Isro plans to mine energy from Moon by 2030 to help meet India needs

Isro plans to mine Helium-3 rich lunar dust, generate energy and transport it back to Earth

From launching 104 satellites at one go, enabling commercial roll out of lithium-ion batteries, to taking the lead in providing energy security, the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) is firing on all cylinders.

Apart from planning for manned missions to Moon, Mars and even aircraft development, Isro is now working on a plan to help India meet its energy needs from the Moon by 2030.

The premier space agency, credited with launching 225 satellites till date, plans to mine Helium-3 rich lunar dust, generate energy and transport it back to Earth.

This comes in the backdrop of successful testing of lithium-ion batteries developed by Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre by the Automotive Research Association of India (Arai). This is expected to provide a fillip to India’s electric vehicles (EV) push. The government is now planning to transfer the technology to companies for commercial production of these batteries, reported Mint.

Isro’s lunar dust mine plans were revealed by Dr Sivathanu Pillai, professor at the space agency, in February.

Speaking at a conference in New Delhi, Pillai, former chief of BrahMos Aerospace, said that mining lunar dust was a priority programme for his organisation.

In a written reply to the Lok Sabha on 29 March, minister of state in charge of atomic energy and space Jitendra Singh said, “Technology is ready for transfer to Indian industries for undertaking the production of Li-ion batteries. BHEL has expressed interest in the transfer of technology.”

This lunar dust mining plan comes in the backdrop of India’s plan to cut down import dependence in hydrocarbons by 10 percentage points by 2022. India’s energy demand growth is expected to outpace that of the other Bric (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries, according to the latest BP Energy Outlook.

Isro’s success on this front will also help reduce pollutants and India’s fuel imports. This assumes significance given India’s energy import bill of around $150 billion, which is expected to reach $300 billion by 2030. India imports around 80% of its oil and 18% of its natural gas requirements. India imported 202 million tonnes of oil in 2015-16.

Cabinet clears EC proposal to buy VVPAT machines that leave paper trail of votes

Election Commission will now spend Rs3,173 crore to buy 1,615,000 VVPAT machines, which leave a paper trail of votes

 In a bid to increase transparency in the electoral process, the Union cabinet on Wednesday cleared a proposal to procure 1,615,000 voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines by September 2018.

Estimated to cost Rs3,173 crore it will also ensure VVPAT units are used in all the polling booths in the next general elections in 2019.

Immediately it nixes the growing controversy after allegations of tampering of electronic voting machines (EVMs) were levelled by several political parties, including the Congress, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

“A voter has a right to know whether his vote has been correctly registered or not. VVPAT machines in many phases and in small numbers were ordered earlier in 2013, 2015 as well. The estimate of the Election Commission is that approximately 16 lakh machines are required. The entire procurement will be supplied by September 2018. If by September 2018 machines are procured then elections conducted after that time will have a paper trail,” finance minister Arun Jaitley said while addressing a press conference after the cabinet meeting.

To prove that a correct vote has been recorded, the VVPAT machine dispenses a paper slip with details of the party for whom the voter cast their vote. The slip has the name, serial number and symbol of the candidate and is displayed through a screened window for seven seconds. The slip then gets cut and is dropped in a sealed box.

“The decision of the government would enable the Election Commission of India to deploy VVPAT units in all polling booths in the general elections, 2019, which will act as an additional layer of transparency for the satisfaction of voters, allaying any apprehension in the minds of the voters as to the fidelity and integrity of the EVMs,” an official statement said.

In 2013, the Supreme Court had asked the EC to generate a printed record to ensure confidence of voters in the EVMs (bit.ly/2pRCQ08). Last year, chief election commissioner Nasim Zaidi had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking funds for the new process.

“The Commission shall closely monitor the production of VVPATs for timely delivery well before general elections 2019. With this the Commission will ensure the total compliance of the orders of Supreme Court and its commitment to use VVPATs with every EVM at all polling stations in the country in general elections 2019,” the EC said in a statement.

In the 2014 general election, there were a total of 9,28,237 polling stations across the country—11.7% more than the 15th general election in 2009.

Sixteen opposition parties including the Congress in a memorandum submitted to the EC on 10 April had criticized the central government for failing to provide sufficient funds to the Commission to procure VVPATs.

“Welcome government’s decision to allot money to buy VVPATs. Clear victory for Congress, Opposition parties & democracy,” P. Chidambaram, senior Congress leader said on Twitter Wednesday.

Experts also welcomed the move.

