Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

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The Arctic has some good news and bad news

News

• While sea ice in the Arctic continues to be on the decline, a new research suggests that it is regrowing at faster rates during the winter than it was a few decades ago.

Findings

• The findings showed that since 1958, the Arctic sea ice cover has lost on average around two-thirds of its thickness and now 70 per cent of the sea ice cap is made of seasonal ice, or ice that forms and melts within a single year.
• But at the same time, that sea ice is vanishing quicker than it has ever been observed in the satellite record, it is also thickening at a faster rate during winter.
• This increase in growth rate might last for decades, explained the researchers. However, this does not mean that the ice cover is recovering, though. Just delaying its demise.
• This increase in the amount of sea ice growing in winter doesn’t overcome the large increase in melting .
• Overall, thickness is decreasing. Arctic sea ice is still very much in decline across all seasons and is projected to continue its decline over the coming decades.
• This rate of growth may continue to increase, and in the coming decades, we could also have an ice pack that would on average be only around 3.3 feet thick in October, but could experience up to five feet of ice growth over the winter.

Warming is heating up the Arctic fast

News

• Global warming is heating the Arctic at a record pace, driving broad environmental changes across the planet, including extreme storms in the mid-latitudes.

Findings

• Persistent heat records have rattled the fragile Arctic in the past five years, a record-long warming streak.
• The mounting heat in the north is upsetting typical weather patterns, a trend that “coincides” with severe winter storms in the eastern U.S. and an extreme cold snap in Europe in March.
• Continued warming of the Arctic atmosphere and ocean are driving broad change in the environmental system in predicted and, also, unexpected ways.
• New and rapidly emerging threats are taking form and highlighting the level of uncertainty in the breadth of environmental change that is to come.
• Arctic air temperatures for the past five years, from 2014 to 2018, “have exceeded all previous records since 1900. From October 2017 through September 2018, annual average temperature in the Arctic was 1.7 Celsius higher than the 1981-2010 average.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

India signs shipping information exchange pact

News

• India has signed an agreement to join the Trans Regional Maritime Network (T-RMN), aimed at exchange of information on the movement of commercial traffic on the high seas.

Beyond News

• Commodore signed the agreement on behalf of the Navy at the Italian Naval Headquarters in Rome.
• The network is composed of 30 countries and is steered by Italy.
• The information is available primarily through the Automatic Identification System (AIS) fitted on merchant ships with more than 300 Gross Registered Tonnage, as mandated by the International Maritime Organisation.
• The AIS information, comprising the name, MMSI number, position, course, speed, last port of call and destination, can be picked up through AIS sensors.
• The Indian Navy is mandated to conclude white shipping information exchange agreements with 36 countries and three multi-national constructs.
• 19 agreements have been signed, and 12 of them have been operationalised. India has also set up a large network of coastal chain radars that track sea and ocean traffic.
• These multilateral agreements are necessitated by the large traffic in the Indian Ocean that cannot be entirely monitored by any one nation.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

Indian Navy inducts its first Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle

News

• The Indian Navy inducted its first Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) System at the Naval Dockyard in Mumbai.

Beyond News

• DSRV is used to rescue crew members stranded in submarines that get disabled. The Indian Navy joins a select group of naval forces in the world that boasts of this niche capability.
• The DSRV can be operated at a depth of 650 meters and can hold around 15 people.
• The Indian Navy in March 2016 had commissioned two DSRVs, the second will deployed at the Eastern Naval Command in Visakhapatnam.
• The induction of the DSRV marks the culmination of years of effort of the Indian Navy in acquiring this niche submarine rescue capability.

Four new gravitational waves detected

News

• Scientists have made four new detections of gravitational waves ripples in the fabric of space and time emanating from separate black hole mergers.

Importance

• The release of four additional binary black hole mergers further informs us of the nature of the population of these binary systems in the universe and better constrains the event rate for these types of events.

Beyond News

• US-based LIGO and Europe-based VIRGO gravitational-wave detectors have recorded gravitational waves from a total of 10 black hole mergers and one merger of neutron stars.
• The new events are known as GW170729, GW170809, GW170818, and GW170823, in reference to the dates they were detected.
• GW170729, detected in the second observing run on July 29, 2017, is the most massive and distant gravitational-wave source ever observed.
• In this coalescence, which happened roughly 5 billion years ago, an equivalent energy of almost five solar masses was converted into gravitational radiation, researchers said.
• GW170814 was the first binary black hole merger measured by the three-detector network, and allowed for the first tests of gravitational-wave polarization (analogous to light polarization).
• The event GW170817, detected three days after GW170814, represented the first time that gravitational waves were ever observed from the merger of a binary neutron star system.

New AI tool can decode security captchas

News

• Researchers have created a new artificial intelligence tool that can read text captcha schemes used to defend the majority of the world’s most popular websites from cyber attacks.

Beyond News

• The algorithm based on deep learning methods, is the most effective solver of captcha security and authentication systems to date and could spell the end for one of the most widely used website security systems.
• Text-based captchas use a jumble of letters and numbers, along with other security features such as occluding lines, to distinguish between humans and malicious automated computer programmes.
• It relies on people finding it easier to decipher the characters than machines.
• The tool, delivers significantly higher accuracy than previous captcha attack systems.
• It is able to successfully crack versions of captcha where previous attack systems have failed.
• By using a machine-learned automatic captcha generator the researchers, or would-be attackers, are able to significantly reduce the effort, and time, needed to find and manually tag captchas to train their software.
• It only requires 500 genuine captchas, instead of the millions that would normally be needed to effectively train an attack programme.
• Since the new solver requires little human involvement, it can easily be rebuilt to target new or modified captcha schemes.
• The programme was tested on 33 captcha schemes, of which 11 are used by many of the world’s most popular websites including eBay, Wikipedia and Microsoft.

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