Tag: Science & Technology

NEW DELHI: Indian scientists have developed a sensor-based ‘Electronic Nose’ for sniffing out variety of gases at pulp and paper mill industries and environmental monitoring at other sensitive locations.

The gases, emitted by these industries beyond certain concentration, may adversely affect human health and environment.

This sophisticated portable device can measure odour concentration and odour intensity and thereby can immediately alert workers in such industrial units for remedial action.

Though the ‘Electronic Nose’ is currently being successfully used in couple of paper mills in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the researchers are also working on its application to monitor gas emissions from any source, be it an industry or leakage of petroleum pipes going through fields or farms.

The devices is developed by the Nagpur-based National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology of the Government of India.

“This has been the first attempt in India to develop such a product using odour sensors that make use of intelligent software to identify odorous molecules. It is also possible to train the software by feeding information based on observation of experts”, said a statement, issued by the ministry of science and technology on Wednesday night.

The pulp and paper industry emits a variety of gases, namely, hydrogen sulphide, methyl mercaptan, dimethyl sulphide, and dimethyl disulphide. These gases beyond a certain concentration may adversely affect the environment and human health.

“This newly developed ‘Electronic Nose’ helps in continuous monitoring of these gases, overcoming all limitations of the available analytical instruments that are not only expensive and time-consuming. The Electronic Nose can easily be operated at a pulp and paper mill industry”, said the ministry.

The ‘Electronic Nose’ uses an array of sensors that function on the principle similar to that of human olfaction. The sensor array generates a pattern based on the type of aroma. The patterns obtained are trained to help interpret and distinguish amongst various odors and odorants as well as to recognize new patterns using advanced mathematical techniques, such as pattern recognition algorithms, principal component analysis, discriminant function analysis, cluster analysis, and artificial neural networks.

WASHINGTON (TIP): LG’s display subsidiary has announced that it is bringing drastically thinner, lighter touchscreens for notebooks later this year.

According to the engadget.com, with full HD (1080p) resolution, the Advanced In-Cell Touch (AIT) screens substitute a touch panel layer for a touch sensor built into the LCD itself, which will makes it thin. It’s the same tech found in smartphones like LG’s G4.

The new tech will make it thin by 25% whereas weight reductions could be as much as 35% compared to typical laptop touchscreen. The reduction in layers also means less light reflection, which LG Display reckons will make the new displays brighter and clearer.

The company also plans to roll out multiple screen sizes, with stylus-compatible models also on the way.

LONDON (TIP): The world’s first human trial of artificial blood grown in a lab from stem cells is set to take place in the UK by 2017.

The UK’s NHS (National Health Service) Blood and Transplant has announced that the manufactured blood will be used in clinical trials with human volunteers within two years.

Research led by scientists at the University of Bristol and NHS Blood and Transplant used stem cells from adult and umbilical cord blood to create a small volume of manufactured red blood cells.

It is hoped that when the production of this lab-produced blood is successfully scaled up, it will offer an alternative to patients with blood disorders such as sickle cell Anaemia and Thalassemia who require treatment with regular transfusions and for whom it is difficult to find compatible donors.

The clinical trial of manufactured red blood cells is designed to compare the survival of red cells manufactured from stem cells with that of standard blood donor red blood cells. This will involve a group of 20 volunteers who will receive a small volume transfusion of between five and ten millilitre of the lab-produced blood. “Scientists across the globe have been investigating for a number of years how to manufacture red blood cells to offer an alternative to donated blood to treat patients,” said Dr Nick Watkins, NHS Blood and Transplant’s assistant director of research and development.”We are confident that by 2017 our team will be ready to carry out the first early phase clinical trials in human volunteers,” Watkins said.

“These trials will compare manufactured cells with donated blood. The intention is not to replace blood donation but provide specialist treatment for specific patient groups,” he said.

“Research has laid the foundation for current transfusion and transplantation practices. Continued investment in research and development is critical to our role in saving and improving lives through blood and organ donation,” said Dr Nick Watkins, NHS Blood and Transplant’s assistant director of research and development.

WASHINGTON (TIP): US defence scientists are planning to use genetically engineered algae, bacteria and plants to radically transform the climate of Mars and terraform it into an Earth-like planet.

Scientists from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aim to warm up and potentially thicken Mars’ atmosphere by growing green, photosynthesising plants, bacteria, and algae on the barren surface of the red planet. “For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not just to visit, but to and stay,” Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s new Biological Technologies Office said. recently at a DARPA-hosted biotech conference.

For Since the last year, Jackson’s lab has been working on learning how to more the process to easily genetically engineer organisms of all types, not just e-coli and yeast, which are mostly commonly used in synthetic biology projects.

