitive Machines. Intuitive Machines' IM-1 mission will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Launch Complex 39A at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Wednesday, Feb. 14.

The IM-1 lunar lander, Nova-C, is scheduled to touch down near Malapert A, a lunar impact crater in the Moon's South Pole region, on February 22.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA's Juno spacecraft is set to make a daring close pass by Io, one of Jupiter's most intriguing moons, known for its intense volcanic activity on Saturday, February 3. This flyby is expected to provide unprecedented views and insights into Io's volcanic features.

Io, the innermost of Jupiter's Galilean moons, is the most volcanically active body in our solar system. Io's surface is constantly reshaped by eruptions from hundreds of volcanoes, which is primarily due to the intense gravitational pull from Jupiter, causing tidal heating of the moon's interior.

During the upcoming flyby, Juno will come within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of Io's surface.

During Juno's most recent approach to Io, the spacecraft captured breathtaking imagery of the moon's night side, brilliantly illuminated by "Jupitershine" - a phenomenon that occurs when sunlight, reflected off Jupiter's vast cloud tops, lights up Io's darkened hemisphere.

The Juno spacecraft has been monitoring Io’s volcanic activity from distances ranging from about 6,830 miles (11,000 kilometers) to over 62,100 miles (100,000 kilometers), and has provided the first views of the moon’s north and south poles. The spacecraft has also performed close flybys of the icy Jovian moons Ganymede and Europa.

Since it arrived at Jupiter in July 2016, Juno has provided invaluable data, revealing the complexities of Jupiter's atmosphere, its auroras, and now, its influence on Io. This mission underscores the importance of robotic explorers in unlocking the mysteries of our solar system. As Juno continues its journey around Jupiter, each flyby brings us closer to understanding the dynamics of this giant planet and its moons, showcasing the wonders of our cosmic neighborhood.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Axiom Space's Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3), the third private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, launched at 4:49 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 18, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Ax-3 crew is travelling to the orbiting outpost aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft following a launch on the company's Falcon 9 rocket. Following stage separation, the rocket's first stage landed on Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The Dragon spacecraft will dock autonomously to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module as early as 4:19 a.m. Saturday, January 20.

The crew, which includes Commander Michael López-Alegría, Pilot Walter Villadei, and Mission Specialists Marcus Wandt and Alper Gezeravci, will conduct microgravity research, educational outreach, and commercial activities aboard the space station. During their two-week stay aboard the orbiting laboratory, the crew will conduct more than 30 scientific experiments and demonstrations focused on human physiology and technological industrial advancements.

The Ax-3 private astronauts are expected to depart the space station on Saturday, February 3, pending weather, for a return to Earth and splashdown at a landing site off the coast of Florida.

"Congratulations to Axiom and SpaceX on a successful launch! Together with our commercial partners, NASA is supporting a growing commercial space economy and the future of space technology. During their time aboard the International Space Station, the Ax-3 astronauts will carry out more than 30 scientific experiments that will help advance research in low-Earth orbit. As the first all-European commercial astronaut mission to the space station, the Ax-3 crew is proof that the possibility of space unites us all," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this breathtaking image featuring a vast group of galaxies - the large, prominent spiral galaxy on the right is NGC 1356, the two apparently smaller spiral galaxies flanking it are LEDA 467699 positioned above, and LEDA 95415 positioned closely to its left. Adding to the celestial tableau is IC 1947, gracefully adorning the left side of the image.

At first glance, NGC 1356, LEDA 467699, and LEDA 95415 appear to be close celestial companions, while IC 1947 seems more distantly placed. However, the true nature of their interactions is revealed when considering the three-dimensional distances between these cosmic entities. NGC 1356 and LEDA 95415 appear to be so close that they must surely be interacting, but NGC 1356 lies approximately 550 million light-years away, while LEDA 95415 resides at a staggering distance of roughly 840 million light-years - an astounding 300 million light-year separation,

Contrary to visual impressions, LEDA 95415 is likely not as much smaller compared to NGC 1356 as it appears. 

On the other hand, the apparent relative gulf between NGC 1356 and IC 1947 in the image is also a cosmic illusion. IC 1947 is a mere 500 million light-years away, and the angular distance observed in the image equates to less than 400,000 light-years. In reality, NGC 1356 and IC 1947 are much closer neighbors in three-dimensional space than their visual representation would suggest.'

The Hubble Space Telescope, a project of international collaboration between NASA and ESA, is a space-based observatory orbiting Earth since 1990. The veteran telescope has provided breathtaking images and valuable data about distant galaxies, nebulae, and other celestial objects, contributing significantly to our understanding of the cosmos.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The United States of America declares January 5 as National Bird Day to raise awareness of the significance of birds to our ecosystem. The day is set apart to make all of us understand that birds are not made to be caught or had as showpieces in our homes, rather, they are nature’s lovely creatures that deserve to live with complete freedom.  

The day was first observed by the Avian Welfare Coalition, which is involved in the cause of promoting awareness about birds that are caught or end up in captivity for either monetary profit or for human entertainment. 

Importance of National Birds Day 
One of nature's most beautiful creatures is birds. They fill our heart with joy better with their chirping, they soar over and make us cheerful and here and there they are simply excessively gorgeous and gorgeous to look out.  Yet, beyond this, they are additionally significant parts of the ecosystem. The time has finally come for us to hold hands in safeguarding them and guaranteeing that they have a healthy nature to flourish in. Every year, National Birds Day is celebrated to bring issues to light about the birds that are caught, severely treated or produced in captivity for monetary profit and delight. It is illegal and ethically wrong to hold birds or creatures in cages and we should attempt to guarantee that they have a superior life.

National Birds Day: History
National Birds Day has been celebrated in America since 2002. This date was picked in light of the fact that it likewise is the day for the yearly Christmas Bird Count. The national holiday is seen in America where individuals hold hands together to acquire details regarding the quality and condition of the birds in the US of America.

National Birds Day 2024: Theme
The theme of the National Birds Day 2024 is ‘Right To Fight’. It signifies the flight of a bird that represents freedom. With this campaign, the Avian Welfare Coalition Alliance intends to diminish the suffering of birds by raising public attention to the damaging bird trade, the real factors of cruel bird breeding mills and the ways of working on the government assistance of birds currently in captivity.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday hailed ISRO's successful launch of its maiden X-Ray Polarimeter Satellite that would offer several insights into celestial objects like black holes, saying this will enhance India's prowess in the space sector.

ISRO's ever reliable Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) in its C58 mission, placed the primary X-Ray Polarimeter satellite XPoSat into a 650 Km Low Earth Orbit as intended after lifting off at the pre-fixed time of 9.10 am from the first launch pad in Andhra Pradesh's Sriharikota.

In a post on X, Modi said, ''A great start to 2024 thanks to our scientists! This launch is wonderful news for the space sector and will enhance India's prowess in this field.'' ''Best wishes to our scientists at @isro and the entire space fraternity in taking India to unprecedented heights,'' he said.
 

BENGALURU [Maha Media]: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning to launch 50 satellites in the next five years for geo-intelligence gathering. Speaking at Techfest', an annual science and technology event organised by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, ISRO Chairman S Somanath yesterday said, this will include the creation of a layer of satellites in different orbits with a capacity to track the movement of troops and image thousands of kilometers of area. Somanath said, for realising India's aspiration to become a strong nation, the current size of its satellite fleet is not enough and it should be ten times what we have today. 

He also said that it was important to improve the ability of satellites to detect changes, to bring in more of AI-related and data-driven approach to analyse data, reduce data downloads and get only the necessary information.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi took the wraps off its first electric vehicle on Thursday and promptly announced it was aiming to become one of the world's top five automakers.

The sedan dubbed the SU7, is a highly anticipated model that is expected to make the most of its shared operating system with the company's popular phones. But the car is making its debut at a time when the world's largest auto market is wrestling with a capacity glut and slowing demand that have stoked a bruising price war.

"By working hard over the next 15 to 20 years, we will become one of the world's top 5 automakers, striving to lift China's overall automobile industry," Chief Executive Lei Jun said at the event.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: China on Tuesday successfully launched a Long March-11 carrier rocket into space, sending three satellites into planned orbit. 

The Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center launched the rocket from waters off the coast of Yangjiang, south China's Guangdong Province, at 6:39 a.m. (Beijing Time). The satellites, Shiyan-24C, will be mainly used for space science and technology experiments. 

It was the 503rd mission of the Long March carrier rocket series.
 

AHMEDABAD [Maha Media]: ISRO Chairman S Somnath said that India will have its own 'Bharat Space Station' during the Amrit Kal. Addressing the young scientists at the Bhartiya Vigyan Sammelan, a joint initiative of Vigyan Bharti (Vibha) and Gujarat Government, at Science City, in Ahmedabad on Friday, Mr Somanth said Indian scientists will land on the moon in the next 25 years. He called upon the student scientists to contribute towards building a developed India by using their knowledge and potential.

He said, coordination and exchange between academic institutions and industry is essential to ensure that research is used for the welfare of society. He also said that the role of technology is very important in achieving the goal of a developed and self-reliant India. Leading scientists, students, and researchers of the country are participating in this conference which is being held from the 21st to the 24th of December.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory recently spotted a cluster of young stars in our Milky Way Galaxy that looks like a cosmic Christmas tree. The NGC 2264 cluster, also known as the "Christmas Tree Cluster", is located about 2,500 light-years away from Earth.

The stars in NGC 2264 are both smaller and larger than our Sun, ranging from some with less than one-tenth the mass of the Sun to seven times the mass of our Sun. The stars are between one and five million years old, compared to the Sun's age of 5 billion years old.

The blue and white lights are young stars that give off X-rays detected by Chandra. The green color represents gas in the nebula (Optical data from NSF's WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak), resembling the "pine needles" of the cosmic tree. Additionally, the infrared data shows foreground and background stars as gleaming specks of white against the blackness of space.

"Young stars, like those in NGC 2264, are volatile and undergo strong flares in X-rays and other types of variations seen in different types of light," according to NASA.

The variations observed by Chandra and other telescopes are caused by several different processes, some of which are tied to activity involving magnetic fields, including flares like those undergone by the Sun.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: A SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply spacecraft is scheduled to depart the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday and return to Earth with supplies and scientific experiments, according to NASA.

Dragon will undock from the space station's Harmony module at 9:05 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesday, and fire its thrusters to move a safe distance away from the ISS after receiving a command from ground controllers at SpaceX in Hawthorne, U.S. state of California. After re-entering Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft will splash down off the coast of Florida. Dragon will carry back to Earth more than 4,300 pounds of supplies and scientific experiments designed to take advantage of the space station's microgravity environment, according to NASA. Dragon launched on Nov. 9 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

The spacecraft arrived at the ISS on Nov. 11 as SpaceX's 29th commercial resupply services mission for NASA, delivering about 6,500 pounds of research investigations, crew supplies, and station hardware. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: After the historic success of its Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission, ISRO is going full throttle with its plans to send Indian astronauts for the first time on the Moon by 2040.

Four test pilots from the Indian Air Force have been selected as Astronaut-Designates for the mission, ISRO chief S Somanath has said.

“Looking ahead, ISRO aims to take the next step in space exploration with the Gaganyaan programme, planning to launch a crew of 2 to 3 Indian astronauts into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for up to three days before safely returning them to a predefined site in Indian waters,” he divulged in an exclusive article for Manorama Yearbook 2024, which was released last week.

Currently, they are undergoing mission-specific training at Astronaut Training Facility (ATF) in Bengaluru, said Somanath, who is also Secretary, Department of Space, and Chairman of, Space Commission.

The inaugural manned space mission Gaganyaan involves developing critical technologies, including a human-rated (capable of safely transporting humans) launch vehicle (HLVM3), an Orbital Module comprising a Crew Module (CM) and Service Module (SM), and life support systems.

Two identical un-crewed missions (G1 & G2) besides Integrated Air Drop Test, Pad Abort Test, and Test Vehicle flights will precede the manned mission. CM is a habitable space with an Earth-like environment in space for the crew and is designed for safe re-entry. Safety measures also include a Crew Escape System (CES) for emergencies, a statement issued by Malayala Manorama said.

The first development flight of Test Vehicle (TV-D1) was launched on October 21, 2023, and it successfully demonstrated in-flight abort of the Crew Escape System, followed by Crew Module separation and its safe recovery from the Bay of Bengal by the Indian Navy. “The success of this test flight was crucial for subsequent unmanned missions and the ultimate human space mission, expected to be launched in 2025,” Somanath said. Aditya L1, which is India’s maiden solar exploratory mission, is also an important mission of the ISRO, he noted.

It will study the sun from the unique vantage point of Lagrange Point 1, showcasing the country’s prowess in both lunar and solar research. Launched on September 2, Aditya L1 is poised for a five-year mission.

The spacecraft is on its intended path towards Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1(L1), approximately 1.5 million km from Earth, where it will be inserted into a Halo orbit in January 2024, he explained. On the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission, he termed it as a 'historic achievement', leading to the declaration of August 23 (landing near the lunar south pole) as ‘National Space Day in India’ by the Prime Minister. In the mission life of 14 earth days, it yielded valuable lunar data, discovering aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, sulphur, manganese, silicon, and oxygen in lunar soil. Referring to some ambitious ongoing and upcoming missions, he said these include Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV), Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) programme, X-ray astronomy mission XPOSAT (X-ray Polarimeter Satellite), Space Docking Experiment, and LOX-Methane engine.

“Together, these transformative initiatives define a new space saga in India's pursuit of space exploration, fostering scientific progress and an ever-expanding cosmic horizon.” Elaborating, he said SSLV, a three-stage launch vehicle, can launch 500 kg satellite into 500 km planar orbit, and can accommodate multiple satellites. It has launch-on-demand feasibility, minimal launch infrastructure requirements and low cost. With two flights in the recent past, SSLV is at the stage of transition from developmental flights to operational flights.

Somanath further said the Prime Minister has set ambitious goals such as commissioning ‘Bharatiya Antariksha Station’ (Indian Space Station) by 2035, and embarking on interplanetary exploration, featuring a Venus Orbiter Mission and a Mars Lander, to further solidify India's presence on the global space stage.

Exuding confidence that India's space programme will reach new heights in the coming years, he said, ''with every mission launched and every discovery made, ISRO reaffirms its position on the global stage as a force to reckon with, instilling national pride and expanding India's technological feat.”
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Betelgeuse, a blazing red supergiant star with a distinctive orange-red hue, will be eclipsed by an asteroid in a rare celestial show on Monday night. Skywatchers worldwide will have the unique opportunity to witness this celestial spectacle as the asteroid Leona delicately aligns itself (a matter of perspective) with this ultra-bright stellar monster, creating a temporary eclipse.

The Virtual Telescope Project will bring this one-of-its-kind event live.

"This kind of occultation are very useful to constrain the shape of the asteroid involved. Here, we hope to even investigate the surface of the involved star, too: Betelgeuse. It is a large red supergiant and while Leona will move in front of it as seen from Earth, we will be hopefully able to learn more about its large convective cells, driving its variable brightness," says astrophysicist Gianluca Masi, Director of the Virtual Telescope Project, who will comment the event during the live feed.

Located in the iconic Orion constellation, Betelgeuse (also known as Alpha Orionis) is one of the largest stars ever discovered. Betelgeuse is about 7,500 to 14,000 times brighter than the Sun, making it easy to spot - it is often the tenth-brightest star in the sky. At roughly 10 million years old, the stellar giant is much younger than our nearly 5-billion-year-old Sun.

The red supergiant is about 700 times the size of the Sun and around 15 times more massive. For context, if we replaced our Sun with Betelgeuse, it would stretch past Jupiter's orbit.

According to NASA, Betelgeuse is destined for a supernova. However, scientists expect this stellar event will not unfold anytime soon - at least for about another 100,000 years, at which point Betelgeuse will become either a neutron star or a black hole. The star's final fate depends on how much material is left after the supernova event.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: India has been placed 7th in this year's Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI). The country improved one rank from the previous one, and also remained among the highest performers. According to a report released during the global climate conference (COP-28) in Dubai, India maintained its top 10 position for the fifth year in a row.

