India takes first step towards own space station, sample return from Moon

by Hansraj Agrawal | Dec 30, 2024 | Science

India will today take its first step towards two of its major space ambitions—having its own space station by 2035—the Bharatiya Antariksh Station—and picking up samples from the Moon and returning to Earth.

For both, one needs to master ‘space docking’–which is what the SpaDeX Mission of the Indian space agency, ISRO, is about to launch today.

Two bodies traveling in space at unimaginably high speeds (about 7.5 km a second) meeting and locking with each other is not an easy feat.

As in many aspects of space faring, India is a late comer in docking, but still, it will be only the fifth in the world to do so.

For sure other countries have done it decades ago. The first was achieved back in March 1966, by none other than the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, who, along with David Scott successfully docked the Gemini 8 spacecraft with an uncrewed ‘target vehicle’ called Agena. Without docking, moon landing would not have been possible, because the astronauts would need to join back the mother spacecraft in orbit.

That, therefore, was manned docking, which was technically easier but riskier to human life. Subsequently, the US, Russia, China and Europe have achieved the more challenging unmanned docking. China docked an uncrewed spacecraft Shenzhou-8 with its space station, Tiangong-1, in November 2011; it did it with a manned spacecraft in June of the following year.

Docking is an extremely demanding exercise, calling for precision alignment and control. These are done by a bunch of sensors (laser range finder, reflectors and ‘rendezvous sensors’) and navigation devices. Both the laser range finder and the rendezvous sensor independently tell the relative positions, but the former also determines the velocity, according to information provided by ISRO. Also, the target and the chaser are “androgynous”, which means either can act as the target or the chaser.

After docking, they will also undock and the spacecrafts will go their own ways and provide useful services—surveillance, imaging and radiation measurement.

The SpaDeX spacecraft were designed and realized by the UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC) with the support of other ISRO centers (VSSC, LPSC, SAC, IISU, and LEOS), says ISRO. The full integration and testing of the satellite were carried out at M/s Ananth Technologies, Bangalore, under the supervision of URSC. It might be remembered that Ananth Technologies was recently named as the beneficiary of an ‘announcement of opportunity’ by the space regulator, INSPACe, which would make the company the first private Indian satellite operator to provide geostationary orbit communication satellite services to the country.

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Magnesium: Casting coup

by Hansraj Agrawal | Dec 29, 2024 | Science

Magnesium, a strong, lightweight metal, could be ideal for making cars and aircraft — except that it is difficult to make anything with the metal.

This has to do with the arrangement of atoms in it. As such, it has long engaged the attention of researchers in the area of metal forming (casting, forging and sheet-making).

Due to technical reasons, such as formation of dendrites, the traditional method of magnesium casting results in cast materials of doubtful strength.

Now, a group of researchers at IIT-Madras, led by Prof Sushanta Kumar Panigrahi, head of the manufacturing engineering section at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, have developed an innovative casting process for magnesium.

Their ‘strain integrated gas infusion’ (SIGI) process improves the quality of magnesium alloy casting by refining its internal structure.

The process involves using horizontal and vertical agitators in the metal pool; the agitators have holes through which argon gas is infused.

While the agitation prevents the formation of undesirable dendrites, the gas helps in heat removal.

The alloys are “stronger and resistant to wear and corrosion. The billets cast by SIGI process can be used as a high-quality precursor for downstream processes to create industrial components”, says a scientific paper on this subject.

The process results in a more ‘homogenous’ metal that is more durable. Also, it reduces both production time and manufacturing cost, Panigrahi says.

Tool to detect H pylori

Researchers have developed a cost-effective diagnostic tool using the CRISPR-based FELUDA system to detect Helicobacter pylori infections and associated antibiotic resistance mutations in dyspeptic patients in rural India, where access to diagnostic laboratories is limited.

H pylori infects over 43 per cent of the global population, causing conditions such as peptic ulcers, gastritis, and even gastric cancer. Resistance to clarithromycin, a key antibiotic for treating H pylori, arises from specific mutations in its 23S rRNA gene, complicating eradication efforts and requiring repeated treatments.

A team led by Dr Shraddha Chakraborty at IIT-Delhi and CSIR-IGIB developed a CRISPR-based diagnostic method using an engineered protein with enhanced mutation detection capabilities. This system identifies H pylori and its clarithromycin-resistance mutations in gastric biopsy samples through a lateral flow assay for visual results.

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A city wakes up to a new era

by Hansraj Agrawal | Dec 29, 2024 | Science

If you want to ‘see’ a long-lost city lying buried deep underground, but without digging, what do you do? You turn to a magnetometer, a device that senses variations in the earth’s magnetic field caused by the differences in the magnetic properties of material lying underground.

A magnetometer has revealed an unfinished city in Iraq. Around 700 BC, neo-Assyrian emperor Sargon II began constructing a new capital, Dur-Sharrukin (now Khorsabad), in present-day Iraq. It was long thought to have been abandoned early, but new findings challenge this assumption.