“It is a good step and will definitely enhance transparency. There has been a demand from political parties for quite sometime and the process was essentially delayed due to the lack of funds. The recent assembly election results have also helped to speed up the process,” said Maj Gen (retd) Anil Verma, head of the New Delhi-based Association for Democratic Reforms think tank.

Robert Taylor, innovator who shaped modern computing, dies at 85

Robert Taylor, innovator who shaped modern computing, dies at 85

His ideas led to the Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet, and he played a vital role in the invention of the computer mouse

Like many inventions, the Internet was the work of countless hands. But perhaps no one deserves more credit for that world-changing technological leap than Robert W. Taylor, who died Thursday at 85 at his home in Woodside, California.

Indeed, few people were as instrumental in shaping the modern computer-connected world as he.

His seminal moment came in 1966. He had just taken a new position at the Pentagon — director of the Information Processing Techniques Office, part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA — and on his first day on the job it became immediately obvious to him what the office lacked and what it needed.

At the time, ARPA was funding three separate computer research projects and using three separate computer terminals to communicate with them. Taylor decided that the department needed a single computer network to connect each project with the others.

Gathering funds

“I went to see Charlie Herzfeld, who was the head of ARPA, and laid the idea on him,” Taylor recalled in an interview with The New York Times. “He liked the idea immediately, and he took a million dollars out of the ballistic missile defence budget and put it into my budget right then and there.” He added, “The first funding came that month.”

His idea led to the Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet.

A half-decade later, at Xerox’s storied Palo Alto Research Center in Northern California, Taylor was a key figure in another technological breakthrough: funding the design of the Alto computer, which is widely described as the forerunner of the personal computer.

Taylor even had a vital role in the invention of the computer mouse. In 1961, at the dawn of the Space Age, he was about a year into his job as a project manager at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington when he learned about the work of a young computer scientist at Stanford Research Institute, later called SRI International.

The scientist, Douglas Engelbart, was exploring the possibilities of direct interaction between humans and computers. Taylor decided to pump more money into the work, and the financial infusion led directly to Engelbart’s invention of the mouse, which would be instrumental in the design of both MacIntosh and Microsoft Windows-based computers. Engelbart died in 2013.

“Any way you look at it, from kick-starting the Internet to launching the personal computer revolution, Bob Taylor was a key architect of our modern world,” said Leslie Berlin, a historian at the Stanford University Silicon Valley Archives project.

At NASA, as the newly elected Kennedy administration was putting the nation on a path to the moon, Taylor became a friend and protégé of J.C.R. Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist who had written a pioneering paper titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis.”

Road map for the future

As much as any single document, the paper became a road map for the development of the Internet and the personal computer, as well as spectacular advances in artificial intelligence and robotics.

Robert William Taylor was born on Feb. 10, 1932, in Dallas and was adopted 28 days later in San Antonio by the Rev. Raymond Taylor, a Methodist minister, and his wife, Audrey. Growing up, Robert moved frequently as his father was assigned to different parishes; he often spent summers in Austin with an aunt and uncle.

After earning a Bachelor’s degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he went on to do graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin.

His Master’s thesis research focused on how the ear and the brain localise sound. To analyse his data, he had to bring it to the university’s computing centre, where a staff member behind a protective glass wall helped operate the centre’s mainframe computer. The operator showed him the laborious process of entering his data and his program onto computer punch cards, the standard of the era.

“I was appalled,” Taylor recalled years later in an interview at the university, “and after I thought about it for a while, I was angry.” The data entry process, he said, was “ridiculous.”

“I thought it was insulting,” he added. He left the centre, went back to his laboratory and used a desktop calculator instead.

He knew, he said, that the calculator “could manipulate symbols — it used high voltages and low voltages to represent 1s and 0s — and that 1s and 0s could be combined to represent letters, and letters could be combined to represent text, and text could be combined to represent knowledge.

“Why couldn’t computers do that?”

Taylor left the Pentagon in 1969 and taught for a year at the University of Utah before joining the newly formed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in California. There, he joined a small group of researchers who were refining many of the technologies that had been pioneered by Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute and who were also creating new ones, including graphics-based personal computing.

Taylor’s team built a prototype personal computer called the Alto, and another group, led by Alan Kay, added a software system that pioneered the desktop metaphor, in which documents are represented by graphical icons on the computer display. That technology in turn became the inspiration for Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh computers and for Microsoft’s Windows software.

Taylor died of complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son Kurt said.

