Nov-dec 2008

CURRENT GENERAL KNOWLEDGE: NOV-DEC 2008 ABBREVIATIONS NATRIP: National Automotive Testing and R & D Infrastructure Project.

AWARDS Social Entrepreneur Award, 2008: Arbind Singh, Executive Director, Nidan, is the winner. In India, the Social Entrepreneur Year of the Award is an initiative of The Nand and Jeet Khemka Foundation and The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, in collaboration with the UNDP.

Indira Gandhi Peace Prize, 2008: Mohammad El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been chosen for the 2008 Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development, for his impassioned opposition to the use of nuclear energy for military purposes and his steadfast espousal of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, sustained over many years. He has led the IAEA in carving out an independent approach free from bias and reflective of a wider balanced perspective in tune with today’s world, it said.

IAAF Awards, 2008: Sprinter Usain Bolt of Jamaica and Pole Vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva of Russia have won the IAAF World Athlete of the Year awards. Bolt is the first man to win the three Olympic events in a single Games, since Carl Lewis in 1984. Yelena Isinbayeva successfully defended her Olympic title and remained undefeated in outdoor competitions in 2008.

UN Human Rights Award, 2008: Slain former Pakistani Premier Benazir Bhutto has beenposthumously awarded the United Nations Human Rights award.

Chandrayaan-1 wins global award: Chandrayaan-1, the unmanned mission sent by India for exploration of moon, has won a prestigious international cooperation award given by the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG). The ILEWG is a public forum sponsored by the world’s space agencies to support international cooperation towards formulating a world strategy for the exploration and utilization of the moon.

BOOKS Imagining India—Ideas for the new century: This book is written by Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys. He has received for the book the biggest advance ever paid to a non-fiction writer in India. Penguin has bought the publication rights of the book.

Secret Life of Words, The: British writer Henry Hitching’s book is on how the English language came to be. It has won for its author the prestigious John Llewellyn

Rhys

Prize,

given

for

the

best

work

of

literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) by a UK or Commonwealth writer aged 35 or under.

DEFENCE Shaurya missile test-fired successfully: India successfully test-fired a mediumrange, surface to surface missile on November 12, 2008. The new Shourya (Valour) missile has a range of 600 km and the high manoeuvrability of the missile makes it less vulnerable to available anti-missile defence systems.

Ezhimala Naval Academy: The prestigious Ezhimala Naval Academy in Kannur district in Kerala will be commissioned in January 2009. All the training and academic programmes of the Indian Navy will be shifted to the new academy, perhaps the biggest in Asia, once it becomes fully operational. The academy can at a time train 750 cadets.

OIL OVL makes second strike in Egypt: In marked contrast to the performance of its parent Oil and Natural Gas Corporation at home, the flagship explorer’s overseas arm ONGC Videsh has struck oil for the second time in an offshore block in Egypt. This is the latest in a string of success the company has scored on foreign soil.

The latest discovery was made off the North Ramadan concession in the Gulf of Suez in partnership with Cairo-based explorer IPR Red Sea Inc. The find in well North Ramadan-2 (NR-2), the second oil discovery in the block, is located on a separate block north of the first oil discovery NR-IA, which produced about 3,000 barrels of oil per day and 15 million cubic feet per day of gas during the testing phase.

OVL holds 70% in the North Ramadan concession, while IPR has the remaining 30%. The North Ramadan concession is 290 sq km in size and is surrounded by some of Egypt’s most prolific producing oil fields in the Gulf of Suez.

PERSONS Singh, Vishwanath Pratap: Former Indian Prime Minister who dethroned Rajiv Gandhi to form, in 1989, India’s second non-Congress coalition government and later tried social engineering through reservations that changed the country’s political course irreversibly, died on November 27, 2008. He was 77.

He had shot to fame in the mid- 1980s when he was Finance Minister in the government headed by Rajiv Gandhi. His major achievement, however, was the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations that ensured reservation to students from backward communities in education and public sector jobs. An erudite man with a fondness for poetry and painting, he wasn’t the same force after he quit as Prime Minister.

PLACES Hosur: Located near Bangalore this place will host the first aircraft Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) facility in India.

Gulf of Aden, The: Located off the Somalian coast, it has become a hotbed of sea

piracy. The Gulf is an important waterway as it is the only gateway to the Suez Canal that, in turn, is the only waterway for ships travelling between Asian and European countries. The 950 km stretch, straddled by Yemen on the north and Somalia on the south, is now being patrolled by a multinational and anti-terror naval task force, comprising warships from the US, Britain, Germany and other countries.

PROJECTS NATRIP plan: National Automotive Testing and R & D Infrastructure Project (NATRIP) would invest Rs 1,718 crore for setting up auto testing facilities at seven locations across the country by 2011. NATRIP, a joint venture between the central government and the country’s auto industry to create a state of the art testing, validation and R&D infrastructure, would set up its centres at Manesar, Chennai, Indore, Silchar, Rae Bareilly, Pune and Ahmednagar.

