Category: Tech

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards unveiled an intermediate range ballistic missile on June 6 that is capable of travelling at hypersonic speeds of up to 15 times the speed of sound, said a state television report. The range of the Fattah missile is 1,400 kilometres.

President of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi hailed the new missile’s hypersonic capability, saying it would boost the country’s “power of deterrence” and “bring peace and stability to the countries of the region.”

The official IRNA news agency published photographs of the ceremony in a closed area. Several top military commanders were present at the launch, including Guards chief General Hossein Salami.

Like slower ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles can be equipped with nuclear warheads. Unlike conventional ballistic missiles, hypersonic ones fly on a trajectory low in the atmosphere, enabling them to reach their targets more quickly and with less chance of being intercepted by modern air defences.

Last year, when the programme was announced, Guards aerospace chief General Amirali Hajizadeh said the system was developed to counter air defence shields. He added he believed it would take decades before a system capable of intercepting it is developed.

The Indian Navy is participating in a commemorative event to mark 130 years of the beginning of the struggle against apartheid at Pietermaritzburg Railway Station near Durban. INS Trishul, a frontline warship of the Indian Navy, is in Durban till June 9, to commemorate the anniversary of the June 7, 1893 incident and 30 years of re-establishment of diplomatic relations between India and South Africa.

The event at Pietermaritzburg Railway includes paying floral tributes at the plinth of Mahatma Gandhi and a performance by the Indian Navy band. The ship will also participate in other professional and social engagements during the visit.

Mahatma Gandhi arrived in Durban, South Africa, in 1893 to serve as legal counsel to a merchant. On June 7, 1893, on his way to Pretoria in the Transvaal, he arrived at Pietermaritzburg station. Gandhiji, who was seated in the first-class compartment after buying a ticket, was evicted from the compartment at the will of a European, who said coolies and non-whites were not permitted in first-class compartments. The incident is believed to be the trigger that led to Mahatma’s fight against racial oppression and the birth of Satyagraha.

India will soon acquire its fastest supercomputer worth Rs. 900 crore that is expected to be operational by March next year. With the acquisition, India will get the weather monitoring mechanism with the highest resolution of probabilistic forecast, said Earth Sciences Minister Kiren Rijiju on May 24.

The country is set to scale up its super-computing prowess significantly and install an 18-petaflop system over the course of this year. The ‘flops’ stand for floating point operations per second, and are an indicator of computers’ processing speed. A petaflop is equal to 1,000 trillion flops. Processing power to such a degree tremendously eases complex mathematical calculations needed, for weather forecasting, among other things.

Currently India’s most powerful, civilian supercomputers — Pratyush and Mihir — with a combined capacity of 6.8 petaflops are housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), Noida, respectively. The computers were made operational in 2018 at an investment of ₹438 crore.

The new supercomputer will have nearly thrice the capability of India’s current fastest supercomputer, the Cray XC-40 supercomputer, Mihir. The new computer can improve forecasting from 12 to 6 kilometers, said Rijiju, while speaking to the media during his visit to the NCMRWF.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched the NVS-1 satellite on May 29.

The NVS-1 is part of the second-generation of satellites called Navigation Indian Constellation (NavIC), which succeeds the first-generation Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS). It has both civilian and strategic uses.

The ISRO has already launched nine first-generation navigation satellites, one of which could not be placed as the launch vehicle crashed into the sea. The NavIC will have increased lifespan, technical capabilities, and applications.

Envisioned as a regional navigation system, the NVS-1 is the first of seven such satellites to be launched. Together, these satellites would form the regional navigation system of India or ‘Indian GPS.’ The satellite has additional capabilities. Its signals will be more secure; a civilian frequency band has been introduced.

NavIC would give India accurate and real-time satellite imagery and geospatial information. It will cover entire India and a radius of 1,500 km from Indian borders, including most of the immediate Indian neighbourhood in South Asia.

For the first time, the NVS-1 has carried a Made in India rubidium atomic clock. Earlier, imported ones were taken onboard. The Ahmedabad-based Space Applications Centre developed the clock, which ISRO said was significant as only a handful of countries possessed this important technology.

A paralysed man has regained the ability to walk smoothly using only his thoughts for the first time, researchers said on May 24, with two implants that restored communication between brain and spinal cord.

Gert-Jan Oskam has been paralysed in his legs for more than a decade after suffering a spinal cord injury during a bicycle accident. Now, with a combination of devices, the 40-year-old Dutchman has gained control over his lower body again. With the new system, he can now walk “naturally”, take on difficult terrain and climb stairs, said a study published in the journal Nature.

The advance is the result of more than a decade of work by a team of researchers in France and Switzerland. Last year, the team showed that a spinal cord implant, which sends electrical pulses to stimulate movement in leg muscles, had helped three paralysed people to walk again. However, the patients needed to press a button to move their legs each time.

In the latest development, the spinal implant is combined with the new technology, brain-computer interface, which is implanted above the part of the brain that controls leg movement. The interface – designed by researchers at France’s Atomic Energy Commission – uses algorithms based on artificial intelligence methods to decode brain recordings in real time. This allows the interface to work out how the patient wants to move their legs at any moment. The data is transmitted to the spinal cord implant via a portable device that fits in a walker or small backpack, letting patients move around without help from others. The two implants, thus, build a “digital bridge” and overcome the disconnect between the spinal cord and brain.