“Out of There are anywhere from 30 million to 30 billion organisms on this Earth, we use two right now for engineering biology,” she said. “I want to use any organism that has properties I want — I want to quickly map it and quickly engineer it. If you look at genome annotation software today, it’s not built to quickly find engineer able systems [and genes],” she was quoted as saying by ‘motherboard.vice.com’.

DARPA and some of its researchers partners have created a software called DTA GView, which Jackson calls the ‘Google Maps of genomes’, in which genomes of several organisms can be pulled up on the programme, which immediately shows a list of known genes and where they are located in the genome.

“This torrent of genomic data we’re now collecting is awesome, except they sit in databases, where they remain data, not knowledge. Very little genetic information we have is actionable,” she said. “With this, the goal is to, within a day, sequence and find where I can best engineer an organism,” she added.

The goal is to pick and choose the best genes from whatever form of life we want and to edit them into other forms of life to create something entirely new.

This will probably first happen in bacteria and other microorganisms, but the goal may be is to do this with more complex, multicellular organisms in the future.

DARPA plans to use specifically engineered organisms to help repair environmental damage. Jackson said that after a natural or man-made disaster, it would be possible to engineer new types of extremophile organisms capable of surviving in a scarred wasteland. As those organisms photosynthesised and thrived would naturally bring that environment back to health, she said.With enough practice turning Earth’s damaged landscapes back into places hospitable for life, Jackson thinks we’ll have what it takes to eventually try to colonise the solar system.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Facebook announced that it has been using a new security tool to help detect and remove malicious software for users of the world’s biggest social network.

Facebook said it was working with Kaspersky Lab, bolstering a program implemented with other online security firms including ESET, F-Secure and Trend Micro.”Thanks to the collaboration with these companies, in the past three months we have helped clean up more than two million people’s computers that we detected were infected with malware when they connected to Facebook,” said Trevor Pottinger, a Facebook security engineer.

“In these cases, we present a cleanup tool that runs in the background while you continue using Facebook, and you get a notification when the scan is done to show you what it found.”

Pottinger said the program uses “a combination of signals to help find infections and get the malware off of your computer for good, even if the malware isn’t actively spreading spam or harmful links.”

Kaspersky Lab’s Kate Kochetkova said in a separate blog post that Facebook users are often targeted in online fraud schemes such as “phishing,” which are faked emails designed to get recipients to download malware.

“Facebook is a major aim for phishers: one in five phishing scams targets Facebook notifications. So be vigilant when you receive emails appearing to be from Facebook: as they can be fake. There are lots of Trojans targeting Facebook users as well,” she said.

Fraudsters may also use Facebook, Kochetkova said, to “‘like’ weird things and promote questionable goods and services on your behalf.”

LOS ANGELES (TIP): Researchers have taken inspiration from the cockroach to create a robot that can use its body shape to manoeuvre through a densely cluttered environment.

Fitted with the characteristic rounded shell of the discoid cockroach, the running robot can perform a roll manoeuvre to slip through gaps between grass-like vertical beam obstacles without the need for additional sensors or motors. While many terrestrial robots are developed with a view to perform a wide range of tasks by avoiding obstacles, few have been specifically designed to traverse obstacles.

“The majority of robotics studies have been solving the problem of obstacles by avoiding them, which depends on using sensors to map out the environment and algorithms that plan a path to go around obstacles,” said study author Chen Li, from the University of California. “However, when terrain becomes densely cluttered, especially as gaps between obstacles become comparable or even smaller than robot size, this approach starts to run into problems.”

In their research, the scientists used high-speed cameras to study the movement of discoid cockroaches through an artificial obstacle course containing grass-like vertical beams with small spacing.

Living on the floor of tropical rainforests, this specific type of cockroach frequently encounters a wide variety of cluttered obstacles, such as blades of grass, shrubs, leaf litter, tree trunks, and fungi.

The cockroaches were fitted with three different artificial shells to see how their movement was affected by body shape when moving through the vertical beams. The shapes of the three shells were: an oval cone with a similar shape to the cockroaches’ body; a flat oval; and a flat rectangle.

When the cockroaches were unmodified, the researchers found that, although they sometimes pushed through the beams or climbed over them, they most frequently used a fast and effective roll manoeuvre to slip through the obstacles.

In these instances, the cockroaches rolled their body so that their thin sides could fit through the gaps and their legs could push off the beams to help them manoeuvre through the obstacles.

As their body became less rounded by wearing the three artificial shells, it became harder for the cockroaches to move through the obstacles, because they were less able to perform the fast and effective roll manoeuvre.