RESEARCH Rains can help predict cholera: Maybe the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) brief will be enlarged beyond forecasting the weather to predicting cholera outbreaks. That’s because a team of scientists from India, Bangladesh and the US has found a strong link between the outbreak of the disease, rainfall anomalies and sea surface temperatures.

The study has been conducted jointly by Kolkata-based National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED), the University of Maryland and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal disease research, Dhaka.

It has linked the outbreak of the disease to the level of chlorophyll-a, a pigment found mainly in plants that influences the population growth of a class of fresh water and sea water-dwelling organisms called copepods, which host vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera.

Cholera is transmitted to humans through food or water that is contaminated with the bacterium. The result is severe diarrhea that may lead to dehydration, even death, if not treated promptly.

In their report, the scientists have also formulated an equation that relates the number of cholera cases, sea surface temperatures, rainfall and chlorophyll-a levels in water sources in a region.

ISRO develops hydrogen fuel to power buses: India’s space scientists have developed hydrogen fuel cells to power an automobile bus by leveraging their know-how of the home-grown cryogenic technology for rockets. The two-year effort has yielded positive results and the scientists are now readying for the fuel cells to be fitted into a bus.

ISRO and Tata Motors had signed an MoU in 2006, to design and develop an automobile bus using hydrogen as a fuel through fuel cell route.

103 years later, Einstein proven right: It’s taken more than a century, but Einstein’s celebrated formula e = mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France’s Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world’s mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons. The odd thing is that the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only 5%. Where therefore is the missing 95%?

The answer, according to the study, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons. In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his special theory of relativity in 1905. The e=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass.

By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic weapons.

Spare 10,000 hours to be a genius: Researchers in Germany have found that genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration, and one has to practice just 10,000 hours to reach the top in their chosen discipline. And, according to them, talent and luck are important, but it’s practice that makes the difference between being good and being brilliant.

The researchers at the Berlin’s Academy of Music came to the conclusion after looking at a group of violin students who started playing at around the age of five, practicing for two or three hours a week. As they grew older, the amount of practice increased. And, by the age of 20, the elite performers had each totalled 10,000 hours of practice, while the merely good students had accrued 8,000.

SPACE RESEARCH India hits the moon: The unmanned Chandrayaan-1, India’s first-ever mission for scientific exploration of the moon, achieved a significant milestone on November 14, 2008, when the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) ejected by the spacecraft successfully hit the lunar surface at 8.31 pm, after a 25 minutes descent.

The MIP was dropped on the polar region of the moon by the Chandrayaan 1 from a height of 100 km.

About 30 kg, the box shaped MIP spun during the fall and hit the lunar surface with a thud. The lunar debris, thrown up as a result of the impact made by the

MIP on the surface of the moon, would be analysed for the possible traces of water.

The video camera aboard the MIP worked without giving any hitch and filmed the descent of the probe on the lunar surface. The C-band radar altimeter inside the MIP measured the altitude and provided vital information for future landing missions. The MIP also carried a mass spectrometer for giving inputs about the constituents of the extremely thin lunar atmosphere.

MIP had been named Aditya and had the Indian flag painted on all four sides.

Hubble captures first photos of planet outside solar system: The US space agency’s 18-year-old Hubble telescope has captured for the first time visible light snapshot of a planet circling another star outside our solar system. Estimated to be about three times Jupiter’s mass, the planet orbits the bright southern star Formalhaut, located 25 light years away in the constellation Piscis Australis or the Southern Fish.

In 2004, the coronagraph in the high resolution camera on Hubble’s advanced camera for surveys produced the first-ever resolved visible light image of the region around Formalhaut. It clearly showed a ring of proto-planetary debris, approximately 21.5 billion miles across and having a sharp inner edge. This large debris disk is similar to the Kuiper Belt, which encircles the solar system and contains a range of icy bodies from dust grains to objects the size of dwarf planets, such as Pluto.

Endeavour docks with space station: Space shuttle Endeavour and its crew of seven astronauts successfully docked with the International Space Station on November 17, 2008, beginning a home improvement mission to double the living space on the orbiting complex. Endeavour was launched on a 15-day mission to expand the living quarters of the orbiting space station and equip it with a new oven, a refrigerator and a new toilet.

NASA tests first deep space internet: US space agency NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modelled on the Internet. NASA engineers used a special software called Disruption-tolerant Networking or DTN to transmit images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 30 million km from earth.

MISCELLANEOUS The mouse has just turned 40: One computer device could be called as being most in touch with humans, the mouse, which celebrated its 40th birthday on December 1, 2008. The first computer mouse was a little wooden box with a single red button on top and a wire hanging from the back, because of which it was likened to a rodent. And while computers have transformed from big white boxes to cool flat screens and laptops, the mouse has stayed the same. Its designer, Douglas Engelbart, is not a rich man as he never got any royalties because the patent expired before the mouse became a must have.