Category: Tech

US scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain, say reports. Net energy gain indicates that this technology could provide an abundant zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels.

“Last week at the Lawrence Livermore National Library, scientists at the National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition,” US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at a press conference, adding, “That is creating more energy from fusion reactions than the energy used to start the process. It’s the first time it has ever been done in a laboratory anywhere in the world.”

Since the 1950s, physicists globally have wanted to exploit the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but no attempt has been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes. The breakthrough is a huge step in the direction of unleashing an infinite source of clean energy that could help end dependence on fossil fuels.

Nuclear fusion occurs when two or more atoms fuse together to make one larger atom, generating a massive amount of energy as heat. Unlike nuclear fission that powers electricity all over the world, nuclear fusion does not release long-lasting radioactive waste. A big challenge of harnessing fusion energy is sustaining it long enough so that it can power electric grids and heating systems around the globe. Once accomplished, the breakthrough would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear energy.

Japanese space startup, ispace Inc launched its own private lander to the Moon on board a SpaceX rocket on Sunday from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Tokyo-based start-up designed its craft to use minimal fuel to save money and leave more room for cargo. It is taking a slow, low-energy path to the Moon, flying 1.6 million km (one million miles) from Earth before turning back to make a planned landing by the end of April. In opposition, NASA’s Orion crew capsule with test dummies took five days to reach the Moon last month. The US lunar flyby mission splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday.

The Japanese ispace craft aims to put a small NASA satellite into lunar orbit to look for water deposits before touching down in the Atlas Crater located in the northeastern section of the Moon’s near side. The M1 lander will deploy two robotic rovers on the Moon. The first rover is a two-wheeled, orange-sized device from Japan’s JAXA space agency, while the second rover is a four-wheeled unit, Explorer Rashid, made by the United Arab Emirates. The lander will also carry an experimental solid-state battery made by a Japanese spark plug company.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Headquarters, Integrated Defence Staff jointly conducted hypersonic vehicle trials on Friday. The trials achieved all required parameters and demonstrated hypersonic vehicle capability, ISRO said in a statement.

A hypersonic vehicle travels at least five times faster than the speed-of-sound, or greater than Mach 5. This vehicle can be an airplane, missile, or spacecraft. Considered to be the latest cutting-edge technology, hypersonic technology is a focus for many countries, including China, India, Russia and the US, which are engaged in further advancement of hypersonic weapons. The speed and maneuverability enable hypersonic missiles to penetrate most missile defenses. Due to its high speed, most radars are unable to detect these missiles early enough to intercept them.

India is also developing an indigenous, dual-capable hypersonic cruise missile as part of its Hypersonic Technology Demonstrator Vehicle programme, say reports. The missile will be capable of firing nuclear weapons along with conventional weapons. The country has tested such technology in 2019 and September 2020. During this test, the speed of a Hypersonic Technology Demonstrator Vehicle (HSTDV) equipped with a scramjet engine was measured at 7,500 km per hour.

ISRO has also completed the first blow down test of the newly-installed Trisonic Wind Tunnel at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram, the agency said in a statement. The tunnel can simulate flight conditions from 0.2 times the speed of sound to four times the speed of sound.

Onkar Batra, a 12th-standard student from Jammu, has launched a nano-satellite with the help of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Batra, a student at BSF Senior Secondary School Jammu, has developed India’s first open-source satellite, InQube. This satellite, prepared under the banner of Paradox Sonic Space Research Agency, will be launched this month.

The satellite has been developed with nanotechnology and weighs one kilogram. Its launch in India cost Rs. 20 to 80 lakh. The price in foreign countries is into crores of rupees.

In an interview, Batra said that the satellite has two missions: to check whether such a lightweight satellite can work in space and to look at the temperature to help researchers know what the weather conditions are going to be like.

Batra, who is also the Chief Executive Officer of Batra Technology, received the National Bal Shakti Award from the President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, for creating an interactive website for COVID-19. He created his first website when he was seven years old, making him earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s youngest Webmaster (male). The school boy is also the world’s youngest theoretical author, as he wrote the book, When The Time Stops at the age of 12.

The European Union has announced plans to provide in-flight network connectivity to passengers. The move will allow airlines across EU countries to give 5G connectivity in flights.

The EU has ordered its member states to make 5G frequency bands available in planes by June 30, 2023 and implement the new directives. Once the directives are in place, air travellers will be able to call, surf the internet, and stream and use apps on the internet.

The new order of mid-flight connectivity comes under EU’s Digital Future Strategy and will affect all EU member states. While there are some airlines that offer Wi-Fi connectivity to passengers, the internet service is comparatively slower in flights, at around 3 MHz, than 20 to 160 MHz available on ground and in homes.

The new 5G system by the EU is said to offer over 100 Mbps, allowing air travellers to stream films and download videos at high-speed. Earlier, there was a concern in the US that 5G frequencies could interfere with flights and lead to incorrect altitude measurements. However, this is not an issue in the UK and the EU, as these regions have a different set of frequencies for 5G, and there are lower power settings than those allowed in the US.

In a real breakthrough in the renewable energy sector, researchers at IIT Madras have created a device that can generate electricity from sea waves. The development might help India achieve its goal to deliver on its climate change targets by generating 500 GW of renewable energy by 2030.

