Category: Tech

Indian Army contingent comprising 137 personnel will participate in the multinational tri-services joint military exercise, BRIGHT STAR-23, from 31 August to 14 September 2023 at Mohammed Naguib Military Base in Egypt. The military exercise will be led by US CENTCOM and Egyptian Army.

In 2023, 34 countries will participate in BRIGHT STAR-23 with a total strength of 549 personnel. It will be the largest ever joint military exercise in the Middle East and North Africa region. Participating in the exercise for the first time, the Indian Army is being represented by a contingent from 23 JAT Battalion.

Exercise BRIGHT STAR-23 will include a large number of training activities focused on combating emerging unconventional threats and enhancing regional partnerships among participating nations aimed at maintaining world peace. In addition to these field and situational training exercises, BRIGHT STAR-23 will include a combined arms live firing exercise based on a tactical setting. A panel discussion on contemporary topics is also planned to be conducted on Cyber Security for which the Indian Armed Forces are the lead force.

The exercise was initially conceptualised as a bilateral biennial training exercise between the US and Egypt during the Camp David Accord of 1977. Its first edition was conducted in 1980 in Egypt. From 1995 onwards, the exercise was expanded for participation by other nations. The previous exercise BRIGHT STAR was conducted in 2021 wherein armed forces of 21 countries participated.

Intel’s talent in India is essential to all of its critical programs, including CPUs, GPUs, artificial intelligence, accelerators, and FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), said its Executive Vice President and General Manager for the Data Center and AI Group Sandra Rivera. Speaking at a media roundtable in Bengaluru, Rivera said that India is at a critical juncture in the company’s semiconductor ambitions, as it seeks to attract manufacturing capabilities to the country.

For Intel, India is a huge market. The number of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) graduates produced in Indian universities, the workforce, the growth of the middle class, the knowledge workers, all position the country as a wonderful growth market and opportunity, said Rivera, and so, there is absolutely no reason why India cannot be a technology leader and a manufacturing leader in the world.

Intel sees an opportunity in the build-up of the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), original design manufacturing (ODM) ecosystem, and the electronics manufacturing industry in India. Its partners also see an opportunity in the country.

The multinational corporation and technology company has so far invested $9 billion in India. According to Rivera, progress in India with regard to technology has been faster than in countries such as Israel and the US, as the country has learned from the experiences of more mature markets and skipped over generations of technology that is not at the leading edge.

A newly developed artificial intelligence (AI) model can estimate one’s age from their chest X-ray. The new research published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity journal said that the model can also signal chronic diseases such as hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease from the difference between estimated and chronological age.

The findings of the research from Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan, have marked a leap in medical imaging and paved the way for improved early disease detection and intervention.

For age estimation, the AI model was trained using around 67,100 chest radiographs of 36,051 healthy individuals who underwent health check-ups between 2008 and 2021. It showed a strong correlation between the AI-estimated age and the chronological age of the individuals. The model was then trained to analyse the link between the AI-estimated age and each disease on additional 34,197 chest radiographs compiled from as many patients with known diseases. In all, it was trained on 1,01,300 chest X-rays from 70,248 participants across five institutions in Japan.

The difference between the individual’s AI-estimated age and chronological age was found to be associated with one’s chronic diseases, which meant that higher the age the AI estimated, higher the likelihood of these individuals to have these diseases.

The lander module (LM) of India’s Chandrayaan-3 has successfully touched down on the Moon’s South Pole on August 23, making India the first nation in the world to achieve the feat. The country is the fourth nation, after the United States, China and Russia to have landed on the Moon.

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) third lunar mission was launched on July 14, leading to celebrations at the Mission Operations Complex (MOX) at ISRO Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

The lander touched the lunar surface at precisely 6.03 pm on August 23. The Pragyan Rover, which was carried by the lander, too rolled out on the same day, and is now exploring the lunar surface.

Pragyan will carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface during the course of its mobility. The lander and the rover with a mission life of one lunar day (14 Earth days) have scientific payloads to carry out experiments on the lunar surface.

Upon the safe and successful landing of Chandrayaan-3, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation via video conferencing from South Africa, where he is attending the 15th BRICS Summit.

Congratulating the team of scientists at ISRO, he said, “India’s successful moon mission is not India’s alone…Our approach of One Earth, One Family, One Future is resonating across the globe…Moon mission is based on the same human-centric approach. So, this success belongs to all of humanity.”

Union Minister for Railways, Communications, Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw on August 18 dedicated to the nation India’s first 3D-printed post office located in Cambridge Layout, Bengaluru.

Built in only 43 days, the post office has been constructed by Larsen & Toubro Limited with technological support from IIT Madras under the guidance of Professor Manu Santhanam, Building Technology and Construction Management Division, Department of Civil Engineering.

The post office covers a built-up area of 1,021 sq ft. Its construction was carried out using 3D concrete printing technology. In this fully automated building construction technology, a robotic printer deposits the concrete layer by layer as per the approved design. A special grade concrete is used to ensure bonding between these layers for the purpose of printing the structure.

The construction of such a structure by conventional method takes about 6-8 months. The 3D technology has brought down the construction cost, which stood at Rs 23 lakh, about 30-40% less than the conventional method.