The Index evaluates the climate mitigation efforts of 63 countries and the European Union, covering over 90 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. China, the largest polluter came in at number 51 while the US, the second biggest emitter came in at number 57. India's past performance in the CCPI ranking shows significant improvement from 31st rank in 2014 to seventh in 2023.
 

_{NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has congratulated the Indian Space and Research Organisation (ISRO) for achieving another technological milestone in space. Chandrayaan-3's Propulsion Module took a successful detour. In another unique experiment, the Propulsion Module is brought from Lunar orbit to Earth's orbit.}

_{Responding to the X post of ISRO about this achievement, the Prime Minister posted on X, "Congratulations @isro. Another technology milestone achieved in our future space endeavours includes our goal to send an Indian to the Moon by 2040."} 

_{In another unique experiment, like the hop experiment on the Vikram Lander, the Propulsion Module (PM) of Chandrayaan-3 was moved from an orbit around the Moon to an orbit around Earth, said the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).}

_{"Chandrayaan-3 Mission: Ch-3's Propulsion Module (PM) takes a successful detour! In another unique experiment, the PM is brought from Lunar orbit to Earth's orbit. An orbit-raising manoeuvre and a Trans-Earth injection manoeuvre placed PM in an Earth-bound orbit," ISRO posted on X.}

_{The primary objective of the Chandrayaan-3 mission was to demonstrate a soft landing near to lunar south polar region and perform experiments using the instruments on Vikram and Pragyaan. The spacecraft was launched on July 14, 2023, on board an LVM3-M4 vehicle from SDSC, SHAR.} 

_{On August 23, Vikram Lander made its historic touchdown on the Moon and subsequently Pragyan rover was deployed. The scientific instruments in Lander and Rover were operated continuously for 1 lunar day as per the defined mission life. The mission objectives of Chandrayaan-3 have been completely met.}
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: India's AstroSat space telescope has achieved a significant milestone by detecting more than 600 Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB), each marking the death of a massive star or merging of neutron stars.

''The detection of the 600th GRB is a great demonstration of the continued undiminished performance of Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI) eight years after launch, and well after its design lifetime,'' Dipankar Bhattacharya, the principal investigator for CZTI, said.

Dubbed as mini big-bangs, GRBs are the most energetic explosions in the universe, emitting more energy in seconds than the sun will emit in its entire lifetime, Gaurav Waratkar, a Ph.D student at IIT Bombay, who leads the study of GRBs with AstroSat, told PTI.

GRBs last from a fraction of a second to several minutes, and are accompanied by the birth of a black hole. Launched in 2015 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), AstroSat had a design life of five years, but continues to be in good health, making observations for astronomers. The satellite is India's first dedicated multi-wavelength space observatory, equipped with a suite of payloads for simultaneously observing celestial objects across different wavelengths, from ultraviolet to X-rays.

''We are proud of what AstroSat has accomplished. To build upon this success, multiple institutes have come together and proposed to build Daksha, a next-generation GRB space telescope that will be far better than any such satellite worldwide. Daksha will be sensitive enough to detect in just over a year what CZTI did in eight,'' Varun Bhalerao, associate professor at IIT-Bombay, said.

The 600th GRB detection by AstroSat's CZTI detector was made on November 22, which was notified to astronomers across the world who could use it in their research on such a phenomenon and provide astronomers with invaluable data to explore the extreme conditions associated with these high-energy events.

''It is amazing to look at the data and have the opportunity to be the first one to view these explosions that happened billions of years ago,'' Waratkar said.

He said since the 600th GRB, the CZTI has detected three more such events, the latest on Monday.

The detection of these GRBs, science results from the various instruments on AstroSat have been published in over 400 peer-reviewed research articles.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Aditya L1 spacecraft, India's first space-based mission to study the Sun, is nearing its final phase, and maneuvers to enter the L1 point are expected to be completed by January 7, 2024, according to ISRO Chairman S Somanath.

''Aditya is on the way. I think it has reached almost its final phase,'' the ISRO chief said on the sidelines of an event organised at VSSC to commemorate the 60th year of the First Sounding Rocket Launch.

He said that the last preparations for the spacecraft's entry into the L1 point are currently underway incrementally.

''Possibly by January 7th, the final maneuvers will be done for entering into the L1 point,'' Somanath added.

Aditya L1 was successfully launched on September 2 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota.

The spacecraft, after travelling about 1.5 million km from Earth over 125 days, is expected to be placed in a Halo orbit around the Lagrangian point L1, considered closest to the Sun.

Among other tasks, it will capture and transmit pictures of the Sun for scientific experiments.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Some areas in the Indo-Gangetic basin in India have already passed the groundwater depletion tipping point and its entire northwestern region is predicted to experience critically low groundwater availability by 2025, according to a new report by the United Nations.

Titled "Interconnected Disaster Risks Report 2023" and published by the United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), the report highlights that the world is approaching six environmental tipping points: accelerating extinctions, groundwater depletion, mountain glacier melting, space debris, unbearable heat and an uninsurable future.

Environmental tipping points are critical thresholds in the Earth's systems, beyond which abrupt and often irreversible changes occur, leading to profound and sometimes catastrophic shifts in ecosystems, climate patterns and the overall environment.

Around 70 per cent of groundwater withdrawals are used for agriculture, often when above-ground water sources are insufficient. Aquifers play a crucial role in mitigating agricultural losses caused by drought, a challenge expected to worsen due to climate change.

However, the report warns that the aquifers themselves are approaching a tipping point. More than half of the world's major aquifers are depleting faster than they can naturally replenish. When the water table falls below a level accessible by existing wells, farmers may lose access to water, posing a risk to entire food production systems.

Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, have already exceeded the groundwater risk tipping point, while others, including India, are not far from it.

"India is the world's largest user of groundwater, exceeding the use of the United States and China combined. The northwestern region of India serves as the bread basket for the nation's growing 1.4 billion people, with the states of Punjab and Haryana producing 50 per cent of the country's rice supply and 85 per cent of its wheat stocks.

"However, 78 per cent of wells in Punjab are considered overexploited and the northwestern region as a whole is predicted to experience critically low groundwater availability by 2025," the report says.

Jack O'Connor, the lead author and senior expert at UNU-EHS, said, "As we approach these tipping points, we will already begin to experience the impacts. Once crossed, it will be difficult to go back. Our report can help us see risks ahead of us, the causes behind them and the urgent changes required to avoid them."
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: ISRO has lined up a series of exploration missions including to Mars, Venus and to the Moon again, apart from the maiden human spaceflight programme, Chairman S Somanath said.

The space agency also has drawn up plans to launch missions for studying climate and weather conditions of the Earth, the space agency chief said, speaking to reporters on Sunday.

Besides, ISRO is also working on regular scientific missions including communication, remote sensing satellites, Somanath, who is also the Secretary of the Department of Space, said here.

Speaking about the Gaganyaan programme, he said the maiden TV-D1 test flight is scheduled for October 21.

Elaborating about the upcoming missions undertaken by the Bengaluru-headquartered space agency, he said, ''We have exploration missions. We have plans to go to Mars, Venus, again sometime to the Moon. We also have programmes to look at the climate and weather of Earth.'' Stressing that the scientists at ISRO would be focused on taking up regular missions like launching satellites for communications and remote sensing, he said scientific missions are also in the pipeline to look at issues like aeronomy, thermal imaging, and climate change impact assessment.

''So many things are there and we are very busy doing all of this,'' he said.

To a query about whether scientists were able to receive any kind of response from the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which successfully made a soft-landing on the surface of the Moon on August 23, he said Vikram had done its job very well during the lunar day (equivalent of 14 Earth days) at which time it was programmed to perform its functions.

''It is happily sleeping on the Moon. It has done its job very well. Maybe if it wishes to wake up, let it wake up. Until then, we will wait,'' he said. ISRO made efforts to re-establish communication with rover Pragyan and lander Vikram after they were put into sleep mode in September following the onset of night on the Moon.

''No signals have been received from them. Efforts to establish contact will continue,'' ISRO had said.

After the historic landing on August 23, lander Vikram and rover Pragyan performed different tasks on the lunar surface, including detecting the presence of sulphur and recording relative temperature.

About ISRO's maiden mission to study the Sun, Somanath said the spacecraft is ‘very healthy’ and is on a 110-day long journey to the Lagrange point L1 and is expected to reach the intended destination by “middle of January.” ''It is a long journey. It is almost 110 days of journey and it has covered some distance now. We corrected a little bit of its trajectory, because early correction is important to reach the L1 point. After tracking, we find it is going in the right direction towards the L1 point,'' he said.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The "Margaritaville" of Jimmy Buffett's famous song is not a genuine town, but it has long been connected with the Florida Keys. This chain of tropical islands is home to the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States, as well as other creatures found nowhere else on the planet. One of these is a recently discovered bright yellow slug named Margaritaville.

The lemon- (or, key-lime-) Newly discovered "margarita snails" are bright yellow coloured snail, along with its lime-green cousin from Belize, is the subject of a study published in the journal PeerJ. These marine snails are distant relatives of the slimy tracks left by land-dwelling gastropods in your garden. They are known as "worm snails" because they spend most of their lives in one location.

"I find them particularly cool because they are related to regular free-living snails, but when the juveniles find a suitable spot to live, they hunker down, cement their shell to the substrate, and never move again," said Rudiger Bieler, curator of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago and the study's lead author. "Their shell continues to grow as an irregular tube around the snail's body, and the animal hunts by laying out a mucus web to trap plankton and bits of detritus." Bieler has spent the past four decades studying invertebrate animals living in the Western Atlantic, but these particular snails "are so small and so well-hidden that we've not encountered them before during our scuba diving surveys. We had to look very closely," he said.

The new species belong to the same family of marine snails as the invasive "Spider-Man" snail that the same team described from the Vandenberg shipwreck off the Florida Keys in 2017. He and his colleagues, including fellow Field Museum curator Petra Sierwald, came across the lemon-yellow snails in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and they found a similar, lime-colored snail in Belize. "Many snails are polychromatic-- within the same species, you get different colors," says Bieler. "In a single population, even a single little cluster, one might be orange, one might be grey. I think they do it to confuse fish and not give them a clear target, and some have warning colouration."

"Initially, when I saw the lime-green one and the lemon-yellow one, I figured they were the same species," said Bieler. "But when we sequenced their DNA, they were very different." Based on these molecular data, Bieler, Sierwald, and their co-authors Timothy Collins, Rosemary Golding, Camila Granados-Cifuentes, John Healy and Timothy Rawlings, placed the snails in a new genus, Cayo, after the Spanish word for a small, low island.

The yellow snail was named Cayo margarita after the citrusy drinks in Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville." The lime snail's name, Cayo galbinus, means "greenish-yellow." The Cayo snails have a key trait in common with another worm snail genus, Thylacodes, for which the team described a new species from Bermuda and named Thylacodes bermudensis. While only distantly related, these snails all have brightly coloured heads poking out of their tubular shells. "Our thought is this is a warning colour," said Bieler.

"They have some nasty metabolites in their mucus. That also might help explain why they're able to have exposed heads-- on the reef, everybody is out to eat you, and if you don't have any defensive mechanism, you will be overgrown by the corals and sea anemones and all the stuff around you. It seems like the mucus might help deter the neighbours from getting too close." Bieler says that the study is important because it helps illuminate the biodiversity of coral reefs, which are under severe threat due to climate change.

"There have been increases in global water temperatures, and some species can handle them much better than others," said Bieler. The Cayo snails have a tendency to live on pieces of dead coral, and as more coral is killed off, the snails might spread. Moreover, said Bieler, "it's another indication that right under our noses, we have undescribed species. This is in snorkelling depth in a heavily touristed area, and we're still finding new things all around us."
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has started preparations for unmanned flight tests as part of the Gaganyaan mission, the agency said on Saturday. A post on the ISRO's official handle on social media platform X read, "Mission Gaganyaan: ISRO to commence unmanned flight tests for the Gaganyaan mission. Preparations for the Flight Test Vehicle Abort Mission-1 (TV-D1), which demonstrates the performance of the Crew Escape System, are underway."

According to ISRO, the success of this test flight will set the stage for the remaining qualification tests and unmanned missions, leading to the first Gaganyaan mission with Indian Astronauts. The agency in a release regarding the First Crew Module for Gaganyaan test flight said that the first development flight Test Vehicle (TV-D1) is in the final stages of preparation.

"The Test Vehicle is a single-stage liquid rocket developed for this abort mission. The payloads consist of the Crew Module (CM) and Crew Escape Systems (CES) with their fast-acting solid motors, along with CM fairing (CMF) and Interface Adapters. This flight will simulate the abort condition during the ascent trajectory corresponding to a Mach number of 1.2 encountered in the Gaganyaan mission," the release said. The Crew Module after integration underwent various electrical testing, at ISRO's facility in Bengaluru, including an acoustic test and was dispatched to SDSC-SHAR on August 13, the release added.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Antarctic sea ice has reached its maximum extent after the cold dark winter months. According to the preliminary data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the maximum extent remained below 17 million square kilometers (6.56 million square miles) for the first time in the satellite record (1979 onwards). This is a full million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) below the previous record low in 2022 – more than the size of Egypt.

Antarctic sea ice has reached its maximum extent after the cold dark winter months. According to the preliminary data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the maximum extent remained below 17 million square kilometers (6.56 million square miles) for the first time in the satellite record (1979 onwards). This is a full million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) below the previous record low in 2022 – more than the size of Egypt.

As evidence of the impacts, Emperor penguin colonies experienced unprecedented breeding failure in a region of Antarctica in the central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea where there was total sea ice loss in 2022, according to the British Antarctic Survey. The discovery supports predictions that over 90% of emperor penguin colonies will be quasi-extinct by the end of the century, based on current global warming trends, it said.

The researchers said there was a high probability that no chicks had survived from four of the five known emperor penguin colonies. This was based on satellite images that showed the loss of sea ice at breeding sites, well before chicks would have developed waterproof feathers. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA's Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) is working on a network of mini mobile robots, almost the size of a shoebox, that can work together as a team to autonomously explore planetary surfaces including the rugger lunar terrain.

Developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the autonomous rovers will be able to make decisions and act without the requirement of constant human intervention, subsequently enabling them to be responsive to challenging exploration objectives. The mini-rovers will collect data in hard-to-access and risky areas, such as inside craters and caves.

Each robot is equipped with two stereo cameras with multiple lenses and image sensors to sense the surrounding environment and map terrain in 3D and sense other rovers in the surrounding environment. When deployed on the surface, the robots would coordinate with one another via wireless radio to efficiently explore nearby terrain or make distributed measurements together.

The CADRE project aims to validate that this autonomous multi-agent system is capable of cooperative exploration that could enable new science for future missions.
 

BHOPAL [Maha Media]: Madhya Pradesh, which is home to the most number of tigers in the country, has got a new protected area for the big cats named 'Veerangana Durgavati Tiger Reserve', the seventh in the state, an official said.

MP retained the "tiger state" status in the 2022 census with the number of big cats in the state rising to 785 from 526 in 2018.

Various areas under Veerangana Durgavati Tiger Reserve have been notified by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change with a view to ensuring the conservation of wild animals, an official said.

Until now, MP was home to six tiger reserves – Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Satpura, Pench, Panna and Sanjay-Dubri.

The official said that in compliance with the condition imposed by the Centre while giving approval to the Ken-Betwa River Link Project, the new tiger reserve, spread across Sagar, Damoh and Narsinghpur districts, has been notified.

Veerangana Durgavati Tiger Reserve has become the seventh tiger reserve of Madhya Pradesh. About 1,414 square kilometres in the tiger reserve has been included in the core area and 925.12 square kilometres in the buffer zone, the official said.

The previously notified eco-sensitive zone of Nauradehi and Veerangana Durgavati sanctuaries and the surrounding forest areas have been included in the notified buffer area, he said.

Since no new revenue area has been included under this tiger reserve, no additional restrictions will be imposed on the local people living around it. The areas including this tiger reserve are already notified as sanctuary or eco-sensitive areas, the official added.