Minister of Science and Technology Jitendra Singh has said that before the actual Gaganyaan mission, the country will send a non-human mission to space. India also plans to send a female robot in the first and second missions, respectively, preceding the Gaganyaan human space-flight programme by the end of 2023 or in 2024. “It is important to go and come back safely. It will land in water. It will ensure the security of the person,” he said.

The union minister unveiled the country’s ambitious space project’s timeline during a media interaction. He said that for the first time, an Indian-origin man will be going on an Indian mission. “Otherwise Rakesh Sharma had gone on a mission, but it was a Russian mission. It is an indigenous mission with indigenous astronaut, indigenous technical knowhow and indigenous funding. We should thank the PM for making funding available to this project. It was delayed due to COVID-19,” he said.

Singh said the department had thought Gaganyaan would be launched within 75 years of India’s independence, but it was delayed for two years due to COVID-19. “Some of the astronauts were being given training at a Russian institute. They had to come back. The two-stage training is now complete,” he added.

The union minister also laid down a plan for Lithium extraction in Jammu and Kashmir’s Reasi district. He said that India has started working in the green hydrogen sector.

In a breakthrough, Stanford University scientists have successfully tested a soft, flexible patch of electronic skin as thick as a piece of paper, offering hope to amputees and those with skin damage. The scientists led by Zhenan Bao, who published their study in the journal Science, have tested the e-skin on a rat.

The e-skin is a device that works by mimicking human skin. It is made of a thin and stretchy rubbery material with electronic circuits and sensors that measure pressure and temperature. Soft and flexible, it can be wrapped around a human finger. The team of researchers behind the discovery has been working on a monolithic e-skin for some time. Their challenge was not so much finding mechanisms to mimic the sensory abilities of human touch, but bringing them together using only skin-like materials.

In humans, nerves detect sensations and then transmit these signals to the brain. In its test, the team connected the e-skin to the animal’s nervous system. They then attached electrodes to a patch of the rat’s brain that regulates touch and temperature. When they put pressure on the device, the rat’s brain sent signals to the region that controls movement. When the researchers sent signals to the rat’s leg through an insertable artificial synapse device, the leg moved.

Croatian car maker Rimac has made the world’s most powerful and fastest electric hypercar, Nevera. The company took the electric vehicle (EV) to the Automotive Testing Papenburg (ATP) facility in Germany and ended up setting a total of 23 different world records in a single day.

The all-electric Nevera achieved the 0-100kph speed in just 1.81 seconds, which is 0.05sec quicker than the faster car named Pininfarina Battista, which held the title for sprinting at the same speed in 1.86 seconds. It also set another record by sprinting 0-400kph in just 29.93 seconds. It then went ahead to break the world record set by Koenigsegg Regera in 2019 for the fastest acceleration in the same category in just 31 seconds.

The records were recorded by two independent verifiers from a third-party firm, Dewesoft and RaceLogic. The verifiers organised multiple sets of rounds by the Nevera at the ground, including standing quarter mile time. After the activity, they gave Rimac Nevera the title of the fastest and most powerful EV ever made.

Rimac said that the electric vehicle is powered by four separate surface-mounted permanent-magnet electric motors that provide a combined 1,914 horsepower and a whopping 2,360 Nm peak torque at a stated top speed of 412 km/h.

SpaceX launched four astronauts into space on May 21 from Cape Canaveral. The Falcon-9 rocket with the Dragon spacecraft lifted off from Nasa’s Launch Complex 39A for the International Space Station (ISS). The spacecraft separated from the rocket nearly 12 minutes after the launch.

The Dragon spacecraft named Freedom carried the first Saudi woman into space, Rayyanah Barnawi, sponsored by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia along with Saudi’s Ali Alqarni, American Commander Peggy Whitson, and Pilot John Shoffner. Barnawi, a breast cancer researcher, is the first Arab woman to go to space. The Saudi pair is the first from their country to ride a rocket since a Saudi prince travelled on board the space shuttle Discovery in 1985. Interestingly, they will be greeted at the station by an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates.

The four astronauts reached the ISS in their capsule on the morning of May 22. They will spend just over a week there before returning home with a splashdown off the coast of the southern US state of Florida. The mission is the second private flight to the space station organised by Houston-based Axiom Space.

A full-sized autonomous bus service was opened to the general public in Scotland, United Kingdom, on May 15. The AB1 service runs on a 22.5-kilometre route with five buses operating a scheduled passenger service throughout the week. The vehicles will travel in mixed traffic up to over 80 kilometers per hour.

AB1 is believed to be the first registered bus service in the world to use full-sized autonomous buses. The trial, which will now run until 2025, aims to demonstrate autonomous technology in a real-world environment transporting up to 10,000 passengers per week. During this time, the team behind the service will make improvements and monitor the benefits for passengers, operations and society.

The new autonomous technology service is the result of almost ten years of research and development from Fusion Processing Ltd, with their CAVStar system having covered over 1.8 million kilometres in tests. A fleet of five Alexander Dennis Enviro200AV vehicles will cover the new 14-mile route, in mixed traffic, at up to 50 miles per hour across the Forth Road Bridge from Ferrytoll Park & Ride, in Fife to Edinburgh Park Transport Interchange.

The service will have two staff members on board: a Safety Driver in the driver’s seat to monitor the technology, and a ‘Captain’ in the saloon to take tickets and answer customers’ questions.