Computing at the speed of light

Computing at the speed of light

University of Victoria researcher has patented LI-RAM, a breakthrough technology that will make information-processing faster, more energy-efficient and durable.

If you've ever complained about your computer being too slow, or your Samsung smartphone exploding on your face, or your tech needs having too large a carbon footprint, this is the news you've been waiting for.

A Vancouver-based researcher has just patented, according to CTV News, a "breakthrough material that will make computing faster, more durable and more energy-efficient". A supercomputer, effectively.

Natia Frank, materials chemist at the Canadian University of Victoria (UVic), said the material, known as LI-RAM (light-induced random-access memory), would use light to store and process data. Not electricity. This means computer processors would consume minimal power, discharge minimal heat and last longer.

What makes LI-RAM sustainable?

Funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, this technology was developed in a bid to overcome the "power wall". On paper, it goes some way in succeeding at this — LI-RAM would use 10% less power as the prevailing standards, and process information faster.

Currently, information processing technologies use up about 10% of the world's electricity resource, according to UVic, which expects LI-RAM to cut this consumption by half.

What makes this technology unique?

Frank says the material in LI-RAM has the unusual quality of rapidly changing magnetic properties when hit with green light. According to a media release issued by UVic, “This means that information can be processed and stored at the single molecule level, allowing for the development of universal memory — a technology that has, until now, been hypothetical."

Range of applications

Besides its use for data storage in mobile phones, computers and other electronic durables, LI-RAM could come in handy "in medical imaging, solar cells, and a range of nanotechnologies".

How soon can we see it in action?

Frank filed a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) Patent Application along with Green Centre Canada. She is currently "working with international electronics manufacturers", and expects LI-RAM to be commercialised in 10 years.

Justice Karnan's outrageous defiance

Justice Karnan's outrageous defiance

he has brought the judiciary into disrepute, flouted all norms of judicial conduct and thrown an open challenge to the Supreme Court. His continuance as a judge makes a mockery of democracy and the rule of law. The case of Justice C.S. Karnan is no longer just strange or curious; it is disgraceful and intolerable. The Calcutta High Court judge’s ‘order’ summoning the Chief Justice of India and six judges of the Supreme Court to his ‘residential court’ to face punishment under the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, is yet another unacceptable affront to the apex court’s authority. Justice Karnan’s conduct goes against the assurance he gave the Chief Justice of India last year that he would foster a “harmonious attitude towards one and all”. At that time, he had expressed regret for passing a suo motu order staying his own transfer from the Madras High Court to the Calcutta High Court, admitting that it was an “erroneous order” passed due to “mental frustration, resulting in loss of mental balance”. The latest instance of his misconduct is in response to the contempt proceedings initiated against him by the Supreme Court for denigrating the judicial institution by making sweeping allegations, in a letter to the Prime Minister, against several judges. He had appeared in person before a seven-judge Bench on March 31, and was given four weeks to respond to the charge of contempt of court. It is quite apparent that he is only further damaging his own case.

The recalcitrant judge has a long history of alleging corruption among other judges, accusing some of caste discrimination against him, and often invoking his caste identity to take complaints against his peers and even Chief Justices to the National Commission for Scheduled Castes. In the past, he has passed judicial orders on matters pertaining to the selection of judges, even after being barred by a Division Bench from hearing them. He had once barged into a court during a hearing, and on another occasion into the chamber of the Madras High Court Chief Justice, “hurling a volley of invectives”. Public criticism, transfer to another High Court, being hauled up for contempt and being denied judicial work — nothing seems to restrain him. The only option left is impeachment, but it is a political process involving Parliament and is something he himself may want so he can give full play to his alleged grievances, including those based on his caste. Justice Karnan’s case vividly exposes the inadequacies of the collegium system of appointments. Nothing makes a better case for the infusion of greater transparency in the selection of judges than his current presence in the High Court

How CERN's experiment could shake up the Standard Model of particle physics

The European organisation for nuclear research (CERN) on Tuesday came out with a news that has more than raised an eyebrow among particle physicists. The LHCb experiment in CERN has shown a feeble but persistent sign of physics that contradicts a basic assumption of the Standard Model, indicating that this theory which has ruled the roost may not be complete in itself. Here is what you need to know:

What is the Standard Model of particle physics?

Nature as we know it is governed by four fundamental forces – electromagnetic, strong, weak and gravitational. One of the major programmes in physics is to unify these four forces and have one equation to describe everything – the theory of everything! However, so far scientists have been able to devise a theory that only gives a unified description of the first three forces. This theory is called the Standard Model (SM).