As per the report 'Status of Tigers: Co-predators & Prey in India-2022', released by the National Tiger Conservation Authority and Wildlife Institute of India in July this year, MP (785) has the highest number of tigers in the country, followed by Karnataka (563) and Uttarakhand (560).
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The Government has instituted a new set of National Awards in the field of Science, Technology and Innovation known as ‘Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar’ today.

This award is meant to recognize the notable and inspiring contribution made by scientists, technologists, and innovators in various fields of science, technology and technology-led innovation. The award is in four categories, which include Vigyan Ratna, Vigyan Shri, Vigyan Yuva-Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, and Vigyan Team. The award shall be one of the highest recognitions in this field in India and will have the status at par with other National Awards.

The nominations for these awards will be invited every year on 14th January till 28th February the National Science Day. These awards will be announced on 11th May on the National Technology Day, and the Award Ceremony will be held on 23rd August on the National Space Day every year.

The Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskars shall be given in the 13 domains, namely Physics, Chemistry, Biological Sciences, Mathematics & Computer Science, Earth Science, Medicine, Engineering Sciences, Agricultural Science, Environmental Science, Technology & Innovation, Atomic Energy, Space Science and Technology, and others. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Human activities are increasingly impacting the planet and, thereby, increasing the risk of triggering dramatic changes in overall Earth conditions, a study that updates the planetary boundary framework shows.

The nine ''planetary boundaries'' represent components of the global environment that regulate stability and livability of the planet for people, the researchers said.

The degree of breaching of the safe boundary levels is caused by human-driven activities impacting the components, they said.

The planetary boundaries framework applies the newest scientific understanding of the functioning of the Earth system to identify a ''safe operating space'' for humanity. It proposes limits for the extent to which human activities can be allowed to impact critical processes without risk of potentially triggering irreversible changes in the Earth conditions that support us.

The resaerchers noted that, for the first time, metrics for all boundaries are presented. Six of the boundaries are found to be transgressed, and transgression is increasing for all boundaries except the degradation of the Earth's ozone layer, they said.

A global focus on climate is not enough. Development of Earth system models that accurately reproduce interactions between boundaries, especially Climate and Biosphere Integrity, is an urgent priority, according to the researchers.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, represents the third update of the framework carried out by 29 scientists from eight different countries.

The trend of increasing transgression of the boundaries is worrying, explained Katherine Richardson, professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and leader of the study.

''Crossing six boundaries in itself does not necessarily imply a disaster will ensue but it is a clear warning signal. We can regard it as we do our own blood pressure,'' Richardson said.

''A BP over 120/80 is not a guarantee of a heart attack but it increases the risk of one. Therefore, we try to bring it down. For our own—and our children's—sakes we need to reduce the pressure on these six planetary boundaries,'' the researcher added. A An important conclusion of the study is that more focus is needed on interactions between the boundaries.

''Focus on human-caused climate change is not enough if we want to protect the Earth system from irreversible harm,'' said Johan Rockstrom, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), and original proposer of the framework in 2009.

''Next to climate change, integrity of the biosphere is the second pillar of stability of our planet. Our research shows that mitigating global warming and saving a functional biosphere for the future have to go hand in hand,'' said co-author Wolfgang Lucht, Head of PIK's department of Earth System Analysis.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Thirteen per cent of the Earth's surface, spanning 65 countries, experienced record high temperatures in August, while the rest of the world braved significantly higher temperatures compared to the 1951-1980 average, according to a new analysis conducted by an independent US-based non-profit organisation.

Berkeley Earth, which focuses on environmental data science and analysis, said last month was the warmest August since records began to be kept in 1850, with "particularly warm conditions" prevailing in parts of India, Japan, North Atlantic, Eastern Equatorial Pacific, Northern South America, Central America, parts of Africa and the Middle East.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a US government agency, said on Thursday that 2023 witnessed Earth's hottest August in its 174-year climate record.

The sizzling month also marked the northern hemisphere's warmest meteorological summer and the southern hemisphere's warmest meteorological winter on record, the NOAA's National Centres for Environmental Information said.

Berkeley Earth said August 2023 exceeded the previous record set in August 2016 by 0.31 degrees Celsius, "a surprisingly large margin, well outside the margin of uncertainty".

Its researchers said: "We estimate that 13 per cent of the Earth's surface experienced its locally warmest August average, and 87 per cent of the Earth's surface was significantly warmer when compared to its local average during the period from 1951 to 1980." In total, they estimated that 65 countries (mostly in the tropics) witnessed their warmest August on record.

These countries include Bahrain, Barbados, Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, China, Colombia, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Niger, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Turkiye, Venezuela and Yemen.

Some of these countries broke their August records by extraordinary margins. In Ecuador, close to the strengthening El Niño, the August average temperature record was broken by more than 1.4 degrees Celsius, the analysis showed.

An El Niño condition -- periods of unusual warming of waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean -- was officially declared by the NOAA in early June.

Berkeley Earth said the global mean temperature in August was 1.68 (± 0.09) degrees Celsius above the 1850-to-1900 average, which is frequently used as a benchmark for the preindustrial period.

"This is the 12th time in the Berkeley Earth analysis that any individual month has reached at least 1.5 degrees Celsius over the preindustrial benchmark. However, July and August 2023 are the only times, thus far, that a 1.5-degree Celsius anomaly has occurred during the northern hemisphere summer," it said.

One of the Paris Agreement goals has been to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial (1850-1900) average.

"That goal is defined in reference to the average climate over many years, so a few individual months above 1.5 degrees Celsius do not automatically mean that the target has been exceeded.

"However, isolated anomalies above 1.5 degrees Celsius are a sign that the Earth is getting close to that limit. It is likely that global warming will cause the long-term average to exceed 1.5 degrees C during the 2030s unless significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are achieved soon," the non-profit, which provides open-source global air pollution data and highly accessible global temperature data, said.

Scientists say the last three months have been extraordinary in terms of global average temperatures, with new records set every month and often by a large margin.

The Berkeley Earth researchers said the global mean temperature anomaly in August exhibited a moderate increase relative to July, rising 0.08 degree Celsius. Such an increase is unsurprising during the strengthening phase of a new El Niño event.

They say that the longer recent period of warmth is driven by a combination of several man-made and natural factors acting together.

Firstly, man-made global warming has been raising the Earth's temperature by about 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade. This is a direct consequence of the accumulation of additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. This is the primary factor responsible for long-term warming, Berkeley Earth said.

However, global warming is a gradual process. It does not explain short-term spikes and fluctuations in the Earth's average temperature. The main reason for such spikes is internal variability in the distribution of heat and circulation of the oceans and atmosphere, it added.

The largest and most well-known form of short-term internal variability is an El Niño cycle or a La Niña cycle originating in the Pacific. During an El Niño phase, global average temperatures tend to be slightly higher. As a result, record highs for global average temperatures tend to be set during El Niño years. This year, a new El Niño officially began in June, after a three-year La Niña period, it said.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in its study of K2-18 b, an exoplanet, discovered the presence of carbon dioxide and methane.This suggests that K2-18b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface. Planets that orbit stars,other than our sun, are called exoplanets. Planet K2-18 b is 120 light years from earth and orbits the cool dwarf star K2-18 a.

It is 8.6 times as massive as Earth and the size lies that of between earth and Neptune.The abundance of methane and carbon dioxide, and shortage of ammonia in this planet support the hypothesis that there may be a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere.

The observations of James Webb also provided a possible detection of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, DMS is only produced by life. The bulk of the DMS in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments. Planet k2-18b is within the  “habitable zone” of its star, that is conditions are just right – neither too hot nor too cold – for life to exists.

NASA now intends to conduct follow-up research with the telescope's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) spectrograph that they hope will further validate their findings and provide new insights into the environmental conditions on K2-18 b.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Country’s top annual science prize, Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Awards were announced today after a gap of two years. This year 12 scientists will get the awards in seven categories. Dr.N. Kalaiselvi, Director General of CSIR announced the awards for the year 2022 in the presence of Union Minister for Science and technology Dr Jitendra Singh. Named after Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, the first director of CSIR, these awards are given every in seven scientific disciplines - physics, biology, engineering, mathematics, medicine, chemistry, and earth sciences.

Speaking On this occasion Union Minister for Science and technology Dr Jitendra Singh said that recent G20 summit became a point to showcase India's tecnological capabilities and it's economic strength. Launching the One Week One Lab program of CSIR-  National Institute of Science Communication and Policy research, The Minister who is also vice President of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR said that It's time to tell the world what we are doing in the field of science for the public good.

The One Week- One Lab' program started from today at CSIR-NIScPR which will continue till 16 September. This is a campaign during which each of the CSIR labs showcases their exclusive ideas and technological breakthroughs to the people of the country over the course of one week. Dr. Jitendra Singh said that on the lines of 'One Week-One Lab' in future the CSIR will take the opportunity to spread the contributions of its units to the general public through 'One Month One Theme' campaign.

Books named Collection of 80 articals of Viggyan Pragati magazine' and 'CSIR@80 A Photo journey' was launched by Union Minister of Science and technology Dr. Jitendra Singh on the occasion. Dr.N. Kalaiselvi, Director General of CSIR said on the occasion that science communication is very important in the present era because and such programs are an interface between Scientific community and general public. She said that NIScPR is successfully doing this work. Professor Ranjana Aggrawal Director of CSIR-NIScPR along with several dignitaries from science fraternity were present on the occasion.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The European Commission president asked G20 leaders on Saturday to join a proposal to set up global carbon pricing.

Many countries are using a price on carbon to help meet their climate goals in the form of a tax or under an emissions trading (ETS), or cap-and-trade, system.

"Climate change is man-made. So it means we can address it. For this we need innovation, investments in green technologies, renewable energy capacity and energy efficiency ... At the G20 I invited leaders to join the call for global carbon pricing," Ursula von der Leyen wrote on X social media, formerly known as Twitter.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: ISRO's next likely Moon mission is in partnership with its Japanese counterpart, a venture that's gathering steam.

Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) is a collaborative venture between Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Bengaluru-headquartered Indian space agency. JAXA and ISRO are developing the rover and lander, respectively. The rover will carry not only the instruments of ISRO and JAXA but also those of US space agency NASA and European Space Agency (ESA).

Vice-Chair of Japan's Cabinet Committee on National Space Policy and Director General, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Saku Tsuneta, visited ISRO headquarters here earlier this month and had a meeting with the space agency's Chairman Somanath S. They discussed the progress of the LUPEX mission.

''Development of a smaller lander for the LUPEX mission was discussed, among other things,'' an ISRO official said. According to JAXA, the LUPEX mission is aimed at exploring lunar polar region suitability for establishing a base on the Moon for sustainable activities; obtaining knowledge regarding the availability of lunar water-ice resources, and demonstrating lunar and planetary surface exploration technologies such as vehicular transport and overnight survival.

Ahmedabad-based Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), an autonomous unit of the Department of Space, has proposed multiple instruments in the LUPEX mission mainly to carry out measurements on the surface and subsurface near the permanently shadowed polar region of the Moon.

The objective of one of the proposed instruments -- Permittivity and Thermo-physical investigation for Moon's Aquatic Scout (PRATHIMA) -- is in-situ detection and quantification of water-ice mixed with lunar surface and sub-surface soil using a rover/lander platform.

The aim of another proposed instrument -- Lunar Electrostatic Dust EXperiment (LEDEX) -- is to detect the presence of charged dust particles and to confirm the dust levitation process in the volatile-rich polar region, and to estimate approximate dust size and flux of charged, levitated dust particles.

According to an ISRO official, the LUPEX mission is slated to be launched in the year 2025.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The scientific devices of Russia's Luna-25 lunar mission went activate and carried out their first measurements on Sunday, the Russian space corporation Roscosmos said. The first lunar mission in Russia's postSoviet space history launched on Friday and is scheduled to land on the Moon on August 21. 

"Today the scientific equipment, developed by the Russian Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute, was switched on for the first time in the conditions of space flight," Roscosmos said in a statement. The space corporation confirmed that telemetry information from all the devices showed that they function nominally. The data gathered by the station on its way to the Moon was already received, and the project's scientific team began processing it, according to the statement.  ************************************************************************************ 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: ISRO on Friday congratulated Russian space agency Roscosmos for the successful launch of its Moon mission Luna-25, the country's first lunar lander in 47 years. The Russian mission coincides with India's third lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 as both landers target to land on Moon's surface on August 23.

India and Russia are both aiming to be the first ever country to land on the Moon's south pole.

''Congratulations, Roscosmos on the successful launch of Luna-25. Wonderful to have another meeting point in our space journies. Wishes for (India's) Chandrayaan-3 & (Russia's) Luna-25 missions to achieve their goals,'' ISRO said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

The Russian spacecraft launched early on Friday morning (IST) will take about 5.5 days to travel to the Moon's vicinity. Luna-25 is reportedly expected to first enter an orbit around the Earth before transferring to a lunar orbit and finally descending on the surface of the Moon.

Only three countries have managed successful landings on the Moon: the former Soviet Union, the United States and China.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The total number of premature deaths and years of disability from cardiovascular diseases attributable to particle air pollution rose from 2.6 million in 1990 to 3.5 million in 2019, a 31 per cent worldwide increase, according to a study.

The research, published on Wednesday in Journal of the American Heart Association, analysed particulate matter (PM) pollution as a risk factor for death and disability using freely available data from 204 countries collected between 1990 and 2019 and detailed in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study.

PM pollution consists of small particles of liquid and solids suspended in the air and inhaled into the lungs, such as vehicle emissions, smoke, dust, pollen and soot.

Exposure to PM pollution was estimated using a tool from the 2019 update to the GBD study that incorporated information from satellite and ground-level monitoring, computer models of chemicals in the atmosphere and land-use data.

The researchers from Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran analysed changes over time in years of life lost due to premature death (YLLs), years lived with disability (YLDs) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).

DALYs is a measure that considers both the loss of life and the impact on quality of life to assess the full impact of a health condition on a population.

The analysis found that the total number of premature deaths and years of cardiovascular disability from cardiovascular diseases attributable to PM air pollution rose from 2.6 million in 1990 to 3.5 million in 2019, a 31 per cent worldwide increase.

The increase in overall deaths was unevenly distributed, with a 43 per cent increase among men compared to a 28.2 per cent increase among women, the researchers said.

Between 1990 and 2019, there was a 36.7 per cent decrease in age-standardised premature deaths attributed to PM pollution, meaning that while fewer people had died from cardiovascular disease, people are living longer with disability, they said.

The study also found that regions with higher socioeconomic conditions had the lowest number of lost years of life due to cardiovascular disease attributed to PM pollution, yet also the highest number of years lived with disability.

The opposite was true in regions with lower socioeconomic conditions, with more lives lost and fewer years lived with disability, according to the researchers.

In all measures, increases in disability and death from ambient PM air pollution were higher in men than women, while declines in disability and death from household PM air pollution were lower in women than men, the study found.

''The declines in deaths may be considered positive news, as they indicate improvements in health care, air pollution control measures and access to treatment,” said Farshad Farzadfar, a senior author of the study.

''However, the increase in disability-adjusted life years suggests that although fewer people were dying from cardiovascular disease, more people were living with disability,'' Farzadfar said.

The researchers also found that between 1990 and 2019, age-standardised CVD death and disability attributed to outdoor PM pollution rose by 8.1 per cent, while age-standardised cardiovascular death and disability attributed to household PM pollution, which is produced by solid cooking fuels such as coal, charcoal, crop residue, dung and wood, fell by 65.4 per cent.

“The reason for the decrease in the burden of household air pollution from solid fuels might be better access and use of cleaner fuels, such as refined biomass, ethanol, liquefied petroleum gas, solar and electricity,” Farzadfar said.

''Moreover, structural changes, such as improved cookstoves and built-in stoves, chimney hoods and better ventilation, might be effective in reducing pollution exposure to solid fuels,” Farzadfar added.

The authors acknowledged several limitations of the study. Because the assessment of exposure to particulate matter pollution in the study is based on regional estimates, it may not accurately reflect individual exposure.

