UniFocus IAS ( UNIFOCUS UNIVERSAL )

  The All India Spices Exporters Forum (AISEF)   body fighting to legalise  ethylene oxide (EtO) treatment for spices within the country. Association urged that prohibition of ethylene oxide could make Indian spies bronds unsafe as per FDA standards.  Recenty indian spies brands are facing rejetion in many countries because of presence of ethylene oxide content beyond maximum treshold level. Inlight of all these developments, FSSAI is also started collecting spies samples accross bronds for testing treshold level of EtO levels. It is to be noted that  ethylene oxide is approved for use on spices in the US under prescribed tolerance limits.   EtO is used as a sterilizer in order to stop reproduction of microorganisms, thus preventing food from getting spoiled. The Hindu Business Line Deccan Herald The Hindu <<< International Agency for Research on Cancer ( IARC ) reports cancer-causing chemicals ( ethylene oxide ) in Indian spices

CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) is a new robotic technology designed to demonstrate collaborative, autonomous exploration and formation sensing by navigating, communicating, computing, perceiving and decision-making without human interaction. To demonstrate the CADRE technology, NASA/JPL is developing multiple small rovers, capable of surviving the daytime Lunar environment and carrying a micro-payload. The systems is designed so that agents (Rovers and a Basestation) share data among the team and make cooperative decisions about the execution of tasks in the workspace. The rovers will autonomously travel in formation and cooperatively explore the local Lunar surface, generate a digital elevation map and perform a distributed measurement with the micro-payload. NASA

XRISM (pronounced “crism”) is led by  JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)  in collaboration with NASA, along with contributions from  ESA (European Space Agency) . It  launched  Sept. 6, 2023. NASA and JAXA developed Resolve, the mission’s  microcalorimeter spectrometer . The objective of the mission is to investigate celestial X-ray objects in the Universe with high-throughput imaging and high-resolution spectroscopy. XRISM was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center at 8:42 a.m on September 7, 2023 JST in Japan  " X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM)" -  NASA " NASA, JAXA XRISM Spots Iron Fingerprints in Nearby Active Galaxy" -  NASA

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is designed to discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest dwarf stars in the sky. In its prime mission, a two-year survey of the solar neighborhood, TESS monitored the brightness of stars for periodic drops caused by planet transits. The prime mission ended on July 4, 2020 and TESS is now in an extended mission.   TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Dr. George Ricker of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research serves as principal investigator for the mission. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in

The observatory, a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency, CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), is measuring the height of  nearly all water surfaces  on Earth. SWOT was designed to measure every major river wider than about 300 feet (100 meters), and preliminary results suggest it may be able to observe much smaller rivers. SWOT was jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the project’s U.S. component. For the flight system payload, NASA provided the KaRIn instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, a two-beam microwave radiometer, and NASA instrument operations. CNES provided the Doppler Orbitography and Radioposition Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) system, dual frequency Poseidon altimeter (developed by Thales Alenia Space), KaRIn radio-frequency subsystem (together with Th

Environmentalists alarmed by Early blooming of rhododendrons is Uttarakhand. It is attributed to shift in  climate patterns, disrupting ecosystems, endangering local  traditions, and threatening medicinal resources. Rhododendrons typically bloom in March and April. These flowers are available in all colours namely white, pink,  red, purple, yellow, and orange. Flowers can be single, semi-double, or double. Rhododendrons are also the source of nector for pollinators. They are also used to make juice for refreshment. Early blooimng could affect quality and availability which will affect economy of state. Times of India

World Thalassemia Day is inagurated by  Thalassemia International Federation (TIF) in 1994 in memory of  son of Panos Englezos, a Thalassemia patient who died from the disease. About Thalassemia: Thalassemia is an inherited (i.e., passed from parents to children through genes) blood disorder caused when the body doesn’t make enough of a protein called hemoglobin, an important part of red blood cells. When there isn’t enough hemoglobin, the body’s red blood cells don’t function properly and they last shorter periods of time, so there are fewer healthy red blood cells traveling in the bloodstream. Red blood cells carry oxygen to all the cells of the body. Oxygen is a sort of food that cells use to function. When there are not enough healthy red blood cells, there is also not enough oxygen delivered to all the other cells of the body, which may cause a person to feel tired, weak or short of breath. This is a condition called anemia. People with thalassemia may have mild or severe anemia.