What are the particles in particle physics?

It is known that all subatomic particles are composed of quarks. These come in six flavours or types: Up, Down, Truth, Beauty, Charm and Strange. The quarks do not occur as singles, they can come in pairs – forming the mesons (e.g. pions and kaons), or triplets, to form the Baryons (e.g., protons and neutrons).

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CERN sees “indications” of new physics

Leaving out gravity, which all particles are subject to, let us look at the list of elementary particles: One set of elementary particles are low-mass leptons (electron, muon, tau) which are not made up of quarks and interact only through electromagnetic and weak interactions.

Then come the heavy-mass baryons (protons neutrons etc) which undergo all types of interactions. These are all fermions, or spin ½ particles.

There are the mesons (pions, kaons etc). These are bosons and they are highly unstable and hence shortlived. These interact through strong interactions.

Gauge bosons are particles that mediate the various forces – gluons mediate the strong interactions, the W and Z bosons mediate the weak interaction and the photons, the electromagnetic interactions.

All these particles have been observed and the last particle to be seen experimentally was the Higgs particle. This is a boson and is involved in the mechanism by which the baryons get their mass.

What are the gaps in the Standard Model?

The SM does not include anything like a description of the dark matter particles. So an experimental discovery of a dark matter particle such as a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) would be seeing physics beyond the standard model.

As mentioned earlier, quarks come in flavours. The standard model does not allow these to be changed in processes that are strongly observed. So experimental evidence of flavour-changing neutral currents would also go beyond the Standard Model.

What is the “indication” that LHCb experiment found?

Today, LHCb has described an “indication” (which is a weaker statement than saying “discovery”) that they have observed a difference in the way electrons and muons behave. They have observed two types of reactions: in one, B meson decays to an excited K Meson and a muon-plus and muon-minus pair. Now the standard model predicts that these two reactions should have the same rate, however, the experimentalists find a significant difference in the rates. This indicates that there is something different from what the Standard Model predicts.

This is a massive announcement. They are cautious to say that the statistical significance is not sufficient for it to be termed a discovery. With the next runs bringing in some five times more data it is very possible that they would get a stronger indication of this.

Lines of defence for using EVMs

Lines of defence for using EVMs
The inclusion of paper audit trails to the EVMs is costly but perhaps unavoidable

In the face of extreme and unreasonable complaints against Electronic Voting Machines by a number of political parties, the Election Commission perhaps had no choice but to have the working of the machines corroborated by a paper audit trail. To have such a facility ready for all constituencies by the 2019 Lok Sabha election is expensive (an estimated ₹3,174 crore) and also unnecessary (paper trails are at best required in a few constituencies to corroborate results). Its request to the Law Ministry to release funds for the procurement of voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines for the 2019 Lok Sabha election should be interpreted in this context. As many as 16 lakh VVPAT machines will be required and only an urgent release of funds will allow the machines to be ready in time for 2019. It was possible for the EC to brush off the complaints from the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Aam Aadmi Party following their defeat in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab respectively, but it clearly became increasingly difficult for it to ignore the clutch of parties that joined the chorus, some demanding a return to paper ballots.

The EC has repeatedly assured voters that there are enough procedural and technical safeguards to prevent large-scale tampering or manipulation of EVMs. Since 2006, elections have witnessed the use of upgraded EVMs — Model 2 machines, with security features such as dynamic coding of key codes on ballot units and their transfer as messages to the control unit in an encrypted manner. EVMs feature encoded software that is burnt one-time on to programmable chips, enabling them to be used as stand-alone machines rather than computer-connected units, thus preventing any hacking by remote devices. Model 3 machines produced after 2013 have additional features such as tamper detection. The EC has laid down procedural rules of locking and storing EVMs before and after polling, besides functional checks and tests in the presence of representatives of political parties. The addition of the VVPAT machine to the process is to allow for cross-checking of EVM results through a paper audit, completing another layer of accountability to the indigenously produced machines (only the microchip is manufactured outside the country with the machine language embedded on it). Contrary to glib claims about tampering, studies show the introduction of EVMs has resulted in a drastic reduction in electoral fraud (rigging, stuffing of ballot boxes, etc.) and allowed for greater voter participation. Since reverting to the older paper ballot system will be regressive, the only option in the face of the protests is to have a back-up in the form of a paper trail — something that will hopefully put a quietus to the controversy.

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