In addition, results from this analysis of the association between particulate matter pollution and cardiovascular outcomes may not be generalizable to other health conditions or other pollutants, they added.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA and Axiom Space have inked an agreement for the fourth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The mission, named Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4), is scheduled for launch no earlier than August 2024 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

While the exact launch date is yet to be determined, the Ax-4 mission is expected to spend up to 14 days docked to the space station. The prime crew members for the mission will be confirmed once they are approved by NASA and its international partners.

The crew will undergo comprehensive training with NASA, international partners, and SpaceX, the launch provider for transportation to and from the ISS. The training will cover spacecraft systems, procedures, and emergency preparedness for the Dragon spacecraft.

"Our Axiom Space team is looking forward to a fourth mission to the International Space Station. Each mission allows us to build on the foundation we have set for the world's first commercial space station, Axiom Station, preparing our teams and orbital platform to succeed the International Space Station operations in low Earth orbit," said Michael Suffredini, CEO and president of Axiom Space.

Axiom Space is acquiring NASA services through a mission-specific order and a reimbursable Space Act Agreement. The mission-specific order encompasses crew supplies, cargo delivery to space, storage, and in-orbit resources for daily use. Additionally, it allows for up to seven contingency days aboard the space station.

Through the Space Act Agreements, Axiom Space will reimburse NASA for various services required to enable the mission, such as crew member training and the use of facilities at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Additionally, SpaceX has its own reimbursable agreement with NASA Kennedy for launch services.

Earlier this year, NASA selected Axiom Space for the third private astronaut mission, and the proposed crew members for that mission are currently being reviewed by NASA and its international partners, with an announcement expected later this year. The third private astronaut mission is now targeted for launch no earlier than January 2024. 
 

CHENNAI [Maha Media]: Hours after the successful commercial launch of PSLV-C56 that injected seven Singapore satellites in the orbit that was followed by the technology demonstrator of controlled lowering the orbit of the fourth stage engine of PSLV to have a lower life span spent in space on Sunday, the ISRO scientists are working on a more challenging task--slinging the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft into the TransLunar Injection (TLI) orbit on the midnight of August 1. 

After the successful PSLV mission, the scientists are back in action to further raise the orbit of India's third Lunar Mission, to explore the so far unexplored Lunar south pole that would propel India joint a select group of space faring nations to achieve this historic. The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which was launched from the Second Launch Pad from Sriharikota on July 14, has undergone five orbit raising manouvers thus far to take it further closer to the moon. And the August 1 operation is more crucial to ensure that the spacecraft enters the Lunar Orbit. 

ISRO had successfully performed the fifth Orbit raising maneuver on July 25 and the spacecraft attained an orbit of 127609 km x 236 km and the next firing, the TLI is planned for August 1 between 12 midnight and 1 a.m. 

"The next firing, the TransLunar Injection (TLI), is planned for August 1, 2023, between 12 midnight and 1 am IST", ISRO said. It will be a more challenging task and the scientists at the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru are burning the midnight oil to make the TLI manouver success. From there, it would take another 22 days for the spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Lunar surface, that would catapult India join USA, the then Soviet Union and China to have achieved this milestone.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: India would launch a satellite from Singapore carrying a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) payload developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) capable of taking images under all weather conditions, on July 30.

The Indian rocket PSLV-C56 would put into orbit Singapore's DS-SAR satellite, along with six co-passenger satellites from the island city-state, from the first launch-pad of the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Sriharikota spaceport in Andhra Pradesh at 6.30 am on Sunday. The DS-SAR satellite is developed under a partnership between Singapore's Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA)(representing the Government of Singapore) and Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd (ST Engineering), a global technology, defence and engineering company. Once deployed and operational, it will be used to support the satellite imagery requirements of various agencies within the Government of Singapore. ST Engineering will use it for multi-modal and higher responsiveness imagery and geospatial services for their commercial customers.

DS-SAR carries a SAR payload developed by IAI allowing the satellite to provide for all-weather day and night coverage, and capability of imaging at one metre resolution at full polarimetry.

The NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), a central public sector undertaking under the Department of Space (DOS), has procured the PSLV-C56 to deploy the 360-kg DS-SAR satellite and the six co-passenger satellites, the ISRO, the national space agency headquartered here, tweeted on Monday.

''It's a commercial mission,'' DOS Secretary and ISRO Chairman, Somanath S, told PTI.

The six co-passenger satellites are: VELOX-AM, a technology demonstration microsatellite, Atmospheric Coupling and Dynamics Explorer (ARCADE), an experimental satellite, SCOOB-II , a 3U nanosatellite flying a technology demonstrator payload, NuLIoN by NuSpace, an advanced 3U nanosatellite enabling seamless IoT connectivity in both urban & remote locations, Galassia-2, a 3U nanosatellite that will be orbiting at low earth orbit, and ORB-12 STRIDER, from Aliena Pte. Ltd., Singapore, a satellite developed under an International collaboration, according to ISRO. The PSLV-C56 is configured in its core-alone mode, similar to that of C55.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA's Mars helicopter is expected to conduct a new flight on the Red Planet Saturday, the agency said on Friday. 

The helicopter is scheduled to reach an altitude of 10 meters and travel about 203 meters for about 137 seconds in its new flight,  he 53th one on Mars, according to NASA. The helicopter, named Ingenuity, arrived at Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, attached to the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover. 

The helicopter is a technology demonstration to test powered flight on another planet for the first time. The helicopter was designed to fly for up to 90 seconds, to distances of almost 300 meters at a time and about 3 to 4.5 meters from the ground, according to NASA. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Minister of State for Atomic Energy and Space Dr Jitendra Singh has said that Chandrayaan-3 will open up new Moon vistas for the world. The mission Chandrayaan-3 will be launched on Friday from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota. Dr Singh said that India’s earlier mission, Chandrayaan-1 had thrown up new light on various aspects of the moon, and for the first time brought before the world the evidence of the presence of water on the surface of the moon.

In an interview with ET (Economic Times) Governance, he said, the whole world is looking up to Chandrayaan 3 with great anticipation, expectation, and hope. The Minister said, Chandrayaan-3 mission signals March to the Moon one step closer and also demonstrates the fact that India is not lagging behind other countries. He said, the unique feature of this mission is that it will not only observe the Moon from the Moon but will also see Earth from the Moon. Dr Singh said, out of 424 foreign satellites launched till date by India, 389 were launched in the last nine years of this government.

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA and SpaceX are planning to launch the seventh crew mission to the International Space Station in August. 

The earliest targeted launch date for the Crew-7 mission is Aug 15, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the agency said on Wednesday. 

The launch will carry NASA astronaut and Mission Commander Jasmin Moghbeli, European Space Agency astronaut and Pilot Andreas Mogensen, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Satoshi Furukawa and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov as mission specialists.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Utilizing an innovative approach, researchers have shed further light on an age-old question- how did life originate on Earth? The study, led by an international collaborative group, offers a glimpse into the very first processes responsible for the formation of life's building blocks.

It is believed that small water puddles containing urea, a vital organic compound for nucleo base formation, were subjected to the intense high-energy radiation from space, which was omnipresent before life was formed, causing the urea to undergo conversion into reaction products that eventually formed DNA and RNA.

To delve deeper into the mechanisms behind urea ionization and reaction, as well as the pathways and energy dissipation involved, the international team, including corresponding author Zhong Yin, an associate professor at Tohoku University's International Center for Synchrotron Radiation Innovation Smart (SRIS), developed an innovative X-ray spectroscopy approach.

Leveraging a high-harmonic generation light source and a sub-micron liquid flat-jet, the new approach enabled scientists to investigate chemical reactions in liquids with unparalleled temporal precision. This cutting-edge technique allowed the team to observe the intricate changes in urea molecules at the femtosecond level, which is equivalent to a quadrillionth of a second.

"We have shown for the first time how urea molecules react after ionization. Ionisation radiation damages the urea biomolecules. But in dissipating the energy from the radiation, the ureas undergo a dynamical process which occurs at the femtosecond time scale," said corresponding author Zhong Yin, currently based as an associate professor at Tohoku University's International Center for Synchrotron Radiation Innovation Smart (SRIS).

While past studies had primarily focused on the gas phase, this new approach facilitated investigations in the aqueous environment, which closely resembles the natural setting of biochemical processes. For this, the researchers developed a device that could generate an ultra-thin liquid jet, with a thickness smaller than one-millionth of a meter, within a vacuum was a crucial aspect of the experiment. A thicker jet would have hindered measurements by absorbing a significant portion of the X-rays used in the study.

Yin believes that their breakthrough not only provides insights into the formation of life on Earth but also opens up new avenues in the burgeoning field of attochemistry.

"Shorter light pulses are necessary to understand chemical reactions in real time and push the boundaries in attochemistry. Our approach enables scientists to observe a molecular movie, following each step of the process along the way," Yin said.

The novel X-ray spectroscopy approach has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of fundamental biological processes and their origins.

The team's finding's are published in the journal Nature.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Glaciers in Asia’s Hindu Kush Himalaya could lose up to 75% of their volume by century’s end due to global warming, causing both dangerous flooding and water shortages for the 240 million people who live in the mountainous region, according to a new report. A team of international scientists has found that ice loss in the region, home to the famous peaks of Everest and K2, is speeding up. During the 2010s, the glaciers shed ice as much as 65% faster than they had in the preceding decade, according to the assessment by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an intergovernmental scientific authority on the region.

“We’re losing the glaciers, and we’re losing them in 100 years’ time,” said Philippus Wester, an environmental scientist and ICIMOD fellow who was the lead author of the report. The Hindu Kush Himalaya stretches 3,500 km (2,175 miles) across Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.

At 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2C of warming above preindustrial temperatures, glaciers across the entire region will lose 30% to 50% of their volume by 2100, the report said. But where glaciers will melt most depends on location. At 3C of warming — what the world is roughly on track for under current climate policies — glaciers in the Eastern Himalaya, which includes Nepal and Bhutan, will lose up to 75% of their ice. At 4C of warming, that ticks up to 80%.

THE FULL PICTURE Scientists have struggled to assess how climate change is affecting the Hindu Kush Himalaya. Unlike the European Alps and North America’s Rocky Mountains, the region lacks a long historical record of field measurements that reveal whether glaciers are growing or shrinking.

“There was always some uncertainty in the Himalaya — are they really melting?”, said Wester. In 2019, the United States declassified spy satellite images of the region’s glaciers dating back to 1970, providing a new scientific baseline.

Further advances in satellite technology in the past five years, alongside bolstered field efforts, have buoyed scientists’ understanding of the changes underway. The report draws on data running through December 2022. “While the knowledge of the Himalayan glaciers is still not as good as the Alps, it’s now comparable to other regions like the Andes,” said Tobias Bolch, a glaciologist with Graz University of Technology in Austria unaffiliated with the report.

Compared with a 2019 ICIMOD assessment of the region, “there’s a much higher level of confidence now in these findings,” said Wester. “We have a better sense of what the loss will be through to 2100 at different levels of global warming.” LIVELIHOODS AT RISK

With this newfound understanding comes grave concern for the people living in the Hindu Kush Himalaya. The report found water flows in the region’s 12 river basins, including the Ganges, Indus, and Mekong, are likely to peak around mid-century, with consequences for the more than 1.6 billion people who depend on this supply.

"While it may sound like we'll have more water because glaciers are melting at an increased rate ... too frequently it will arise as floods instead of a steady flow," said Wester. Past peak water, supplies will eventually dwindle. Many high mountain communities use glacial water and snowmelt to irrigate crops. But the timing of when snow falls has become more erratic, and there’s less than there used to be.

“We’ve had … huge numbers of yak deaths because during summer they go to higher pastures,” said report co-author Amina Maharjan, a senior specialist in livelihoods and migration at ICIMOD. If the snow falls too soon, “the entire area is covered in snow and they don’t have grass to graze”. People are now moving away from mountain communities to earn income elsewhere, she said.

Melting glaciers also pose a danger to downstream communities. Runoff pools in shallow lakes, held back by rocks and debris. The risk comes when a lake overfills, bursting through its natural barrier and sending a torrent of water rushing down mountain valleys. Governments are trying to prepare for these changes. China is working to shore up the country’s water supplies. And Pakistan is installing early warning systems for glacial lake outburst floods.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Groundwater pumping has shifted such a large mass of water that the Earth tilted nearly 80 centimetres east between 1993 and 2010 alone, which could impact our planet's climate, according to a study.

The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that during the study period, the most water was redistributed in western North America and northwestern India.

Scientists have previously estimated humans pumped 2,150 gigatons of groundwater, equivalent to more than 6 millimetres of sea level rise, from 1993 to 2010. However, validating that estimate is difficult.

''Earth's rotational pole actually changes a lot,'' said Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University in South Korea, who led the study.

''Our study shows that among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater actually has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole,'' Seo said.

The researchers noted that water's ability to change the Earth's rotation was discovered in 2016, and until now, the specific contribution of groundwater to these rotational changes was unexplored.

The latest study modelled the observed changes in the drift of Earth's rotational pole and the movement of water—first, with only ice sheets and glaciers considered, and then adding in different scenarios of groundwater redistribution.

The model only matched the observed polar drift once the researchers included 2150 gigatons of groundwater redistribution. Without it, the model was off by 78.5 centimeters, or 4.3 centimeters of drift per year.

The researchers said attempts by countries to slow groundwater depletion rates, especially in those sensitive regions, could theoretically alter the change in drift, but only if such conservation approaches are sustained for decades.

The rotational pole normally changes by several metres within about a year, so changes due to groundwater pumping do not run the risk of shifting seasons. However, on geologic time scales, polar drift can have an impact on climate, they said.

''This is a nice contribution and an important documentation for sure,'' said Surendra Adhikari, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, US, who was not involved in this study.

Adhikari published the 2016 paper on water redistribution impacting rotational drift.

''They have quantified the role of groundwater pumping on polar motion, and it's pretty significant,'' Adhikari said in a statement.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: This study was published in the journal, Nature Water.'

Human activities have a significant impact on natural waters, aquatic biodiversity, and water quality. According to Professor Mathieu Lapointe of the Department of Construction Engineering at Ecole de technologie superieure (ETS), certain types of wastewater that are not currently treated can be treated globally using more sustainable and affordable in situ methods.

According to a study conducted by Professor Lapointe and published in the journal Nature, the rate of discharge into the environment of certain types of untreated water--urban and rural runoff, as well as industrial runoff--varies from country to country. Lower-income countries discharge more than higher-income countries. Specifically, depending on the country, wastewater treatment rates can range from 4 per cent to 95 per cent.

Water treatment plants are not only costly, they also consume a lot of energy. Moreover, they don't solve the problems associated with urban waterproofing or the erratic excess rainfall caused by climate change. In addition, agricultural and urban runoff is often considered insufficiently contaminated to justify the cost of using conventional treatment plants. As a result, runoff remains untreated even though it can contaminate aquatic ecosystems.

Professor Lapointe recommends passive, modular, inexpensive, and decentralized solutions capable of retaining specific contaminants. These include bioretention cells, aggregate-decant systems and seepage areas through functionalized soils. He also proposes a greater reliance on passive ecosystem services, including microorganisms, oxidation, photodegradation and inactivation, to name a few.

"To treat waters that are not currently treated for techno-economic reasons, such as stormwater runoff, government authorities and environmental organizations would do well to promote passive systems, which can be combined or integrated with more conventional processes for collecting and treating wastewater.", Professor Lapointe said. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a stunning video showcasing two of Jupiter's largest moons, Europa and Io, crossing in front of the planet's iconic feature, the Great Red Spot. The video, composed of images captured by the agency's Cassini spacecraft during its voyage to Saturn in 2000, provides a captivating glimpse into the dynamic interactions within the gas giant's moon system.

Europa, known for its icy surface, and Io, renowned for its volcanic activity, can be seen traversing across Jupiter's imposing backdrop. Interestingly, despite Io being closer to Jupiter and moving at a faster pace, the time-lapse video showcases Europa overtaking its volcanic sibling. The apparent anomaly arises from the motion of the Cassini spacecraft itself, which was travelling rapidly at the time, causing significant changes in the camera's position during the imaging process.