Called the ‘Ocean Wave Energy Converter’ or Sindhuja-1, this device was deployed at a remote location 6 km off the coast of Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu, and placed at a depth of 20 metres. The IIT-M team completed trials of this device in the second week of November, and now targets generating 1 MW of power from ocean waves in the next three years. The team is led by Professor Abdus Samad, the scientist behind the establishment of the Wave Energy and Fluids Engineering Laboratory at IIT Madras.

Professor Abdus Samad, a faculty of IIT Madras’ Department of Ocean Engineering, has been working for over a decade on wave energy. The group led by him created and put to the test a scaled-down model. The lab is also looking into other uses for this technology, such as providing power for smaller underwater gadgets like data buoys and navigational buoys.

A team of researchers in Canada have discovered two new minerals in a slice of a 15-tonne meteorite that landed near the town of El Ali, in the Hiraan region of Somalia in east Africa. A potential third mineral is also being looked at.

The meteorite is the ninth largest celestial rock recorded at over 2 metres wide. It was unearthed in Somalia in 2020 and named the El Ali meteorite. The minerals have officially been named elaliite after the meteorite’s location and elkinstantonite after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Vice President, Arizona State University Interplanetary Initiative and Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission.

A 70-gram slice of the iron-based meteorite was sent to the meteorite collection of University of Alberta, Canada, for classification. After carrying out some tests, the researchers found the unknown minerals. The researchers will now examine material science applications of these minerals.

A professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the university and the curator of the collection, Dr Chris Herd said similar minerals had been synthetically created in a lab in the 1980s but were never recorded to be present in nature. The new minerals could help researchers understand the work of “nature’s laboratory” and its real-world uses, he added.

Indigenous radio telescope SARAS has helped scientists conclude the properties of the earliest radio luminous galaxies formed 200 million years after the Big Bang, a period called the Cosmic Dawn.

Published in Nature Astronomy by an international group of scientists, the findings of SARAS give an insight into the characteristics of the earliest radio loud galaxies that are usually powered by supermassive black holes. The team of scientists estimated the energy output, luminosity, and masses of the first generation of galaxies that are bright in radio wavelengths.

The Shaped Antenna measurement of the background Radio Spectrum 3 (SARAS) telescope has been indigenously designed and built at Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru. It was deployed over Dandiganahalli Lake and Sharavati backwaters in northern Karnataka in 2020.

In a first-of-its-kind work, using data from SARAS 3, researchers from the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, along with collaborators at the University of Cambridge and the University of Tel-Aviv, estimated the energy output, luminosity, and masses of the first generation of galaxies that are bright in radio wavelengths.

Scientists study the properties of very early galaxies by studying radiation from hydrogen atoms in and around the galaxies, emitted at a frequency of approximately 1420 MHz. The radiation is stretched by the expansion of the universe, as it travels to us across space and time, and arrives at Earth in lower frequency radio bands 50-200 MHz, which is also used by FM and TV transmissions. The cosmic signal is tremendously faint, and detecting the signal, even using the most powerful existing radio telescopes, has remained a challenge for astronomers.

Indonesia is building a lithium refinery and an anode material production facility to complement its nickel-based battery materials industry, an official said, as it aims to set itself up as a hub for making electric vehicles (EVs).

Investors are currently building a lithium hydroxide plant with 60,000 tonnes capacity in the heart of the nickel industry in Morowali, Septian Hario Seto, a Deputy Coordinating Minister for Maritime and Investment Affairs, told an industry conference on Tuesday.

An anode material plant with 80,000 tonnes capacity is set to start construction in January, he added.

Both materials are needed to make EV batteries.

“We are building an ecosystem, so we are not only producing nickel- and cobalt-based components alone,” he said.

Indonesia has already started producing EV battery parts extracted from nickel, but other materials are also needed to produce EV batteries, Seto said.

Indonesia currently does not have its own lithium mine. He did not elaborate on how the lithium ore for the plant would be sourced.

The government has banned exports of unprocessed nickel to attract investment at home and secure material for domestic production of nickel metals and battery materials.

The researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur have developed lanthanides-based perovskite nanocomposite catalytic materials for artificial photosynthesis to produce high-purity hydrogen.

In the patented method, the researchers used natural sunlight to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen using a highly recyclable catalyst based on low-cost, simple transition metal. The team has now developed a series of catalysts that can efficiently produce hydrogen under ambient conditions. The end application of this research lies in the industries, automobile and energy sectors.

In a statement, IIT Jodhpur said that hydrogen-based energy is the only viable source for a green and sustainable future. More than 90 per cent of the source of hydrogen is from petroleum feedstock, making it costly and out of reach of the common man. IIT Jodhpur’s research team, led by Principal Investigator Dr Rakesh K Sharma, is working to find a viable source of hydrogen generation. The technology developed by the IIT Jodhpur team does not need any external energy source except sunlight.

The team screened more than 100 catalyst combinations to develop five sets of catalysts that give high hydrogen production under sunlight. The catalysts work for wastewater, saline water and brackish water. The catalysts are recyclable and can be used multiple times.