PROJECT Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager (FOXSI) sounding rocket KEY POINTS This third flight of the FOXSI experiment featured direct-focusing X-ray optics, 3D-printed collimating devices for limiting background, and high-resolution X-ray detectors. This technology will enable high-fidelity X-ray imaging in astronomy and other fields. X-rays from the Sun help us probe the highest-energy phenomena that occur in our solar system, including solar storms and their origins. The Sun presents some unique challenges to researchers attempting to unravel its high-energy behavior. To deal with these challenges, a sounding rocket experiment team has developed an array of new technologies that can reveal how the Sun emits high-energy radiation, plasma, and particles. The Sun gives off abundant X-rays from its fiery, multimillion-degree corona (the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere) and poses particular challenges for X-ray imaging. During solar flares, which temporarily heat up the corona l

After months of preparation and years since its last flight, the upgraded High Resolution Coronal Imager Flare mission – Hi-C Flare, for short – took to the skies for a never-before-seen view of a solar flare. The low-noise cameras – built at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama – are part of a suite of state-of-the-art instruments on board the Black Brant IX sounding rocket that launched April 17 from Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. Using the new technology, investigators hoped to study the extreme energies involved with solar flares. The Hi-C Flare experiment mission was led by Marshall. It was the third iteration of the Hi-C instrument to take flight, but its first flight with ride along instruments, including the COOL-AID (Coronal OverLapagram – Ancillary Imaging Diagnostics), CAPRI-SUN (high-CAdence low-energy Passband x-Ray detector with Integrated full-SUN field of view), and SSAXI (Swift Solar Activity X-ray Imager). Following a month of payload integ

DALL·E, DALL·E 2, and DALL·E 3 are text-to-image models developed by OpenAI using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called "prompts." The first version of DALL-E was announced in January 2021. In the following year, its successor DALL-E 2 was released. DALL·E 3 was released natively into ChatGPT for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise customers in October 2023, with availability via OpenAI's API and "Labs" platform provided in early November. Microsoft implemented the model in Bing's Image Creator tool and plans to implement it into their Designer app. DALL·E was revealed by OpenAI in a blog post on 5 January 2021, and uses a version of GPT-3 modified to generate images. On 6 April 2022, OpenAI announced DALL·E 2, a successor designed to generate more realistic images at higher resolutions that "can combine concepts, attributes, and styles". On 20 July 2022, DALL·E 2 entered into a beta phase

Chloropicrin , also known as  PS  (from  Port Sunlight ) and  nitrochloroform , is a chemical compound currently used as a broad-spectrum antimicrobial, fungicide,  herbicide ,  insecticide , and  nematicide .  It was used as a  poison gas in World War I  and allegedly by Russia in the  Russian invasion of Ukraine . Its chemical structural formula is  Cl 3 C − N O 2 . ( Wikipedia ) Recently  Russia and Ukraine have accused each other  of using banned toxins on the battlefield.  (  USNews  ) OPCW reported that alligations are  insufficiently substantiated. (  USNews  ) Chloropicrin is  less lethal than other chemical weapons. I t was used  as a  poison gas in  World War I before the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons in war. ( The Kyiv Independent ) The Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, usually called the Geneva Protocol, is a treaty prohibiting th

"West Nile fever in Kerala: State govt orders all districts to be vigilant" - The Hindu West Nile virus (WNV) is the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the continental United States.  It is most commonly spread to people by the bite of an infected mosquito. Cases of WNV occur during mosquito season, which starts in the summer and continues through fall. There are no vaccines to prevent or medications to treat WNV in people. Fortunately, most people infected with WNV do not feel sick. About 1 in 5 people who are infected develop a fever and other symptoms. About 1 out of 150 infected people develop a serious, sometimes fatal, illness. You can reduce your risk of WNV by using insect repellent and wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants to prevent mosquito bites. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  ( CDC ) World Health Organization ( WHO )

  Missions to the outer solar system are an important part of NASA’s goals because these scarcely visited worlds, particularly the ice giants Neptune and Uranus, hold secrets about the formation and evolution of our solar system and countless others. However, due to the high cost, long travel time and narrow window for mission implementation, outer solar system exploration has been extremely limited in more than 60 years of space exploration. In this NIAC, we are developing a mission architecture that addresses all of these challenges by using a ScienceCraft and enables science missions at the outer planet system. Sciencraft integrates a science instrument and spacecraft into one monolithic and lightweight structure. By printing an ultra-lightweight quantum dot-based spectrometer, developed by the PI Sultana, directly on the solar sail we create a breakthrough spacecraft architecture allowing an unprecedented parallelism and throughput of data collection, and rapid travel across the so

  We want to build the first lunar railway system, which will provide reliable, autonomous, and efficient payload transport on the Moon. A durable, long-life robotic transport system will be critical to the daily operations of a sustainable lunar base in the 2030’s, as envisioned in NASA’s Moon to Mars plan and mission concepts like the Robotic Lunar Surface Operations 2 (RLSO2), to: — Transport regolith mined for ISRU consumables (H2O, LOX, LH2) or construction — Transport payloads around the lunar base and to / from landing zones or other outposts We propose developing FLOAT — Flexible Levitation on a Track — to meet these transportation needs. The FLOAT system employs unpowered magnetic robots that levitate over a 3-layer flexible film track: a graphite layer enables robots to passively float over tracks using diamagnetic levitation, a flex-circuit layer generates electromagnetic thrust to controllably propel robots along tracks, and an optional thin-film solar panel layer generates