For 2,500 years, Khorsabad was largely forgotten until it was rediscovered in the 1800s. French archaeologists unearthed treasures in the palace but found little evidence of other structures within the city’s one-mile-square walls. Recent surveys by the French Archaeological Mission and Ludwig-Maximilian University aimed to reassess the site following its occupation by the Islamic State, mapping 7 per cent of the area with high-resolution magnetometers.

The team avoided drawing attention by hand-carrying the equipment. Over seven days the survey revealed hidden structures up to 10 ft underground, including a water gate, potential palace gardens, and a massive 127-room villa double the size of the White House.

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‘Folded paper’ turns agricultural tool

by Hansraj Agrawal | Dec 29, 2024 | Science

A recent government press release said that the National Institute of Biotic Stress Management has distributed ‘foldscopes’ — portable microscopes — to farmers in nearly 20 districts of Chhattisgarh. It described the foldscope as “the new tool that is empowering communities” and “helping agricultural livelihoods”.

Foldscopes aid in pest and disease detection, soil quality assessment and water analysis. It helps in in-situ diagnosis and digital cataloguing of plant-pathogenic fungi through foldscope microscopy.

In Chhattisgarh, it is used to identify diseases such as powdery mildew, leaf blight, leaf spot and post-harvest diseases. As many as 16 fungal diseases and their causal organisms were identified based on the morphological structure of the pathogens and host species such as Golovinomyces cichoracearum and Erysiphe polygoni. Furthermore, five biopesticides and two bioagents were also tested, the release said.

“Foldscope microscopy was also used for assessing semen quality in straws for cattle artificial insemination (AI). This could be a pioneering application with significant potential to enhance conception rates and improve the grading of indigenous cattle breeds,” the release said.

The foldscope was developed about 10 years ago by Manu Prakash, an Indian-American bioengineer and professor at Stanford University, and his team as part of an effort to make scientific tools more affordable and accessible.

It is said that Prakash once visited a farm and noticed the lack of equipment for scientific farming. This spurred him to work towards bringing frugal engineering to farmland testing equipment. The result was the foldscope, a tool that could perform basic scientific tasks while being portable, durable, and affordable. The foldscope was introduced in 2014 and has since been used globally for education, diagnostics, and research, particularly in resource-constrained settings.

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Building India’s home-grown quantum internet network

by Hansraj Agrawal | Dec 29, 2024 | Science

In a modest room at IIT-Madras, the embryo of a (literally) ‘far-reaching’ technology has just got its first heartbeats. On December 24, a Section 8 (not-for-profit) company, styled ‘IITM CDoT Samgnya Technologies Foundation’, received a formal approval from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

The company is building India’s home-grown quantum internet with local access, or QuILA. A 550 km fibre optic cable between Chennai and Bengaluru, and another 2,200 km cable between Bengaluru and Delhi will form the backbone of a network that will carry tamper-proof quantum signals.

The team at the newly formed company is drawing up a detailed project report to secure funds from the ₹6,003-crore National Quantum Mission; but work on the project is furiously underway.

Looking at the tiny components strewn on the table, you would scarcely guess what they are meant to become. What you see resembles just a printed circuit-board with wires sticking from it — far from the big, buzzing machines one may have expected. Incredible as it may seem, this is the testbed for India’s quantum internet, developed by the Centre for Quantum Information, Communications and Computing (CQuICC), which is one of the four ‘hubs’ under the mission. Each hub has a specific mandate — the one in IIT-Madras is for ‘quantum communications’.

Indigenised nodes

CQuICC has already developed a quantum line, with ‘Alice’ (the sender point) and ‘Bob’ (receiver) five km apart, between IIT-M and the National Informatics Centre (NIC), via IIT-Madras Research Park and the Society for Electronics Transactions Security (SETS). That, of course, is for starters. The Alice and Bob nodes are imported and cost ₹2 crore each; the task before the centre is to indigenise them and make them available for a tenth of the imported cost, apart from averting the national security worries that imported components can potentially pose, says Pradeep Thangappan, industry liaison for CQuICC. This network, meant to test and develop scheduling and routing protocols, is part of the ‘Metro Access Quantum Area Network’ (MAQAN) project. Thangappan points to a unique feature — the existing optic fibre network will be used for quantum communications and the internet. Between Chennai and Delhi, there will be over 500 nodes (where information is either generated, processed, transmitted or received).

India aims to build MAQAN networks in Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi. These networks connect to QuILA, allowing people to use the internet. (It must be noted that, to an internet user, quantum technology is invisible — what you do sitting at your computer will not change, but a quantum internet will be superior in terms of security, speed and reliability.)