The project has no vertical joints. It involved continuous printing of the full perimeter. The 3D printing technology, which was imported from Denmark for the post office project, was also flexible to incorporate curved surfaces and adapt to site dimensions. It also enabled continuous reinforced concrete footing and three-layer walls with outer layers printed with concrete and the middle being reinforced concrete.

Israel’s Defense Ministry on August 17 secured its largest-ever defense deal selling a sophisticated missile defense system to Germany for $3.5 billion. The defense system, Arrow 3 is designed to intercept long-range ballistic missiles.

Development and manufacturing of the system was led by the Israel Aerospace Industries, the Defense Ministry’s Homa Administration for air-defense systems, and the US Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency. Israel sought approval for the deal from the US State Department before closing it with Germany.

Israeli defense officials said the system would extend Germany’s defense capability, while boosting the defense relationship between Israel and the United States. The director of the Israeli Missile Defense Organization, Moshe Patel told reporters that the components of the missile system will be fully delivered to Germany by 2025, with the system reaching full capability by 2030.

Germany launched the European Sky Shield Initiative last year with 17 other nations, including the United Kingdom and Sweden, which is a joint European air defense system after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Arrow 3, considered the most advanced system of its kind, is meant to intercept long-range ballistic missiles before they re-enter the atmosphere. It has a so-called hit-to-kill capability that enables it to directly intercept the target outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

Space scientists have discovered patterns on Mars that provide evidence of a cyclical climate similar to that of Earth’s, opening up new prospects for research into the origin of life. Using data from NASA’s Curiosity rover, the scientists at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, with the participation of French space agency CNES, made the new discovery.

Using the Mastcam1 and the ChemCam2 instruments on the rover, space scientists have discovered deposits of salts dating from 3.8 to 3.6 billion years ago on Mars. The salt deposits that form a hexagonal pattern in sedimentary layers present new evidence indicating an environment conducive to the emergence of life on the Red Planet.

The surface of Mars, unlike the surface of Earth, is not constantly renewed by plate tectonics, resulting in the preservation of huge areas of terrain abundant in fossil rivers and lakes dating back billions of years.

Since 2012, Curiosity has detected the presence of simple organic molecules that can be formed by geological as well as biological processes. This environment, in which simple organic molecules have already been discovered, may have provided ideal conditions for the formation of complex organic compounds.

The findings of the study were published in the journal Nature on 9 August 2023. This work opens up new prospects for research into the processes underlying the origin of life, of which no vestiges remain on Earth.

In the new study, a team of scientists at Yale University in the US have created a complete human-like liver in a mouse model that could help find ways to regulate cholesterol levels and potentially treat chronic liver diseases.

The team used progenitor stem cells and mature cells known as hepatocytes from a human liver to create this model. According to these researchers, this organ developed into a similar size-adjusted shape and carried out similar cellular functions as a healthy human liver. The cellular functions in the humanised liver could also be manipulated to mimic human fibrosis and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, the researchers added.

The functional human-like liver in living mice could help find ways to regulate cholesterol levels and potentially treat chronic liver diseases. The newly developed liver model can be used by drug companies seeking to assess safety of experimental drugs designed to treat chronic diseases.

Alcoholic and non-alcoholic liver disease, cancer, viral hepatitis, fibrosis and cancer affect more than 1.5 billion people worldwide. In the US, an estimated 30% to 40% of the population has been diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease alone. Yet liver disease has been difficult to study in animal models. The livers of mice, for instance, perform different functions than those of humans.

The findings are published August 9 in the journal Cell.

Indian IT company, Tata Consultancy Services has bagged a contract from the Government of India to redesign and build a new version of public procurement platform Government e-Marketplace (GeM).

The GeM platform provides an end-to-end online marketplace to government entities, including public sector undertakings, for procurement of common-use goods and services in a transparent and efficient manner. In its next avatar, GeM is envisaged to be an all-inclusive platform for government procurement, offering improved ease of doing business and transparency.

The Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of GeM is over Rs 2 lakh crore purchased by 70,000 buyer organisations from more than 65 lakh sellers and service providers, including over 8 lakh medium and small enterprises, TCS said in a statement.

TCS will leverage new technologies such as cloud neutrality and interoperability. It will maintain the current platform and base the new GeM platform on multilingual and open source-based architecture.

 The new platform will be based on e-commerce and e-marketplace principles with multi-tenancy, multi-rule, multilingual, open source, and open-API-based architecture. It will be highly scalable, designed to accommodate the anticipated six-fold growth in GMV over the next six years, the statement said.

The new platform will deploy data analytics to forecast projections and improve supply chain management, and advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to help identify potential fraud.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India is running an Indian Web Browser Development Challenge, which seeks to inspire start-ups and developers in the country to create an indigenous web browser.

The challenge is being run in collaboration with CCA and C-DAC Bangalore. It aims to create a browser with a focus on accessibility, and ensuring support “for individuals with diverse abilities.”

The programme has already seen participation from over 200 participants, including government departments, academia, start-ups and more, the MeitY said in a press release.

The team also envisions the ability to sign digital documents using a crypto token, which would allow for secure transactions.

There are three rounds in the competition. After the preliminary round, 18 of the best ideas will be chosen. In the second round, those 18 ideas will be brought down to 8, and then finally, three entries will fight it out for top three in the final round.

Technical mentorship will be provided to the contestants, and the prize pool will be worth Rs 3.41 crore, of which the winner will take home Rs 1 crore. The winner will also receive government backing and support for the project.