SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY AFFAIRS OCTOBER 2009

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY AFFAIRS OCTOBER 2009

• NASA has launched tallest rocket (327 feet) Ares 1-X form Cape Canaveral, Florida.

  
  
• Two Cyprus companies, NORASCO and Upturn Trading Limited, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with India’s CASE Neuberg Solutions for setting up turnkey solar energy plants.

  
  
• Three pairs of the Himalayan Tahr and two pairs of Blue sheep from a zoo in Japan were received by officials of the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological (PNHZ) Park in Darjeeling. 

  
  

  The animals were received as a part of an animal exchange programme. India has sent a pair of elephants to the Okinawa Zoo about three years back.

  
  
• Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California detected water, methane and carbon dioxide — the basic components of life — on the planet named HD 209458b, outside solar system. 

  
  

  It’s the second planet outside our solar system after Jupiter-sized planet, HD 189733b on which water, methane and carbon dioxide have been found, which are potentially important for biological processes in habitable planets.

• Three new species of legless amphibians have been discovered from forests in Manipur and Nagaland by researchers led by Delhi University Associate Professor S.D. Biju.

  
  
• India has allocated places at Chhayamithi Virdi in Gujarat and Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh to the U.S.-led consortia for expanded cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

  
  
• Russia has been given a site at Haripur in West Bengal, besides Koodankulam. French company Areva will start work at Jaitapur in Maharashtra.

  
  
• Three scientists who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fibre-optic networks shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics. Charles K Kao was cited for his breakthrough involving the transmission of light in fiber optics while Willard S Boyle and George E. Smith were honored for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit known as the CCD sensor.

  
  
• Three Americans, Australian-born Elizabeth Blackburn, British-born Jack Szostak and Carol Greider won the Nobel prize for medicinefor revealing the existence and nature of telomerase, an enzyme which helps prevent the fraying of chromosomes that underlies aging and cancer. 

  
  
• Iran test fired Shaheb-3 and Sajjal missiles with a range of 1300 to 2000Km. These can carry payload of 1000kgs.

  
  
• The International Conference on'Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy' was inaugurated by Prime Minister on September 29th in New Delhi. Bhabha was the president of the first international conference on this subject held in Geneva in 1955. The conference was also attended by Mohammad ElBaradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The conference was organized by the Department of Atomic Energy in association with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Indian Nuclear Society.
  
  

• Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) recommended commercial cultivation of Bt Brinjal in India.

• The US Space Agency NASA has crashed a Rocket into a crater on the South Pole of the Moon in the hope of detecting water. The LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) satellite crashed into the Cabeus crater floor near the moon's south pole at around 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) per hour.

  
  
• Two nuclear-capable, medium range surface-to-surface Prithvi-II missiles were successfully test-fired by the armed forces from the Integrated Test Range (ITR), Chandipur. Both missiles had a range of 350 km and can carry nuclear load.