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Science & Technology Current Affairs May 1st Week 2019
Category : Science & Technology Current
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 1. Scientists developed Ultrasensitive Quantum Thermometer

 
Researchers at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, have developed an ultrasensitive quantum thermometer by using graphene quantum dots. It can precisely measure a wide range of temperature from 27 degree C to –196 degree C.
It has high sensitivity in different temperatures and can measure every little (micro Kelvin) changes in temperature and has an extremely quick response time of just about 300 milliseconds.
The team led by Saikh S. Islam, Director of the Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology developed the thermometer.
The results of the study were published in the journal Nanoscale Advances.
The thermometer will be useful in the pharmaceutical industry, healthcare, and the automobile industry.
 
2.IIT Madras team develops easy OCR system for reading documents in Bharati script containing nine Indian languages
 
The research team from IIT Madras has used a multi-lingual Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scheme to develop a method for reading documents in Bharati script. The researchers have also developed a finger-spelling method that can be used by hearing-impaired persons to generate sign language, in collaboration with TCS Mumbai.
The Bharati script is a conglomeration of 9 Indian languages, namely, Devnagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil. In the last 10 years, Professor V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy’s research team at IIT Madras has worked on developing this script.
The OCR scheme first segments the document into 2 parts, text and non-text. After this, the text is separated into paragraphs, sentences words and letters, where every letter is recognised as a character in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) or Unicode. The letter again has several components, namely, the basic consonant, consonant modifiers, vowels.
The objective of this initiative was to introduce easy readability of the Indian languages. The scripts of the aforementioned Indian languages pose a hindrance for character recognition and this difficulty is removed in the Bharati script which can be easily read.
The future prospects of IIT Madras’ collaboration with Sunil Kopparappu of Innovation Labs, TCS, Mumbai lies in developing a new Braille system with the Bharati script for the visually and hearing-challenged population.
 
3. ISRO planning to send a probe to study sun early next year
 
Indian Space Research Organization is planning to send a probe to study the sun early next year. 
Talking to reporters in Nagercoil, ISRO chairman Dr K Sivan said, currently scientists are exploring possibilities to study more about Sun and the probe named Aditya-L1 will be sent to observe the solar corona, the outer layers of the Sun.
He said, the satellite would be ed in a halo orbit around the L1 (Lagrangian point 1) of the Sun-Earth system so that it has the advantage of continuously viewing the Sun without any occultation or eclipses. The L1 is 1.5 million kms from the Earth. Mr Sivan said, the mission to send Indian astronauts to space by 2022 is well on stream. 
On a question about tracking cyclone Fani, he said, with the details provided by ISRO, officials were able to forecast the landfall area and this helped in taking precautionary measures in advance. 
It may be recalled that ISRO is making all-out efforts to launch Chandrayaan-2 in the launch window between July 9 and 16, with the aim of its lander soft landing near the south pole of the moon by September 6th.
 
4.  Momo-3
 
A Japanese aerospace start-up Interstellar Technology Inc. has successfully launched a first privately developed rocket ‘Momo-3’ into space. The unmanned rocket launched from its test site in Taiki on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and it reached about 110 km in altitude before falling into the Pacific Ocean after 10 minutes of flight time.
The rocket is 10 meters in length, 50 centimeters in diameter and weighs about 1 ton. ‘Momo-3’ rocket has the capability of putting payloads into the orbit.
The company Interstellar Technology Inc. founded by former Livedoor Co. President Takafumi Horie in 2013. The objective is to develop low-cost commercial rockets to carry satellites into space.