The Cassini spacecraft was launched by NASA in 1997 with the primary objective of studying Saturn and its moons. However, during its trajectory, Cassini also provided valuable insights into Jupiter's moon system, capturing breathtaking images and data that continue to inspire scientists and space enthusiasts.

While Cassini's mission to Jupiter concluded long ago, the gas giant continues to be a subject of fascination and exploration. NASA's Juno spacecraft is currently in orbit around Jupiter, meticulously studying its atmosphere, magnetic field, and inner structure to unravel the planet's mysteries. As of May 15, the solar-powered orbiter has flown over 510 million miles and also documented close encounters with three of Jupiter’s four largest moons.

The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), launched in April, is also en route to the gas giant, poised to delve deeper into the mysteries of Jupiter's icy moons, including Europa. The spacecraft will arrive on the planet in July 2031.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day is a popular online platform that shares captivating astronomical images and videos, offering a daily dose of cosmic wonders to astronomy enthusiasts and the general public alike.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's latest image reveals the mesmerizing beauty of NGC 7292, a galaxy located approximately 44 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. The galaxy is characterized by its irregular shape and a stretched-out core forming a distinct bar - a feature common in spiral galaxies.

Unlike well-known spiral or elliptical galaxies, NGC 7292 lacks the defined spiral arms and it appears slightly dishevelled with a hazy, faint glow. Astronomers classify NGC 7292 as a low surface brightness galaxy, making it barely discernible against the vast backdrop of the night sky. Such galaxies are typically dominated by gas and dark matter rather than stars.

Hubble inspected NGC 7292 as part of an observational campaign focused on studying the aftermath of Type II supernovae. These cataclysmic events occur when a massive star collapses under its own gravity and subsequently rebounds in a violent explosion, tearing the star apart. By examining the aftermath and the remaining nearby stars associated with a large sample of historical Type II supernovae, astronomers hope to gain insights into the diversity of these powerful cosmic events.

NGC 7292 hosted a Type II supernova known as SN 1964H, which was first observed in 1964. By studying the stellar neighbourhood surrounding SN 1964H, scientists aim to estimate the initial mass of the star that underwent the supernova event. Additionally, this investigation may reveal any surviving stellar companions that once shared a system with the star that eventually exploded as SN 1964H.

Launched by NASA in 1990, Hubble has allowed astronomers to observe the universe with unprecedented clarity, leading to numerous groundbreaking discoveries. The telescope is equipped with a suite of powerful instruments that allow it to observe the universe in different wavelengths - from ultraviolet to near-infrared.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Researchers found women are less inclined to take chances than males because they are more sensitive to the pain of potential losses than the potential profits. This study was published in the British Journal of Psychology.'

The study also discovered that men are 'significantly' more optimistic than women, making them more inclined to take chances. Dr Chris Dawson, associate professor of business economics at the University of Bath School of Management, said the findings were significant and could help explain sex-specific outcomes in several employment sectors and financial markets.

'It is widely acknowledged that men, across many domains, take more risks than women. These differences in how the sexes view risk can have significant effects," Dr Dawson said. 'For instance, differences between the sexes in risk-taking can explain why women are less likely to be entrepreneurs, are underrepresented in high-paying jobs and upper management, and less likely to invest their wealth in equities markets than men. Despite these important implications, we still know very little about why women take fewer risks than men.

"My research attempts to fill that gap. When thinking about risky choices, people tend to assess the probability of losing something alongside an evaluation of how painful that loss would be. I found that women take fewer risks than men as they focus more on the possibility of losing and anticipate experiencing more pain from potential losses," he added. Previous research suggests that women are more risk averse than men, and this study investigated the joint role of two psychological characteristics to explain the differences - loss aversion, the idea that losses loom larger than gains, and optimism.

To measure loss aversion, Dr Dawson used data from 13,575 people from the UK British Household Panel Survey to assess how changes in household income from one year to the next predict changes in psychological well-being. He found that income losses are less painful for men than for women with no difference in the psychological responses to income gains between the sexes.

When asked how they saw themselves financially a year from now with expectations about outcomes under the individual's control, men were significantly more optimistic than women. The research indicates that this optimism may be linked to men's overconfidence about their abilities compared to women which previous studies have highlighted.

If women are both less optimistic about the probability of favourable outcomes occurring and less confident in their abilities than men, they will naturally evaluate a given gamble as being riskier, the research said.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The Centre for Cognition and Sociality (CCS) at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has revealed the finding of neurons that allow us to recognise others. The researchers observed that the neurons that deal with information connected with distinct persons are situated in the CA1 area of the hippocampus. Humans, like other social creatures, are continually interacting with others. The capacity to recognise the identity of the social counterpart, access important information about them from memory, and update it from the present encounter is crucial for building social bonds throughout this process. However, research on how these mechanisms occur in the brain has been restricted.

Previous efforts to resolve this topic relied mostly on mouse brain research, notably in the hippocampus. The hippocampus was assumed to provide the solution since it is a brain region known to be involved in memory formation. The Cornu Ammonis (CA) fields, which are numbered CA1 through CA3, are engaged in many activities linked to memory and spatial processing inside the hippocampus and were thus significant study objectives. So far, the mouse studies on the neural mechanisms of individual recognition mainly focused on the CA2 region of the hippocampus. However, previous studies have used behavioral experiments that only involve distinguishing unfamiliar mice from familiar mice, making it difficult to interpret whether the results reflect the animal's ability to perceive or truly recognize individual characteristics.

In this study, the IBS-CCS research team developed a new behavioral paradigm using mice to better investigate their ability to recognize other individuals. Their new method involved having the subject mouse associate specific individual mice with rewards and studying their behavior after encountering reward-associated individuals and not associated individuals. Specifically, two mice were immobilized on a spinning disk and were randomly presented to a subject mouse, which would recognize the neighbor through scent. Water is then supplied from the device to the subject mouse as a reward when licking in response to the reward-associated mouse, but not another. The researchers tried to determine whether the subject mouse could discriminate against different individuals and analyzed the brain cell activity during the experiment.

The stimulus mice on the spinning disk were male littermates and the subject mice were already familiar with the stimulus mice. This means that the subject mice distinguished between stimulus mice solely according to the unique characteristics of the stimulus mice, suggesting the high reliability of the experimental results. Using this behavioral paradigm, the researchers clearly demonstrated that the dorsal CA1 region of the hippocampus plays an essential role in individual recognition. For example, when the hippocampal CA1 region is suppressed using a neuroinhibitor, the subject mouse was unable to distinguish its neighbor. Also by using a two-photon imaging technique that allows real-time observation of neural cell activity in the deep regions of the brain, the IBS-CCS team even identified the specific neuronal cells in the hippocampal CA1 region that is responsible for the recognition of individual mice.

This was an interesting addition to previous findings, which have proposed the dorsal CA2 region of the hippocampus to be the important brain area for social memory while reporting that the dorsal CA1 region does not play a significant role. Furthermore, researchers in the past believed that social memories in rodents only last for a short period of time and that they do not form long-term memories about individual subjects. However, the latest study by the IBS-CCS has demonstrated that long-term memories about individuals can indeed be formed in mice.

Dr LEE Doyun who led this research stated, "We have revealed for the first time how value information about others obtained through positive or negative interactions with them is represented and stored in our brains. Furthermore, this provides significant insights into understanding the role of our brains in building and developing human relationships through various social interactions." Beyond that, the researchers have also revealed the presence of specific neurons in the subject mouse's hippocampal CA1 region that process positive information associated with different individual mice. An important part of forming a social relationship is assigning a positive or negative value to a social encounter with another individual and updating that value. For example, just as it is essential to develop a friendship with a particular individual, it is essential to evaluate how enjoyable and rewarding it was to interact with them.

These specific CA1 neurons were found to be responsive when encountering reward-associated individuals. However, such reward expectation responses were not observed when the subject was exposed to odors that are unrelated to social activity, such as citral or butanol. These findings indicate that the hippocampal CA1 region plays a selectively important role in the formation of associative social memories. It is hoped that this new discovery can lead to a potential solution for the treatment of various brain disorders that cause difficulty in forming social relationships.

"Our results could be utilized to understand and propose treatment methods for mental disorders such as autism, which exhibit abnormalities in brain functions involved in processing memories and related information about others," explains Dr Lee. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Researchers found young chimps combine different gestures, vocalisations, and facial expressions in a way that mimics the development of communication in human infants. The study was published in 'Animal Behaviour.'

Durham University psychologists discovered that young chimps combine different communication signals, which may help them be better understood by other chimps in different situations such as playing or fighting. The researchers discovered that this skill develops throughout childhood and adolescence.

Combining playful open-mouth faces with laughing, touching another chimp while whimpering, and baring their teeth while squeaking were examples of such combined signals. The researchers say that understanding this "multimodal" form of communicating could shed important light on how communication evolved in humans and our closest ape relatives, and tell us more about how our own language skills emerge.

Their study, which also involved the University of Portsmouth, is published in the journal Animal Behaviour. Researchers observed 28 semi-wild chimpanzees, ranging in age from one to 11 years old, at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust sanctuary in northern Zambia.

While previous studies on apes have largely looked at different forms of communication signals in isolation (gestures, vocalisations, facial expressions), the new findings looked at how chimpanzees combined these different forms of communication to see how this developed with age and in varying circumstances. The researchers found that chimpanzees consistently used standalone communication signals - such as grunting, arm movements or facial expressions - across all ages and in different situations.

However, they also showed that as the chimpanzees got older, they were more likely to combine different communication signals together. This was especially the case when the chimpanzees were responding to aggression or was playing, two situations where it is important for them to make clear what they were communicating to avoid risky fallout, the researchers said.

The older adolescent chimpanzees studied were also more likely to use a combination of different communication signals instead of individual gestures or expressions, especially during aggression scenarios. Research lead author Emma Doherty, a Research Postgraduate in the Department of Psychology, at Durham University, said: "When we think about human language, we know that it is a combination of different types of communication such as speech, facial expressions and gestures.

"The way we communicate likely has deep evolutionary roots that are shared with some of our closest living relatives such as apes. "Our study provides evidence that the way chimpanzees communicate with increased complexity as they get older is consistent with the development of communication we see in human infants.

"By studying the development of this multi-layered way of communicating among young chimpanzees we can learn more about the reasons behind this and shed light on the potential evolutionary continuity between humans and other apes." The researchers said that more work should be carried out to observe multimodal signals in primates in the wild to further understand how the development of communication is affected by different environments.

They added that studying multimodal communication - instead of observing individual communication signals in isolation - could provide better evidence of how communication develops in apes and potentially help us to understand the evolution of human communication. Research corresponding author Dr Zanna Clay, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, Durham University, said: "A lot of the focus of research so far into communication, both in humans and other animals, looks at individual communication signals independently, but we know humans combine these signals all the time from early infancy.

"As a close relative of humans, apes give us a snapshot into how these signals could have evolved into multimodal communications, ultimately culminating in human language."
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lauded participation of more than 2 crore on Meri LiFE app in less than a month of its launch. Sharing a tweet by Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Bhupender Yadav, the Prime Minister tweeted: "Encouraging trend, indicating a collective spirit to make our planet better."

"There couldn't have been a better way to mark World Environment Day! Participation on Meri LiFE App breaches the 2 crore mark in less than a month since its launch," Bhupender Yadav had tweeted. MeriLiFE empowers individuals to lead a sustainable lifestyle by making pro-planet choices in their daily lives, said its official website.

The app is inspired by the concept of LiFE, introduced by the Prime Minister at COP 26, which emphasizes mindful and deliberate utilization instead of mindless and wasteful consumption. The Meri LiFE mobile application aims to enable a greater community of young people to emerge as Pro-Planet-Persons, changemakers and solution providers towards some of the greatest environmental problems we are confronted with today, through phygital mediums, the website added. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: A Falcon 9 carrier rocket launched another 52 Starlink internet satellites into orbit early on Wednesday, the SpaceX corporation said. 

"Falcon 9 launches 52 @Starlink satellites to orbit, completing this first stage booster’s 14th launch and landing," SpaceX tweeted, adding that the deployment of satellites has been confirmed. 

The rocket lifted off at 11:02 p.m. PT (06:02 GMT on Wednesday) from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, marking the 14th launch and landing for this Falcon 9 first-stage booster. In a separate post, Starlink said all the satellites are equipped with optical space lasers to provide internet coverage globally and "serve customers in the most remote locations on Earth." "The space laser mesh is what enabled Starlink coverage for critical infrastructure, schools, and communities across the 169 island nation of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean after it was hit by a tsunami last year," Starlink said in a tweet. 

Starlink is a next-generation satellite network designed to provide broadband internet access across the world, launched by SpaceX in February 2018.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: China on Tuesday successfully sent three astronauts including its first civilian into orbit as it launched the Shenzhou-16 manned mission to its space station for its second crew rotation, signalling another leap forward for the country’s ambitious space programme.

The spaceship, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China at 9:31 AM (Beijing Time), according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).

About 10 minutes after the launch, Shenzhou-16 separated from the rocket and entered its designated orbit. The crew members are in good shape and the launch is a complete success, the CMSA declared.

Hours later the spaceship successfully docked with the space station’s core module about 400km above the ground, the CMSA said.

After that, it conducted a fast-automated rendezvous and docked with the radial port of its core module Tianhe.

The astronaut trio aboard Shenzhou-16 will then enter the Tianhe module and the three astronauts of the Shenzhou-15 mission who are preparing to return to Earth have got ready for their arrival, it said.

For the first time, China has included a civilian in its rotating crew for the space station which otherwise remained a domain of the military personnel.

Gui Haichao, a professor at Beihang University in Beijing regarded as a payload specialist, was among the three astronauts.

The other two are mission's commander Jing Haipeng, who is also making history by becoming the first Chinese astronaut to go into space for a record fourth time.

The astronaut flight engineer Zhu Yangzhu is also making his first journey into space.

The Shenzhou-16 will be the first crew mission after China's space station programme entered the stage of application and development, Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the CMSA told the media on Monday.

The trio will take over from the Shenzhou-15 astronauts, who have been on China’s newly completed Tiangong space station since November, to start their own five-month stint aboard the station.

Once ready, China will be the only country to own a space station as the International Space Station (ISS) of Russia is a collaborative project of several countries. The ISS station is also set to be decommissioned by 2030.

The significant feature of China's space station is its two robotic arms, especially the long one which has the ability to grab objects, including satellites from space.

After entering orbit, the Shenzhou-16 spaceship will make a fast, automated rendezvous and docking with the space station combination.

The Shenzhou-16 astronauts will conduct large-scale in-orbit tests and experiments in various fields as planned. They are expected to make high-level scientific achievements in the study of novel quantum phenomena, high-precision space-time-frequency systems, the verification of general relativity, and the origin of life.

The launch also marks the 475th flight mission of the Long March carrier rocket series. On Monday, the CMSA also announced China’s plan for a manned lunar landing by 2030.

China’s manned lunar mission came as the US space agency NASA aims to send a second manned mission to the moon by 2025 to explore the south pole for frozen water.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: S Somanath, the head of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said on Monday that Chandrayaan-3 will launch in July of this year. After the second generation navigation satellite NSV-01 was successfully launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, was when he made these statements.

Speaking to the news agency, he said, "Chandrayaan-3 will be launched in July this year."

A follow-up mission to Chandrayaan-2, Chandrayaan-3 aims to show that safe moon landing and roving are possible from beginning to end. It is configured with Landers and Rovers and it would be launched by LVM3 from Sriharikota's Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

It is made up of a rover, a propulsion module, and an indigenous lander module. Both the lander and the rover will be equipped with scientific payloads that will conduct lunar surface experiments.

The project intends to create and showcase new technology needed for extraterrestrial expeditions. The lander will be able to land softly at a chosen location on the moon and release the rover, which will do in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface as it is moving.