  In this project we will continue our Phase I efforts to develop and demonstrate the feasibility of a revolutionary power source for missions to the outer planets utilizing a new paradigm in thermal power conversion, the thermoradiative cell (TRC). Operating like a solar cell in reverse, the TRC converts heat from a radioisotope source into infrared light which is sent off into the cold universe. In this process, electricity is generated. In our Phase I study, we showed 8 W of electrical power is possible from the 62.5 W Pu-238 pellet from a general purpose heat source using a 0.28 eV bandgap TRC operating at 600 K. The necessary array includes 1,125 cm² of TRC emitters, or just over 50% of the surface area of a 6U cubesat. With a mass (heat source + TRC) of 622 g, a mass specific power of 12.7 W/kg is possible, over a 4.5x improvement from heritage multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG) was shown. Building on our results from Phase I, we believe there is much mor

  Humankind has never before seen the low frequency radio sky. It is hidden from ground-based telescopes by the Earth’s ionosphere and challenging to access from space with traditional missions because the long wavelengths involved (meter- to kilometer-scale) require infeasibly massive telescopes to see clearly. Electromagnetic radiation at these low frequencies carries crucial information about exoplanetary and stellar magnetic fields (a key ingredient to habitability), the interstellar/intergalactic medium, and the earliest stars and galaxies. The Great Observatory for Long Wavelengths (GO-LoW) proposes an interferometric array of thousands of identical SmallSats at an Earth-Sun Lagrange point (e.g. L5) to measure the magnetic fields of terrestrial exoplanets via detections of their radio emissions at frequencies between 100 kHz and 15 MHz. Each spacecraft will carry an innovative Vector Sensor Antenna, which will enable the first survey of exoplanetary magnetic fields within 5 parse

  The future of a space-faring civilization will depend on the ability to move both cargo and humans efficiently and rapidly. Due to the extremely large distances that are involved in space travel, the spacecraft must reach high velocities for reasonable mission transit times. Thus, a propulsion system that produces a high thrust with a high specific impulse is essential. However, no such technologies are currently available. Howe Industries is currently developing a propulsion system that may generate up to 100,000 N of thrust with a specific impulse (Isp) of 5,000 seconds. The Pulsed Plasma Rocket (PPR) is originally derived from the Pulsed Fission Fusion concept, but is smaller, simpler, and more affordable. The exceptional performance of the PPR, combining high Isp and high thrust, holds the potential to revolutionize space exploration. The system’s high efficiency allows for manned missions to Mars to be completed within a mere two months. Alternatively, the PPR enables the transp

  The future of space-based UV/optical/IR astronomy requires ever larger telescopes. The highest priority astrophysics targets, including Earth-like exoplanets, first generation stars, and early galaxies, are all extremely faint, which presents an ongoing challenge for current missions and is the opportunity space for next generation telescopes: larger telescopes are the primary way to address this issue. With mission costs depending strongly on aperture diameter, scaling current space telescope technologies to aperture sizes beyond 10 m does not appear economically viable. Without a breakthrough in scalable technologies for large telescopes, future advances in astrophysics may slow down or even completely stall. Thus, there is a need for cost-effective solutions to scale space telescopes to larger sizes. The FLUTE project aims to overcome the limitations of current approaches by paving a path towards space observatories with largeaperture, unsegmented liquid primary mirrors, suitable

  NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) has selected six visionary concept studies for additional funding and development. Each study has already completed the initial NIAC phase, showing their futuristic ideas – like a lunar railway system and fluid-based telescopes – may provide fresh perspectives and approaches as NASA explores the unknown in space. The NIAC Phase II conceptual studies will receive up to $600,000 to continue working over the next two years to address key remaining technical and budget hurdles and pave their development path forward. When Phase II is complete, these studies could advance to the final NIAC phase, earning additional funding and development consideration toward becoming a future aerospace mission. “These diverse, science fiction-like concepts represent a fantastic class of Phase II studies,” said John Nelson, NIAC program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Our NIAC fellows never cease to amaze and inspire, and this class definit

Chang'e 6 (Chinese: 嫦娥六号; pinyin: Cháng'é liùhào) is a robotic lunar exploration mission by the China National Space Administration. As China's second sample return mission, it will attempt to obtain a sample of soil and rock from the far side of the Moon. Like its predecessors in the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, the spacecraft is named after the Chinese Moon goddess Chang'e. It launched on 3 May 2024 and the mission is expected to last about 53 days. ICUBE-Q or ICUBE-Qamar is a lunar CubeSat jointly developed by Institute of Space Technology (IST), Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). It is a rideshare mission on the Chinese lunar sample-return mission of Chang'e 6 and is the first lunar mission of Pakistan. With the launch of ICUBE-Q  Pakistan made history by launching its first satellite mission to the moon. "Chang-6" - Wikipedia "ICUBE-Q" - Wikipedia mint