Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

Editorials are covered separately. HINDU NOTES are available free date wise| CLICK HERE

42 heritage monuments, sites in Bihar state-protected

News

• From the ruins of Raja Bhoj’s fort in Buxar to noted author George Orwell’s birthplace in Motihari, Bihar’s archaeology department has brought nearly 13 heritage landmarks under its fold in the last 10 years.

Beyond News

• According to top officials in the state’s Directorate of Archaeology, the total number of monuments and sites protected under the Bihar Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites Remains and Art Treasures Act, 1976, has now grown to 42.
• An old mound located in Lari area of Arwal district is the latest site (42nd) to be declared protected.
• The notification for the same was issued on September 8, last year.
• The consolidated list also includes the colonial-era clock tower in Jamui.
• The state legislation provides for preservation of ancient monuments and archaeological sites other than those declared by or under the law made by parliament to be of national importance for the regulation of archaeological excavations and for the protection of antiquities in Bihar.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

India-Russia to bolster defence ties

News

• Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her Russian counterpart General Sergey Shoygu held a bilateral meeting in Moscow to discuss ways to reinforce defence cooperation between the two sides.

Beyond News

• The talks were aimed to reinforce defence cooperation between the two countries focusing specifically on Military Technical Cooperation.
• The Defence Minister also met her Chinese counterpart General Wei Fenghe, who was appointed in March as the Minister of National Defence and the State Councillor.
• However, officials said it was a mere courtesy meeting during the plenary session of the 7th Moscow Conference on International Security.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

The center of the Milky Way is teeming with black holes.

News

• The center of our galaxy is teeming with black holes, sort of like a Times Square for strange super gravity objects, astronomers discovered.

Beyond News

• For decades, scientists theorized that circling in the center of galaxies, including ours, were lots of stellar black holes , collapsed giant stars where the gravity is so strong even light doesn’t get out.
• But they hadn’t seen evidence of them in the Milky Way core until now.
• Astronomers poring over old x-ray observations have found signs of a dozen black holes in the inner circle of the Milky Way. And since most black holes can’t even be spotted that way, they calculate that there are likely thousands of them there. They estimate it could be about 10,000, maybe more, according to a study.

Findings

• The stellar black holes are in addition to and essentially circling the already known supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A , that’s parked at the center of the Milky Way.
• In the rest of the massive Milky Way, scientists have only spotted about five dozen black holes so far.
• The newly discovered black holes are within about 30.9 trillion kilometers of the supermassive black hole at the center. So there’s still a lot of empty space and gas amid all those black holes.
• Earth is in spiral arm around 3,000 light years away from the center of the galaxy.
• The newly confirmed black holes are about 10 times the mass of our sun, as opposed to the central supermassive black hole, which has the mass of 4 million suns.
• Also the ones spotted are only the type that are binary , where a black hole has partnered with another star and together they emit large amount of x-rays as the star’s outer layer is sucked into the black hole. Those x-rays are what astronomers observe.
• There are good reasons the Milky Way’s black holes tend to be in the center of the galaxy. First, their mass tends to pull them to the center. But mostly the center of the galaxy is the perfect “hot house” for black hole formation, with lots of dust and gas.

India third most vulnerable country to cyber threats

News

• India emerged as the third most vulnerable country in terms of risk of cyber threats, such as malware, spam and ransomware, in 2017, moving up one place over previous year, according to a report by security solutions provider Symantec.

Beyond News

• In 2017, 5.09% of global threats detected were in India, slightly less than 5.11% in 2016. The U.S. (26.61%) was most vulnerable to such attacks, followed by China (10.95%), according to ‘Internet Security Threat Report’.
• The global threat ranking is based on eight metrics – malware, spam, phishing, bots, network attacks, web attacks, ransomware and cryptominers.
• As per the report, India continues to be second most impacted by spam and bots, third most impacted by network attacks, and fourth most impacted by ransomware.
• Cyber criminals, are rapidly adding “cryptojacking” to their arsenal as the ransomware market becomes overpriced and overcrowded.
• The report also pointed out that with the threat landscape becoming more diverse, attackers are working harder to discover new avenues of attack and cover their tracks while doing so.

Mantis shrimp the muse for camera that may allow better underwater navigation

News

• Scientists have developed a bio-inspired camera that mimics the eyes of a mantis shrimp, an advance that may open up new ways for people and robots to better navigate underwater.

Beyond News

• The findings, are the first to demonstrate passive underwater global positioning (GPS) using the polarisation properties of underwater light.
• The technology could open new possibilities for undersea navigation and understanding of the migratory behaviour of marine animals.
• The camera, a variation of a polarisation imager named Mantis Cam after the shrimp that inspired it, takes advantage of how light refracts, or bends, when it passes through the surface of water and bounces from particles and water molecules.
• Underwater polarisation patterns are a result of the Sun’s position relative to the location where the recordings were collected.
• They found that they can use the underwater polarisation patterns to estimate the Sun’s heading and elevation angle, allowing them to figure out their GPS coordinates by knowing the date and time of the filming.
• This technology may open up new ways for people and robots to better navigate underwater using visual cues from polarised light.

Hubble precisely measures distance to ancient star cluster

News

• Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time precisely measured the distance to one of the oldest objects in the universe, a 13.4 billion-year-old cluster of stars born shortly after the Big Bang.

Beyond News

• The refined distance yardstick provides an independent estimate for the age of the universe.
• It will also help astronomers improve models of stellar evolution. Star clusters are the key ingredient in stellar models because the stars in each grouping are at the same distance, have the same age, and have the same chemical composition. They therefore constitute a single stellar population to study.
• This stellar assembly, a globular star cluster called NGC 6397, is one of the closest such clusters to Earth. The new measurement sets the cluster’s distance at 7,800 light-years away, with just a three per cent margin of error.
• Until now, astronomers have estimated the distances to our galaxy’s globular clusters by comparing the luminosities and colours of stars to theoretical models, and to the luminosities and colours of similar stars in the solar neighbourhood.
• However, the accuracy of these estimates varies, with uncertainties hovering between 10 per cent and 20 per cent. The new measurement uses straightforward trigonometry, the same method used by surveyors, and as old as ancient Greek science.
• The research team calculated NGC 6397’s age at 13.4 billion years old.
• Hubble measured the apparent tiny wobble of the cluster stars due to Earth’s motion around the Sun. With this technique, called “spatial scanning,” Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 gauged the parallax of 40 NGC 6397 cluster stars, making measurements every 6 months for 2 years.
• The researchers then combined the results to obtain the precise distance measurement.

CLICK HERE TO SEE DATE WISE CURRENT AFFAIRS