It is among an ongoing series of space missions which are part of the Indian lunar exploration programme and is managed by ISRO. However, Chandrayaan-2's lander 'crash-landed' on the moon's surface on September 6, 2019, when it diverted from its trajectory while attempting to land as a result of a glitch in its software after it was successfully launched and sent into lunar orbit in 2019.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO will launch GSLV-F12 Navigation satellite on May 29th at 10.42 hrs from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. 

This is a return to flight mission carrying the next generation NavIC satellite that will replace the IRNSS-1G satellite launched in 2016. NavIC is a constellation of seven satellites offering the standard position service for civilian users and restricted service for strategic users. Three satellites of the constellation are placed in the geostationary orbit and four satellites in the inclined geosynchronous orbit. The ground network consists of a control centre, range and integrity monitoring stations and two-way ranging stations. NavIC signals covering 1500kms around India are designed to provide user position accuracy better than 20 meters and timing accuracy better than 50 nanoseconds.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Climate change is likely to abruptly push up to 30 per cent species over tipping points as their geographic ranges reach unforeseen temperatures, according to a study.

The researchers found that if the planet warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius, 15 per cent of species they studied will be at risk of experiencing unfamiliarly hot temperatures across at least 30 per cent of their existing geographic range in a single decade.

However, this doubles to 30 per cent of species at 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming, they said.

The study, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, analysed data from over 35,000 species of animals -- including mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, corals, fish, cephalopods and plankton -- and seagrasses from every continent and ocean basin, alongside climate projections running up to 2100.

The researchers investigated when areas within each species’ geographical range will cross a threshold of thermal exposure, defined as the first five consecutive years where temperatures consistently exceed the most extreme monthly temperature experienced by a species across its geographic range over recent history (1850-2014). Once the thermal exposure threshold is crossed, the animal is not necessarily going to die out, but there is no evidence that it is able to survive the higher temperatures, according to the researchers.

The research projects that for many species there could be an abrupt loss of habitat due to future climate change, they said.

The researchers found a consistent trend that for many animals, the thermal exposure threshold will be crossed for much of their geographic range within the same decade.

''It is unlikely that climate change will gradually make environments more difficult for animals to survive in. Instead, for many animals, large swaths of their geographic range are likely to become unfamiliarly hot in a short span of time,'' said study lead author Alex Pigot from University College London (UCL) in the UK.

''While some animals may be able to survive these higher temperatures, many other animals will need to move to cooler regions or evolve to adapt, which they likely cannot do in such short timeframes,'' Pigot said in a statement.

The study suggests that once a species is suffering under unfamiliar conditions, there may be very little time before most of its range becomes inhospitable.

''Our study is yet another example of why we need to urgently reduce carbon emissions to mitigate the harmful effects climate change is having on animals and plants, and avoid a massive extinction crisis,'' Pigot added.

The researchers hope that their study could help with targeting conservation efforts, as their data provides an early warning system showing when and where particular animals are likely to be at risk.

''In the past we have had snapshots to show the impact of climate change, but here we are presenting the data more like a film, where you can see the changes unfold over time,'' said study co-author Christopher Trisos from the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

''This shows that for many species the risk is a bit like everything, everywhere, all at once. By animating this process, we hope to help direct conservation efforts before it’s too late, while also showing the potentially catastrophic consequences of letting climate change continue unchecked,'' Trisos added.
 

BENGALURU [Maha Media]: If things go as planned, the Indian Space Research Organisation would launch its ambitious Chandrayaan-3 mission aimed at demonstrating critical technologies to land the spacecraft on the south pole of the moon in less than two months.

Chandrayaan-3 mission carries scientific instruments to study the thermo-physical properties of the lunar regolith, lunar seismicity, lunar surface plasma environment and elemental composition in the vicinity of the landing site.

"Chandrayaan-3 mission is scheduled in July second week," a senior official of the Bengaluru-headquartered national space agency under the Department of Space told PTI on Thursday.

While the scope of these scientific instruments on the lander and the rover would fit in the theme of 'Science of the Moon', another experimental instrument would study the spectro-polarimetric signatures of the Earth from the lunar orbit, which would fit in the theme of 'Science from the Moon', according to ISRO officials.

In March this year, Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft successfully completed the essential tests that validated its capability to withstand the harsh vibration and acoustic environment that the spacecraft would face during its launch.

These tests were particularly challenging, considering the fact that the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which would be launched by LVM3 (Launch Vehicle Mark-III) (earlier referred as GSLV Mk III) from SDSC SHAR, Sriharikota, is a composite of three modules -- propulsion, lander and rover.

"Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface. It consists of Lander and Rover configuration", an ISRO official said.

The propulsion module, which has Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload to study the spectral and Polari metric measurements of Earth from the lunar orbit, would carry the lander and rover configuration till 100 km lunar orbit.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: For the first time ever, global temperatures are now more likely than not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F) of warming within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization said on Wednesday.

But that did not necessarily mean the world would cross the long-term warming threshold of 1.5C above preindustrial levels set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement. With a 66% chance of temporarily reaching 1.5C by 2027, "it's the first time in history that it's more likely than not that we will exceed 1.5C," said Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre who worked on the WMO's latest Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update.

Last year's report put the odds at about 50-50. Partially responsible for boosting the chance of hitting 1.5C is an El Niño weather pattern expected to develop in the coming months. During this natural phenomenon, warmer waters in the tropical Pacific heat the atmosphere above, spiking global temperatures.

The El Niño "will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory", said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a press statement. Still, the likelihood of temporarily exceeding 1.5C has increased over time. Between 2017 and 2021, for example, scientists estimated just a 10% chance of hitting 1.5C.

Unlike the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate projections which are based on future greenhouse gas emissions, the WMO update provides more of a prediction-based long-range weather forecast. The WMO also found a 98% chance that one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, surpassing 2016 which saw global temperature impacted by about 1.3C (2.3F) of warming.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Alatest study, led by Yale School of the Environment scientists and published in Nature, investigated the combined effect of temperature and humidity on urban heat stress using observational data and an urban climate model calculation. Researchers found that the heat stress burden is dependent on local climate and a humidifying effect can erase the cooling benefits that would come from trees and vegetation.

"A widely held view is that urban residents suffer more heat burden than the general population owing to the urban heat island phenomenon. This view is incomplete because it omits another ubiquitous urban microclimate phenomenon called the urban dry island -- that urban land tends to be less humid than the surrounding rural land," said Xuhui Lee, Sara Shallenberger Brown Professor of Meteorology, who directed the study. "In dry, temperate, and boreal climates, urban residents are actually less heat-stressed than rural residents. But in the humid Global South, the urban heat island is dominant over the urban dry island, resulting in two to six extra dangerous heat stress days per summer."

Lee and YSE doctoral student Keer Zhang, lead author of the study, say they were motivated to investigate the issue for several reasons: a large percentage of the global population lives in urban areas; many people in informal urban settlements do not have access to air conditioning; and the problem is going to get worse as temperatures rise and more people move to cities. About 4.3 billion people, or 55 per cent of the world's population, live in urban settings, and the number is expected to rise to 80 per cent by 2050, according to the World Economic Forum.

The researchers developed a theoretical framework on how urban land modifies both air temperature and air humidity and showed that these two effects have equal weight in heat stress as measured by the wet-bulb temperature, in contrary to other heat indexes, which weigh temperature more heavily than humidity. Wet-bulb temperature combines dry air temperature with humidity to measure humid heat. The results of the study, the authors note, raise important questions.

"Green vegetation can lower air temperature via water evaporation, but it can also increase heat burden because of air humidity. The question then is to what extent this humidifying effect erases the cooling benefit arising from temperature reduction. We hope to answer this question in a follow-up study, where we are comparing observations of the wet-bulb temperature in urban greenspaces (with dense tree cover) and those in built-up neighborhoods," Lee said. Zhang says she hopes the study can lead to further research on how cities can mitigate heat stress."Our diagnostic analysis on the urban wet-bulb island found that enhancing urban convection efficiency (the efficiency in dissipating heat and water) and reducing heat storage at night can reduce daytime and nighttime urban humid heat, respectively. We hope that our work will promote more research on optimizing urban shapes and materials for better thermal comforts," she says. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: According to a study, sleep spindles, which are small bursts of brain activity detected by EEG during one phase of sleep, may regulate anxiety in persons suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The study shines a light on the role of spindles in alleviating anxiety in PTSD as well as confirms their established role in the transfer of new information to longer-term memory storage. The findings challenge recent work by other researchers that has indicated spindles may heighten intrusive and violent thoughts in people with PTSD.

The final draft of the preprint publishes in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging on May 3, 2023."These findings may be meaningful not only for people with PTSD, but possibly for those with anxiety disorders," said senior author Anne Richards, MD, MPH, of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, the Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the San Francisco VA Medical Center."There are non-invasive ways that might harness the benefits of this sleep stage to provide relief from symptoms," she said. The researchers enrolled 45 participants who had all experienced combat or noncombat trauma; approximately half had moderate symptoms of PTSD and the other half had milder symptoms or were asymptomatic. 

The researchers studied the spindles during non-rapid eye movement 2 (NREM2) sleep, the phase of sleep when they mainly occur, which comprises about 50 per cent of total sleep.

In the study, participants attended a "stress visit" in which they were shown images of violent scenes, such as accidents, war violence, and human and animal injury or mutilation, prior to a lab-monitored nap that took place about two hours later. Anxiety surveys were conducted immediately after exposure to the images as well as after the nap when recall of the images was tested. The researchers also compared anxiety levels in the stress visit to those in a control visit without exposure to these images. The researchers found that spindle rate frequency was higher during the stress visit than during the control visit. 

"This provides compelling evidence that stress was a contributing factor in spindle-specific sleep rhythm changes," said first author Nikhilesh Natraj, PhD, of the UCSF Department of Neurology, the Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Notably, in participants with greater PTSD symptoms, the increased spindle frequency after stress exposure reduced anxiety post-nap.

The naps in the study took place shortly after exposure to violent images - raising a question about whether sleep occurring days or weeks after trauma will have the same therapeutic effect. The researchers think this is likely, and point to interventions that could trigger the spindles associated with NREM2 sleep and benefit patients with stress and anxiety disorders. Prescription drugs, like Ambien, are one option that should be studied further, "but a big question is whether the spindles induced by medications can also bring about the full set of brain processes associated with naturally occurring spindles," said Richards.

Electrical brain stimulation is another area for more study, researchers said. "Transcranial electrical stimulation in which small currents are passed through the scalp to boost spindle rhythms or so-called targeted memory reactivation, which involves a cue, like an odor or sound used during an experimental session and replayed during sleep may also induce spindles," said Natraj."In lieu of such inventions, sleep hygiene is definitely a zero-cost and easy way to ensure we are entering sleep phases in an appropriate fashion, thereby maximizing the benefit of spindles in the immediate aftermath of a stressful episode," he said. The researchers' next project is to study the role of spindles in the consolidation and replay of intrusive and violent memories many weeks after trauma exposure.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Mizoram has been declared the happiest state in the country according to a study conducted by Rajesh K Pillania, professor of strategy at the Management Development Institute in Gurugram.

According to a report, the state, which is the second in India to achieve 100 per cent literacy, offers students opportunities for growth even in the most difficult of circumstances.

“Mizoram’s happiness index is based on six parameters including family relationships, work-related issues, social issues and philanthropy, religion, COVID-19‘s effect on happiness, and physical and mental health,” the report said.

“A student of the Government Mizo High School (GMHS) in Aizawl, Mizoram, has had to face many difficulties since his father abandoned his family when he was young. Despite this, he remains optimistic and excels in his studies. He hopes to become a chartered accountant or appear for civil services exams if his first choice does not work out,” the report said.

Similarly, a student in Class 10 at GMHS, aspires to join the National Defence Academy (NDA). His father works in a milk factory and his mother is a homemaker. Both are hopeful about their prospects because of their school.

“Our teachers are our best friends, we are not scared or shy of sharing with them anything,” one student said. The teachers in Mizoram regularly meet with students and their parents to address any problems they may be facing.'

Mizoram’s social structure also contributes to the happiness of its youth. “It is the upbringing that adds to youth being happy or not, we are a casteless society. Also, parental pressure for studies is less here,” said Sister Lalrinmawii Khiangte, a teacher of Eben-ezer Boarding School, a private school in the state.

The report further said that every child in the Mizo community, regardless of gender, starts earning early.

“No task is considered too small and youths typically find employment around the age of 16 or 17. This is encouraged, and there is no discrimination between girls and boys,” it said.

Mizoram has a high number of broken families, but having many peers in similar situations, working mothers, and financial independence from an early age means children are not left bereft. “When both genders are taught to earn their living, and neither is dependent on the other, why should a couple continue to live together in an unhealthy setting?” asked Khiangte.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: SpaceX is scheduled to launch its seventh dedicated smallsat rideshare mission, Transporter-7, to low-Earth orbit on Tuesday, April 11. This flight will carry 50 payloads including CubeSats, MicroSats, hosted payloads, and orbital transfer vehicles carrying spacecraft to be deployed at a later time.

The launch is set to take place at 11:48 p.m. PT (06:48 UTC on April 12) from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage booster launching the Transporter-7 mission has already supported the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich mission, which was launched in November 2020 to study sea level rise, NASA's DART mission, which was launched in September 2021 to test an asteroid deflection technology, and seven Starlink missions.

Following stage separation, Falcon 9's first stage will return to Earth and land on Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4) at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The live webcast will be available on SpaceX's official website as well as on various other online platforms. It will begin about 10 minutes prior to liftoff
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Japan's space agency on Saturday postponed the launch of its flagship H3 rocket by a day to Tuesday due to bad weather, after aborting a launch last month due to technical trouble.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) had halted the initially planned launch moments before lift-off on Feb. 17 when the secondary booster engines on the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries rocket failed to ignite.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA on Thursday, including the first person from the Arab world going up for an extended monthslong stay.

The Falcon rocket bolted from Kennedy Space Center shortly after midnight, illuminating the night sky as it headed up the East Coast..

Nearly 80 spectators from the United Arab Emirates watched from the launch site as astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi — only the second Emirati to fly to space — blasted off on his six-month mission. Half a world away in Dubai and elsewhere across the UAE, schools and offices planned to broadcast the launch live. Also riding the Dragon capsule that's due at the space station on Friday: NASA's Stephen Bowen, a retired Navy submariner who logged three space shuttle flights, and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, a former research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and space newbie, and Andrei Fedyaev, a space rookie who's retired from the Russian Air Force. The first attempt to launch them was called off Monday at the last minute because of a clogged filter in the engine ignition system. They will replace a U.S.-Russian-Japanese crew that has been up there since October. 

The other station residents are two Russians and an American whose six-month stay was doubled, until September, after their Soyuz capsule sprang a leak. A replacement Soyuz arrived last weekend.

Al-Neyadi, a communications engineer, served as backup for the first Emirati astronaut, Hazzaa al-Mansoori, who rode a Russian rocket to the space station in 2019 for a weeklong visit. The oil-rich federation paid for al-Neyadi's seat on the SpaceX flight.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: National Science Day is being celebrated across the country today. The theme of this year's Science day is “Global Science for Global Wellbeing”, in light of India’s G20 presidency.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has extended his greetings to all scientists and innovators of the country. In a tweet, the Prime Minister said, India is making innumerable strides in the world of science and nurturing an eco-system for research and innovation. 
                                                             
National Science Day is celebrated to mark the discovery of the “Raman Effect” by physicist, Sir CV Raman on this day in 1928. For this discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930. In 1954, he was honoured with India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna. In 1986, the National Council for Science & Technology asked the Government of India to designate February 28 as National Science Day. Since 1987, the event is celebrated all over the country in schools, colleges, universities and other academic, scientific, technical, medical and research institutions. The celebration includes public speeches, radio, TV, science movies, science exhibitions, research demonstration, debates, and many more activities.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The Elon Musk-led SpaceX is set to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station on Monday. The four astronauts will board the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the flying laboratory for a six-month-long mission.

Nasa astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, along with United Arab Emirates (UAE) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Russian space agency, Roscosmos, cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev are going to the flying laboratory for a six-month mission to conduct scientific research.