Once the MAQANs and QuILA are set up, expected within a few years, India will have its own quantum internet. For that, CQuICC is working towards standardising communication equipment as well as developing protocols for ‘entanglement sharing’ (distribution of entangled photons across the network) and quantum key distribution (to secure against hacking and eavesdropping), says Prof Anil Prabhakar, Principal Investigator, CQuICC.

Plugging into IBM hub

Prabhakar notes that CQuICC is also working to make IIT-Madras an ‘IBM quantum hub’ — namely a research network established by IBM. Membership in the IBM Q network means that, through CQuICC, universities, companies, governments, and startups will get access to IBM’s hardware, such as a 53-qubit quantum processor, and an opportunity to collaborate with global peers.

Divided opinion

Apart from IIT-Madras, the other hubs under the mission are IISc, Bengaluru, for quantum computing, IIT-Bombay for quantum sensing and metrology, and IIT-Delhi for quantum materials and devices.

Quantum technology is set to revolutionise sensing (a big help in medical diagnosis) and communications, but opinion is divided over the relevance of ‘quantum computers’. Experts (who declined to be named) caution against the “hype” around quantum computing. The mission aims “to develop intermediate-scale quantum computers with 20-50 physical qubits (three years), 50-100 physical qubits (five years) and 50-1,000 physical qubits (eight years) in various platforms like superconducting and photonic technology”.

It is moot whether even a 1,000-qubit quantum computer is a better performer than today’s conventional exascale computers. For example, the exascale computer Frontier, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, can perform a billion billion (1 followed by 18 zeroes) floating point operations per second. For some specific tasks, quantum computers are better but, generally, conventional exascale or even peta-scale supercomputers are far more practical than quantum computers, which are error-prone. A growing body of opinion holds that error-free, million-qubit quantum computers may be developed some day in the future, but for now most quantum computers are only toys.

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Nanoplastics: A new source of worry in the battle against antimicrobial resistance

by Hansraj Agrawal | Dec 29, 2024 | Science

Antibiotic resistance (aka antimicrobial resistance) is a global menace, and India is among the worst hit countries.

According to a July 2024 Lancet article, the AR burden in India is “particularly high”. “The growing resistance to existing antibiotics amidst the shrinking pipeline of newer drugs is a serious threat to attaining the SDG [UN sustainable development goals] target by 2030,” it said.

Now, a study by the Institute of Nano Science and Technology, Mohali, has brought to light a hitherto unknown cause of AR: nanoplastics.

Nanoplastics, derived from single-use plastic bottles, contribute to the spread of AR, the study has found, underscoring an unrecognised public health risk.

The joint threat of plastic pollution and antibiotic resistance is a growing concern. Nanoplastics and microorganisms coexist in diverse environments, including the human gut.

This problem led INST scientists to trace how plastic nanoparticles could impact bacteria.

Recognising the central role of Lactobacillus acidophilus in the gut microbiota, Dr Manish Singh and his team investigated whether nanoplastics could transform beneficial bacteria into carriers of AR genes and pose a risk to human gut microbiome health.

They synthesised nanoplastic particles from used plastic water bottles as they better represent the actual pollutant nanoplastics resulting from discarded single-use plastic bottles and containers.

The scientists demonstrated that nanoplastics derived from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles can facilitate the cross-species gene transfer from E coli to Lactobacillus acidophilus through a process called horizontal gene transfer (HGT), particularly through outer membrane vesicle (OMV) secretion in bacteria.

Gene transfer mechanism

According to the researchers, there are two novel mechanisms through which nanoplastics derived from PET bottles facilitate AR gene transfer.

The first is through a direct transformation pathway, where the nanoplastics act as physical carriers, transporting AR plasmids across bacterial membranes and promoting direct gene transfer between bacteria.

The second is through the OMV-induced transfer pathway, where the nanoplastics induce oxidative stress and damage to bacterial surfaces, which activates the stress response genes and triggers an increase in OMV secretion.

The OMV, loaded with AR genes, becomes a potent vector for gene transfer across bacterial species, thus facilitating the spread of AR genes even among unrelated bacteria.

“This reveals an important and previously overlooked dimension of nanoplastics’ effects on microbial communities,” the release says.

The study, published in the journal Nanoscale, highlights how nanoplastics may unexpectedly contribute to the AR crisis by introducing AR genes to beneficial gut bacteria like Lactobacillus acidophilus, which could act as reservoirs for AR genes, potentially transferring them to pathogenic bacteria during the course of infections.

Protecting beneficial gut bacteria is crucial for immune support, digestion, and disease prevention.

Limiting nanoplastic contamination could help preserve gut microbiota integrity, minimising the chances of AR gene transfer from beneficial to pathogenic bacteria and supporting microbiome resilience.

With increasing plastic pollution, this finding highlights the need for strict safety guidelines, awareness programmes, as well as policies that prioritise responsible usage of plastics and waste management to safeguard human health and microbiome stability.

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