After examining the cockroaches, the researchers then tested a small, rectangular, six-legged robot and observed whether it was able to traverse a similar obstacle course.

The researchers found that with a rectangular body the robot could rarely traverse the grass-like beams, and frequently collided with the obstacles and became stuck between them.

When the robot was fitted with the cockroach-inspired rounded shell, it was much more likely to successfully move through the obstacle course using a similar roll manoeuvre to the cockroaches.

NEW YORK (TIP): In a clue to possibility of life below the surface of Mars today, an international team of researchers has discovered traces of methane in Martian meteorites.

For the study, the researchers examined samples from six meteorites of volcanic rock that originated on Mars. All six samples also contained methane, which was measured by crushing the rocks and running the emerging gas through a mass spectrometer.

The discovery hints at the possibility that methane could be used as a food source by rudimentary forms of life beneath the Martian surface. On Earth, microbes do this in a range of environments.

“Our findings will likely be used by astrobiologists in models and experiments aimed at understanding whether life could survive below the surface of Mars today,” said study co-author Sean McMahon from Yale University in the US.

“Even if Martian methane does not directly feed microbes, it may signal the presence of a warm, wet, chemically reactive environment where life could thrive,” McMahon said. The discovery was part of a joint research project led by the University of Aberdeen in Britain, in collaboration with the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, the University of Glasgow, Brock University in Ontario, and the University of Western Ontario.

“One of the most exciting developments in the exploration of Mars has been the suggestion of methane in the Martian atmosphere,” said University of Aberdeen professor John Parnell, who directed the research.

Recent and forthcoming missions by NASA and the European Space Agency are looking at this. However, it is so far unclear where the methane comes from, and even whether it is really there, Parnell said.

“However, our research provides a strong indication that rocks on Mars contain a large reservoir of methane,” Parnell pointed out.

AHMEDABAD (TIP): Isro has said it will provide navigational support to the country’s railways through ‘Gagan’ (GPS-aided geo-augmented navigation) system.

“Isro will provide satellite-generated information to the railways through space technology-based tools that will provide safety at unmanned level crossings,” Isro chairman A S Kiran Kumar told reporters here yesterday in reply to a question on how will Isro help the railways in using the navigational support system.

“There are host of requirements for using Gagan in railways. We are providing some solutions,” Kumar said.

Gagan is an indigenous navigational guide system developed by Isro on the lines of GPS system of the US.

Elaborating on it, Kumar said that at some places the railway tracks are under stress. If water accumulation happens, then based on digital elevation model data, other host of information which they generate, can be given.

“There is specific information provided for aligning the railway tracks, particularly in mountainous regions, and also identifying tracks which are most stable when you are going through tunnels. In all these things, space technology is useful,” he said.

“We are trying to provide space technology-based tools for enabling them to deal with unmanned level crossings,” he said.

Gagan was jointly developed by the Isro and Airports Authority of India (AAI) with a view to assist aircraft in accurate landing.

The Gagan signal is being broadcast through two Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites – GSAT8 and GSAT10.

With the use of Gagan software system, a train would know the location of any unmanned level crossing and soon a a warning signal can be given.

As soon as the warning signal will be given, the train’s hooter will automatically start when it comes near an unmanned crossing.

MUMBAI (TIP): In a significant discovery, glass has been found on Mars, throwing up the possibility of past life on the Red Planet, Nasa announced on Tuesday. The breakthrough was attained by Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which detected deposits of glass within impact craters on Mars.

“Though formed in the searing heat of a violent impact, such deposits might provide a delicate window into the possibility of past life on the Red Planet,” Nasa said.

According to Nasa, knowing that impact glass can preserve ancient signs of life – and now knowing that such deposits exist on the Martian surface today – opens up a potential new strategy in the search for ancient Martian life.

One of the craters contain ing glass, called Hargraves, is near the Nili Fossae trough, a 650-km-long depression that stretches across the Martian surface. The region is one of the landing site contenders for Nasa’s Mars 2020 rover, a mission to cache soil and rock samples for possible return to earth. Nasa states that Nili Fossae trough is already of scientific interest because the crust in the region is thought to date back to when Mars was a much wetter planet.

The region also is rife with what appear to be ancient hydrothermal fractures, warm vents that could have provided energy for life to thrive just beneath the surface.

During the past few years, research has shown evidence about past life has been preserved in impact glass on Earth. A 2014 study led by scientist Peter Schultz of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, found organic molecules and plant matter entombed in glass formed by an impact that occurred millions of years ago in Argentina. He suggested that similar processes might preserve signs of life on Mars, if they were present at the time of an impact.