This is the second time that a Russian astronaut is being launched to space on Musk’s spacecraft, however, it's the first time an Arab astronaut is flying to space with the mission.

The Crew-6 mission with the four astronauts will launch from Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39A in Florida. The four-member crew will spend a day in transit rendezvousing with the Space Station in zero gravity.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: All flight-capable modern birds possess the propatagium, a specialised wing structure that is necessary for flight. This structure's evolutionary ancestry has long been unknown, but recent studies indicate that nonavian dinosaurs may have developed it. The conclusion, which fills certain knowledge gaps about the genesis of avian flight, comes from statistical analysis of arm joints preserved in fossils. For a long time now, we have known modern birds evolved from certain lineages of dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago. This has led researchers to look to dinosaurs to explain some of the features unique to birds, for example, feathers, bone structure and so on. But there's something special about the wings of birds in particular that piqued the interest of researchers at the University of Tokyo's Department of Earth and Planetary Science.

"At the leading edge of a bird's wing is a structure called the propatagium, which contains a muscle connecting the shoulder and wrist that helps the wing flap and makes bird flight possible," said Associate Professor Tatsuya Hirasawa. "It's not found in other vertebrates, and it's also found to have disappeared or lost its function in flightless birds, one of the reasons we know it's essential for flight. So, in order to understand how flight evolved in birds, we must know how the propatagium evolved. 

This is what prompted us to explore some distant ancestors of modern birds, theropod dinosaurs." Theropod dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor, had arms not wings. If scientists could find evidence of an early example of the propatagium in these dinosaurs, it would help explain how the modern avian branch of the tree of life transitioned from arms to wings. However, it's not so simple, as the propatagium is made up of soft tissues which do not fossilize well if at all, so direct evidence might not be possible to find. 

Instead, the researchers had to find an indirect way to identify the presence or lack of a propatagium in a specimen.

"The solution we came up with to assess the presence of a propatagium was to collect data about the angles of joints along the arm, or wing, of a dinosaur or bird," said Yurika Uno, a graduate student at Hirasawa's lab. "In modern birds, the wings cannot fully extend due to the propatagium, constraining the range of angles possible between connecting sections. If we could find a similarly specific set of angles between joints in dinosaur specimens, we can be fairly sure they too possessed a propatagium. And through quantitative analyses of the fossilized postures of birds and nondinosaurs, we found the telltale ranges of joint angles we hoped to." 

Based on this clue, the team found that the propatagium likely evolved in a group of dinosaurs known as the maniraptoran theropods, including the famous Velociraptor. This was backed up when the researchers identified the propatagium in preserved soft tissue fossils, including those of the feathered oviraptorosaurian Caudipteryx and winged dromaeosaurian Microraptor. All the specimens they found it in existed prior to the evolution of flight in that lineage.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: China successfully sent a new remote sensing satellite into space from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Friday. 

The remote sensing satellite was launched at 12:01 p.m. (Beijing Time) by a Long March2C carrier rocket and entered its planned orbit successfully.

The launch was the 464th flight mission of the Long March carrier rocket series.
 

CHENNAI [Maha Media]: The Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Satellite Launch Vehicle Mission-2023 carrying 150 PICO satellites designed and developed by 5,000 Grade 6-12 students from across the country, will take place on February 19. Martin Foundation in association with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam International Foundation (AKIF) and Space Zone India is all geared up for the mission. 

It will be launched using a Sounding Rocket from Pattipulam village in Chengalpattu district of Tamil Nadu. AKIF was founded by the grandnephews of the late President and eminent scientist Dr Abdul Kalam. More than 5,000 students from Grade VI to XII from different parts of India, have been enabled to design and develop 150 PICO satellites, which will be launched using the sounding rocket. 

The mission will take place at Space Zone's facility at suburban Kelambakkam, where the company has the facility to launch sounding rockets. 

The countdown for the mission will begin 24 hrs before the Kalam SLV takes off.

The launch window is available from 7.30 AM to 8.30 AM on February 19 and the lift off time will be finalised after taking into account the prevailing weather conditions.

The rocket will take the satellites to an altitude of about 5-6 km and splash down into the sea. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Traditionally, it has been considered that cultivating food causes biodiversity loss and has a negative influence on an ecosystem. A new study from various colleges, including The University of Texas at Austin, contradicts this idea, demonstrating that community gardens and urban farms benefit biodiversity, local ecosystems, and the well-being of the people who labour in them. The study, published in Ecology Letters, looked at 28 urban community gardens across California over five years and quantified biodiversity in plant and animal life, as well as ecosystem functions such as pollination, carbon sequestration, food production, pest control and human well-being.

"We wanted to determine if there were any tradeoffs in terms of biodiversity or impacts on ecosystem function," said Shalene Jha, an associate professor of integrative biology who was lead author on the paper. "What we found is that these gardens, which are providing tremendous nutritional resources and increasing well-being for gardeners, are also supporting incredibly high levels of plant and animal biodiversity. It's a win-win." Previous assumptions by scientists about the negative effect of food production on biodiversity have been almost entirely based on intensive rural agriculture enterprises that tend to grow only one or two types of crops, often at a massive scale. Urban community gardens, private gardens, and urban farms and orchards tend to grow more types of plants in smaller areas. This new study is the first to explore the effects of urban gardens across a wide range of biodiversity measures and ecological services.

"It's estimated that by 2030, about 60% of the world's population will live in cities," Jha said. "And urban farms and gardens currently provide about 15%-20% of our food supply, so they are essential in addressing food inequality challenges. What we're seeing is that urban gardens present a critical opportunity to both support biodiversity and local food production." The study also found that the choices that gardeners make can have a large impact on their local ecosystem. For instance, planting trees outside crop beds could increase carbon sequestration without limiting pollinators or decreasing food production from too much shade. And mulching only within crop beds could help improve soil carbon services, while avoiding negative effects on pest control and pollinators.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Children who start preschool at the age of four are considerably more likely to attend college, according to an empirical study headed by an MIT economist.

The research looks at children who attended public preschools in Boston between 1997 and 2003. It discovered that attendance at a public preschool increased "on-time" college enrollment -- starting straight after high school -- by 8.3 percentage points, an 18 per cent gain, among students from similar backgrounds. In addition, there was a 5.4 percentage point rise in college attendance at any time.

"We find that 4-year-olds who were randomly allocated a seat in a public Boston preschool during this time period, 1997 to 2003, are more likely to attend college and that it's a pretty large effect," says Parag Pathak, a professor at MIT's Department of Economics and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study's results. "They're also more likely to graduate from high school, and they're more likely to take the SAT."

The study does not find a connection between preschool attendance and higher student scores on Massachusetts' standardized tests. But it does find that children who attended preschool had fewer behavioural issues later on, including fewer suspensions, less absenteeism, and fewer legal-system problems.

"There are many things that influence whether you go to college, and these behavioural outcomes are relevant to that," says Pathak, who is also a director of Blueprint Labs. This MIT research centre uses advanced empirical methods to examine issues in education, health care, and the workforce.

The paper, "The Long-Term Effects of Universal Preschool in Boston," is published in the February issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The authors are Guthrie Gray-Lobe, a research associate at the Becker-Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago and a research affiliate at MIT's Blueprint Labs; Pathak, who is the Class of 1922 Professor of Economics at MIT; and Christopher Walters PhD '13, an associate professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Publicly funded preschool programs have become increasingly popular and prevalent in recent decades. Across the U.S., 44 states operated publicly funded preschool programs as of 2019, along with 24 of the 40 biggest U.S. cities. The portion of 4-year-olds in the U.S. in a public preschool program has grown from 14 per cent in 2002 to 34 per cent in 2019.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Three million people in India are at risk of flooding caused by glacial lakes, the highest number of those exposed in the world, according to new study.

The study by an international team led by scientists at UK's Newcastle University, UK is the first global assessment of areas at greatest risk of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF). Published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, it estimates that 15 million people around the world are at risk from flooding caused by glacial lakes. The researchers, which also identified priority areas for mitigation, said more than half the globally exposed populations are found in just four countries: India, Pakistan, Peru, and China.

India and Pakistan contain the highest number of exposed people -- nearly three million and two million people respectively, or one-third of the global total combined -- while Iceland contains the least (260 people), they said.

As the climate gets warmer, glaciers retreat and meltwater collects at the front of the glacier, forming a lake.

These lakes can suddenly burst and create a fast-flowing GLOF that can spread over a large distance from the original site -- more than 120 kilometres in some cases.

GLOFs can be highly destructive and damage property, infrastructure, and agricultural land and can lead to significant loss of life.

Flash floods potentially triggered by a GLOF event in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district in February 2021 left nearly 80 people dead and many more missing.

The number of glacial lakes has grown rapidly since 1990 as a result of climate change. At the same time, the number of people living in these catchments has also increased significantly.

The research team looked at 1,089 glacial lake basins worldwide and the number of people living within 50 kilometres of them, as well as the level of development in those areas and other societal indicators as markers of vulnerability to GLOFs.

They then used this information to quantify and rank the potential for damage from GLOFs at a global scale and assess communities' ability to respond effectively to a flood.

The results highlighted that 15 million people live within 50 km of a glacial lake and that High Mountain Asia -- which encompasses the Tibetan Plateau, from Kyrgyzstan to China -- has the highest GLOF danger, with 9.3 million people potentially at risk.

''This work highlights that it's not the areas with the largest number or most rapidly growing lakes that are most dangerous... Instead, it is the number of people, their proximity to a glacial lake and importantly, their ability to cope with a flood that determines the potential danger from a GLOF event,'' lead researcher Caroline Taylor, a doctoral student at Newcastle University, said in a statement.

The researchers point to the relative lack of research on the danger from glacial lakes in the Andes, which runs along South America's western side, and is among the world's longest mountain ranges.

They noted that further research is urgently needed to better understand the potential GLOF danger on a local level in this area due to the high number of people living in proximity to glacial lakes and their reduced capacity to cope with the impact of a GLOF.

''Understanding which areas face the greatest danger from glacial flooding will allow for more targeted and effective risk management actions which in turn will help minimise loss of life and damage to infrastructure downstream as a result of this significant natural hazard,'' said Rachel Carr, head of physical geography at Newcastle University and a co-author of the study.

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Weathering is the process by which rocks, rain, and carbon dioxide help govern the Earth's climate over thousands of years, much like a thermostat. A new study performed by Penn State scientists could help us better understand how this thermostat reacts to temperature changes.

"Life has been on this planet for billions of years, so we know Earth's temperature has remained consistent enough for there to be liquid water and to support life," said Susan Brantley, Evan Pugh University Professor and Barnes Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, adding, "The idea is that silicate rock weathering is this thermostat, but no one has ever really agreed on its temperature sensitivity."

Because many factors go into weathering, it has been challenging to use results of laboratory experiments alone to create global estimates of how weathering responds to temperature changes, the scientists said.

The team combined laboratory measurements and soil analysis from 45 soil sites around the world and many watersheds to better understand weathering of the major rock types on Earth and used those findings to create a global estimate for how weathering responds to temperature.

"When you do experiments in the laboratory versus taking samples from soil or a river, you get different values," Brantley said, adding, "So what we tried to do in this research is look across those different spatial scales and figure out how we can make sense of all this data geochemists around the world been accumulating about weathering on the planet. And this study is a model for how we can do that."

Weathering represents part of a balancing act of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere. Volcanoes have emitted large amounts of carbon dioxide through Earth's history, but instead of turning the planet into a hot house, the greenhouse gas is slowly removed via weathering.

Rain takes the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and creates a weak acid that falls to Earth and wears away silicate rocks the surface. The byproducts are carried by streams and rivers to the ocean where the carbon is eventually locked away in sedimentary rocks, the scientists said.

"It has long been hypothesized that the balance between carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere from volcanoes and being pulled out by weathering over millions of years holds the temperature of the planet relatively constant," Brantley said, adding, "The key is when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the planet gets hotter, weathering goes faster and pulls more carbon dioxide out. And when the planet is cooler, weathering slows down."

But much remains unknown about how sensitive weathering is to changing temperatures, partly because of the long spatial and time scales involved.

"In a soil profile, you are seeing a picture of soil where the camera shutter was open for sometimes a million years -- there are integrated processes happening for a million years and you're trying to compare that with a two-year flask experiment," Brantley said.

Brantley said the field of critical zone science -- which examines landscapes from the tallest vegetation to the deepest groundwater -- has helped scientists better understand the complex interactions that influence weathering.

For example, rocks must fracture for water to get in cracks and start breaking down the materials. For that to happen, the rock must have large, exposed surface areas, and that is less likely to happen in regions where soil is deeper.

"It's only when you start crossing spatial and time scales that you start seeing what's really important," Brantley said, adding, "Surface area is really important. You can measure all the rate constants you want for that solution in the lab, but until you can tell me how does surface area form out there in the natural system, you are never going to be able to predict the real system."

The scientists reported in the journal Science that temperature sensitivity measurements in the laboratory were lower than estimates from soils and rivers in their study. Using observations from the lab and field sites, they upscaled their findings to estimate the global temperature dependance of weathering.

Their model may be helpful for understanding how weathering will respond to future climate change, and in evaluating man-made attempts to increase weathering to draw more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- like carbon sequestration.

"One idea has been to enhance weathering by digging up a lot of rock, grinding it, transporting it and putting it out in the fields to let weathering happen," Brantley said, adding, "And that will work -- it's already working. The problem is, it's a very slow process."

Though warming may speed up weathering, pulling all the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that humans have added could take thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, the scientists said.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is currently not plausible, according to a new report.

Climate policy, protests, and the Ukraine crisis – The participating researchers systematically assessed to what extent social changes are already underway, while also analyzing certain physical processes frequently discussed as tipping points.

The researchers concluded that social change is essential to meeting the temperature goals set in Paris. But what has been achieved to date is insufficient, they said.

Accordingly, climate adaptation will also have to be approached from a new angle, said the report.

The central report was released by Universität Hamburg’s Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” (CLICCS).

The interdisciplinary team of researchers addressed ten important drivers of social change, the report said.

“Actually, when it comes to climate protection, some things have now been set in motion. But if you look at the development of social processes in detail, keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees still isn’t plausible,” says CLICCS Speaker Anita Engels.

According to the Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook, especially consumption patterns and corporate responses are slowing urgently needed climate protection measures.

Other key factors like UN climate policy, legislation, climate protests and divestment from the fossil fuels are supporting efforts to meet the climate goals.

As the analysis showed, however, this positive dynamic alone won’t suffice to stay within the 1.5-degree limit.

“The deep decarbonization required is simply progressing too slowly,” said Engels.

In addition, the research team assessed certain physical processes that are frequently discussed as tipping points, such as the loss of the Arctic sea ice and melting ice sheets, which are serious developments as are regional climate changes.

But they will have very little influence on the global temperature until 2050, they said.

In this regard, a thawing permafrost, weakened Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), and the loss of the Amazon Forest are more important factors, albeit only moderately, the report said.

“The fact is that these feared tipping points could drastically change the conditions for life on Earth – but they’re largely irrelevant for reaching the Paris Agreement temperature goals,” said CLICCS Co-Speaker Jochem Marotzke from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Germany.

The report also covered COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Economic reconstruction programs have reinforced dependence on fossil fuels, which means the necessary changes are now less plausible than previously assumed, the report said.

In contrast, whether efforts to safeguard Europe’s power supply and the international community’s attempts to become independent of Russian gas will undermine or accelerate the phasing out of fossil fuels in the long run remains unclear, the report said.

The Outlook is currently the only assessment that interlinks social sciences and natural sciences analysis in an integrated study to assess the plausibility of certain climate futures, the report said.

More than 60 experts have contributed, it said.

According to the report, the best hope for shaping a positive climate future lies in the ability of society to make fundamental changes, or “human agency”.

In addition, the Outlook reveals a range of conditions for doing so, for instance that transnational initiatives and non-government actors continue to support climate protection, and that protests keep up the pressure on politicians.

“The question of what is not just theoretically possible, but also plausible, that is, can realistically be expected, offers us new points of departure,” said Engels.

“If we fail to meet the climate goals, adapting to the impacts will become all the more important,” said Engels.

In this regard, the Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook introduced a new tool for testing the long-term effects of various measures, the report said.

“In order to be equipped for a warmer world, we have to anticipate changes, get the affected parties on board, and take advantage of local knowledge. Instead of just reacting, we need to begin an active transformation here and now,” said Engels. 
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: People with poor literacy face more mental health problems such as loneliness, depression and anxiety, according to a review of studies which used data from nine countries, including India.

The research, published in the journal Mental Health and Social Inclusion, is the first to look at the global picture of literacy and mental health.

The researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK found that little or no literacy disproportionately affect women, who account for two thirds of the world's illiterate.

"Despite rising literacy rates over the past 50 years, there are still an estimated 773 million adults globally who can't read or write," said Bonnie Teague from UEA's Norwich Medical School.

"Literacy rates are lower in developing countries and those with a history of conflict, and women are disproportionately affected," Teague said.

The researchers noted that people with more literacy tend to have better social outcomes in terms of things like finding employment, being paid well, and being able to afford better food and housing.

Not being able to read or write holds a person back throughout their life and they often become trapped in poverty or more likely to commit crime, they said.

"We also know that lower literacy is related to poorer health, chronic diseases and shorter life expectancy," Teague said.

"There has been some research examining the potential association between literacy and mental health but this is the first study looking at the issue on a global scale," he added.

The team reviewed data from 19 studies that measured both literacy and mental health. These studies took place across nine different countries -- US, China, Nepal, Thailand, Iran, India, Ghana, Pakistan, and Brazil, and involved almost two million participants.

The resaerchers used information relating to mental health and literacy to assess the global reported relationship between these two factors.

They found a significant association between literacy and mental health outcomes across multiple countries.

"People with lower literacy had greater mental health difficulties such as anxiety and depression," said Lucy Hunn, who completed the review as part of her Doctorate in clinical psychology training at UEA.

"We can't say for sure that poor literacy causes poor mental health, but there is a strong association," Hunn said.

The researchers noted that there may be multiple factors impacting on mental health which also impact literacy such as poverty or living in an area with a history of conflict.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Honeybees, which pollinate one-third of the crops Americans eat, face many threats, including infectious diseases.

On January 4, 2023, a Georgia biotechnology company called Dalan Animal Health announced that it had received a conditional license from the US Department of Agriculture for a vaccine designed to protect honeybees against American foulbrood, a highly destructive infection.

To receive a conditional license, which usually lasts for one year and is subject to further evaluation by the USDA, veterinary biological products must be shown to be pure, safe and reasonably likely to be effective.

Dr. Jennie Durant, an agriculture researcher at the University of California, Davis, who specialises in honeybee health, explains why this vaccine is potentially an important step in ongoing efforts to protect pollinators.

What threat does this vaccine address?
The new bee vaccine, Paenibacillus Larvae Bacterin, aims to protect honeybees from American foulbrood. This highly destructive bacterial disease gets its name from the foul scent honeybee larvae exude when infected.

An outbreak of American foulbrood is effectively a death sentence for a bee colony and can economically devastate a beekeeping operation. The spores from the bacteria, Paenibacillus larvae, are highly transmissible and can remain virulent for decades after infection.

Once an outbreak occurs, beekeepers typically have to destroy any bee colonies that they know were infected to avoid spreading the disease. They also have to destroy the hive boxes the colonies were stored in and any equipment that may have touched infected colonies.

Beekeepers have used antibiotics preventively for decades to keep foulbrood in check and treat infected colonies. Often they mix the antibiotics with powdered sugar and sprinkle it inside the colony box. As often happens when antibiotics are overused, scientists and beekeepers are seeing antibiotic resistance and negative impacts on hive health, such as disruption of the helpful microbes that live in bees' guts.

In 2017, the US Food and Drug Administration began requiring a veterinarian's prescription or feed directive to use antibiotics for foulbrood.

While this regulatory change sought to address antibiotic resistance, it limited beekeepers' access to antibiotics and their ability to treat foulbrood preventively. The vaccine would ideally provide a more sustainable solution.

How effectively does the vaccine prevent infection?
Studies are still analysing its effectiveness. One published study demonstrated a 30 to 50 per cent increase in resistance to American foulbrood in a vaccinated queen's offspring.

While this might seem low, it's important to put the results in context. Given how deadly and contagious American foulbrood is, researchers did not want to directly expose an outdoor hive to foulbrood with an unproven vaccine.

Instead, they conducted lab studies where they exposed test hives to around 1,000 times the number of American foulbrood spores a colony would typically be exposed to in the field. Dalan, the manufacturer, has field trials planned for 2023.

How do you vaccinate honeybees?
It's not done with tiny needles beekeepers mix the vaccine into bee food. This approach exposes queen bees to inactive Paenibacillus larvae bacteria, which helps larvae hatched in the hive to resist infection.

This is not a mRNA vaccine, like the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines. It's a more traditional inactive vaccine like the one we use against polio.

To understand how the vaccine works, it's helpful to know what queen bees eat: a protein-rich substance called royal jelly that is secreted from glands on the heads of young worker bees.

When queen bees are shipped to a beekeeper, they are typically placed in a small cage with 50 to 200 worker bees that have been fed something called queen candy.

This substance is often made with powdered sugar and corn syrup and has the consistency of sugar cookie dough or modelling clay. Worker bees consume the candy, produce royal jelly and feed it to the queen.

The vaccine's delivery method uses this unique system. A beekeeper can mix the vaccine with the queen candy, which is then digested by worker bees.

They produce royal jelly and feed it to the queen, who digests it and then transfers the vaccine to her ovaries. Once she is transferred to the hive and begins laying eggs, the larvae that hatch from those eggs have a heightened immunity to American foulbrood.

Who will use the vaccine?
According to representatives at Dalan, limited quantities of the vaccine should be available starting in spring 2023 to commercial beekeepers and bee producers, with the aim of supplying smaller-scale beekeepers and hobbyists in the future.

How long will a dose last?
Dalan is still researching the specifics. Its current understanding is that it will last as long as the queen bee can lay eggs. If she dies, is killed or is replaced, the beekeeper will have to purchase a new vaccinated queen.

Is this a big scientific advance?
Yes, it is the first vaccine for any insect in the US and could help pave the way for new vaccines to treat other issues that have plagued the beekeeping industry for decades. Honeybees face many urgent threats, including Varroa mites, climate change and poor nutrition, which makes this vaccine an exciting new development.

Dalan is also working on a vaccine to protect bees against European foulbrood. This disease is less fatal than American foulbrood, but is still highly infectious. Beekeepers have been able to treat it with antibiotics but, as with American foulbrood, they are seeing signs of resistance.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Planetary nebulae form when red giant stars expel their outermost layers as they run out of helium fuel, becoming hot, dense white dwarf stars that are roughly the size of Earth. The material that was shed, enriched in carbon, forms dazzling patterns as it is blown gently into the interstellar medium.

Most planetary nebulae are roughly circular, but a few have an hourglass or wing-like shape, like the aptly named ‘Butterfly Nebula’. These shapes are likely formed by the gravitational tug of a second star orbiting the nebula’s ‘parent’ star, causing the material to expand into a pair of nebular lobes, or ‘wings’. Like an expanding balloon, the wings grow over time without changing their original shape.

Yet new research shows that something is amiss in the Butterfly Nebula. When a team led by astronomers at the University of Washington compared two exposures of the Butterfly Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009 and 2020, they saw dramatic changes in the material within the wings. As they will report on Jan. 12 at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, powerful winds are driving complex alterations of material within the nebula’s wings. They want to understand how such activity is possible from what should be a ‘sputtering, largely moribund star with no remaining fuel’.

“The Butterfly Nebula is extreme for the mass, speed and complexity of its ejections from its central star, whose temperature is more than 200 times hotter than the sun yet is just slightly larger than the Earth,” said team leader Bruce Balick, a UW professor emeritus of astronomy, adding, “I’ve been comparing Hubble images for years and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

The team compared high-quality Hubble images taken 11 years apart to chart the speeds and growth patterns of features within the nebula’s wings. The bulk of the analysis was performed by Lars Borchert, a graduate student at Aarhus University in Denmark who participated in this study as a UW undergraduate student.

Borchert discovered roughly half a dozen ‘jets’ — beginning about 2,300 years ago and ending 900 years ago — pushing material out in a series of asymmetrical outflows. Material in the outer portions of the nebula is moving rapidly, at about 500 miles per second, while material closer to the hidden central star is expanding much more slowly, at about a tenth of that speed. Paths of the jets cross one another, forming ‘messy’ structures and growth patterns within the wings.

The nebula’s multi-polar and swiftly changing interior structure is not easy to explain using existing models of how planetary nebulae form and evolve, according to Balick. The star at the centre of the nebula, which is hidden by dust and debris, could have merged with a companion star or drew off material from a nearby star, creating complex magnetic fields and generating the jets.

“At this point, these are all just hypotheses,” said Balick, adding, “What this shows us is that we don’t fully understand the full range of shaping processes at work when planetary nebulae form. The next step is to image the nebular center using the James Webb Space Telescope, since infrared light from the star can penetrate through the dust.”

Stars like our sun will swell into a red giant and form planetary nebulae someday, expelling carbon and other relatively heavy elements into the interstellar medium to form star systems and planets in the far future. This new research, and other “time-lapse” analyses of planetary nebulae, can help illustrate not just how the materials for the star systems of tomorrow will take shape, but also how the building blocks of our own oasis were produced and gathered billions of years ago.

“It’s a creation story that is happening over and over again in our universe,” said Balick, adding, “The shaping processes provide key insight into the history and impacts of the stellar activity.”
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: Warm waters inhibit the growth of fast-growing coral species on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, a new study published on Wednesday said.

In the study, scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) found that fast-growing coral on the iconic reef is likely to be hit with a double blow of high mortality and slow growth during acute heat stress events, reports Xinhua news agency.

The government agency's findings are a major blow to the long-term survival prospects of the reef as the world's oceans continue to warm.

According to AIMS' Long Term Monitoring Program, recent increases in coral cover in the northern and central regions of the reef were largely driven by fast-growing species, which are common but more susceptible to marine heatwaves.

"Our results demonstrate that these fast-growing table corals, critical for reef recovery, have evolved strategies that are perfect to maximize growth in their current environment," Juan Ortiz, senior author of the study, said in a statement.

"But these initial findings may indicate that they have limited potential for adaptation to future hotter conditions."

Ortiz and his team used the AIMS National Sea Simulator to track the growth of four coral species from one part of the reef at 10 temperatures ranging from 19 to 31 degrees Celsius over the course of a month.

The scientists were surprised by how consistently individual colonies of the same coral species responded to temperature.

Ortiz said the team will next expand the research to include more species from different parts of the reef.

"Low variability in their response to temperature could make it harder for corals to naturally evolve higher thermal tolerance. To gain more insights, we need to understand what is happening at a bigger scale and across more species," he said.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: African elephant numbers have dropped from about 26 million in the 1800s to 415,000 today. While this is largely due to European colonisation, poaching and habitat loss, these majestic animals now face another grave challenge.

Climate change is causing droughts in much of Africa to become longer and more severe. This damages elephant habitats and denies them the water they need. Due to their unique physiology, African elephants need hundreds of litres of water each day to survive.

The African savanna elephant is listed as endangered. If the situation doesn't change, Africa – indeed, the world – may lose one of its most iconic animal species.

A tragic plight Elephants are not just important for their ecological, cultural and economic value. They are also a keystone species – that is, they help hold ecosystems together. This means their decline has far-reaching consequences.

Many African ecosystems pivot around the lives of elephants. Elephant feeding habits, such as pushing over trees and peeling off bark, can turn woody vegetation into grasslands. This makes room for smaller species to move in. Their digging for water in dry riverbeds creates water holes other animals can use. And as they migrate, elephants help spread seeds in their dung.

Under climate change, long, intense droughts across southern and eastern Africa are escalating. Some have lasted more than 20 years.

The conditions have left many elephants desperate for water. Research as far back as 2003 shows elephants in Zimbabwe were dying during drought. And in 2016, when a drying El Nino weather pattern hit southern Africa, there were reports of more elephant deaths, prompting a local conservation group to drill bore holes to provide relief.

Drought can also reduce the availability of food, causing elephants to starve. It can also mean young elephants die or don't develop properly, because their parched mothers produce less milk.

A unique physiology So, why do elephants struggle in drought and heat? When elephants experience high internal temperatures, it can disrupt the function of cells, tissues and organs such as the liver and cause them to become sick and die.

Humans and other animals also suffer heat stress. But elephants are particularly vulnerable because they can't sweat it off.

The graphic below shows how heat accumulates and dissipates in elephants.

Heat accumulates through an elephants' natural metabolism and physical activity, as well as being absorbed from the environment.

But it does not always effectively dissipate. Elephants' thick skin slows heat loss – and their lack of sweat glands exacerbates this.

What's more, elephants are the largest of all land mammals, weighing up to eight tonnes. They also have a large body volume – which generates heat – but a relatively small surface area (their skin) from which to lose this heat.

Water is essential for elephants to cope with heat. They swim and spray their skin with mud and water; the subsequent evaporation mimicks sweating and cools them down.

And elephants cool themselves internally by drinking several hundred litres of water a day.

Let elephants roam free Creating artificial water sources is a common management intervention when elephants need water. This includes the use of pipes, bores and pumps.

But this measure can be problematic. Sometimes, the water is sourced from supplies needed by local people. And large numbers of elephants congregating around water can permanently damage the local environment and reduce food availability for other animals.

Historically, elephants migrated to water during drought. But the introduction of fenced areas in the landscape has disrupted this movement.

Fences were constructed to mark out colonial land ownership, separate people from large animals and deter poachers.

But as climate change worsens in Africa, elephants and other wildlife must be able to move freely between connected habitats.

Wildlife corridors may provide an answer. These are protected channels of vegetation that enable animals to move between fragmented patches of habitat. Wildlife corridors work well for megafauna in India and the United States and would likely increase mobility for much of Africa's wildlife.

Introducing more wildlife corridors, especially in southern and eastern Africa, would require removing fences. This change would have repercussions.

Nearby communities – which have not coexisted with elephants since colonisation – would have to adjust to the change. The removal of fences may also lead to an increase in poaching. And letting elephants roam the landscape may make them less accessible to tourists, which could reduce tourism revenue.

But communities have coexisted with elephants in the past. And community-based projects have been shown to reduce conflict between humans and wildlife. In some cases, they've also led to lower poaching rates and increased quality of life for communities.

Community management projects, such as in Northern Kgalagadi in Botswana, show how local expertise – drawn from millennia of experience and knowledge – can guide wildlife management. Research has shown successful outcomes – both socially and ecologically – in places where elephants share landscapes with people.

Protecting a keystone species Ensuring African elephants survive drought will increasingly require new conservation strategies, including community-based management. Without this, already dwindling elephant populations will continue to decline.

This would be bad news for the health and stability of natural ecosystems in Africa – and a blow to Africa's people.
 

NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: The observation satellite EROS-C3, developed and manufactured by the state-owned company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), was launched into space, the IAI said. 

With a weight of about 400 kg and a height of 4.58 meters, the satellite was launched on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, United States on Friday, and successfully entered its orbit around the Earth at an altitude of 512 km. EROS-C3 (Earth Resources Observation Systems C3) was built for the Israeli intelligence and information company ImageSat International (ISI), in which the IAI holds about 30 per cent of shares. 

It is designed to support the most demanding operational challenges defense and intelligence organizations are presently facing, according to ISI. The IAI noted that this is a highly advanced satellite, the third generation of the company's electro-optical observation satellites, with the capability to take high-resolution images and produce high-quality color images. 

The photos are taken by a lightweight multispectral space camera, developed and manufactured by the Israeli defense electronics company Elbit Systems. It can photograph a swath of 11.5 km with 30 and 60-cm image resolutions.