Science and Technology: December 2022 Current Affairs | Science & Technology for UPSC CSE PDF Download

Near-Earth Asteroid Ryugu

Why in News?

A sample of a space rock called Ryugu that was carried to Earth in 2020 by the Japanese space agency’s asteroid sample-return mission, Hayabusa 2 may hold the answers to the origin of the Earth.

• It is the first time several grams of asteroid samples have been brought back to Earth.

What is Asteroid Ryugu?

• Asteroid Ryugu is a diamond-shaped space rock. The asteroid's name means "dragon palace" in Japanese and refers to a magical underwater castle in a Japanese folktale.
• Ryugu was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project, a collaborative, U.S.-based project to catalogue and track space rocks.
• The asteroid is about 2,952 feet (900 meters) in diameter.
• Ryugu is orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars and occasionally crosses Earth's orbit, which means the space rock is classified as "potentially hazardous," though the body poses no imminent danger to our world.

What are the Key Highlights?

• Findings:
  • Roughly 5 % of materials that assembled to form Earth more than 4.5 billion years ago could have come from space rocks similar to near-Earth asteroid Ryugu.
  • These asteroid samples represent the first solids to be formed in the solar system. This means they could be the building blocks of Earth.
  • Ryugu has copper and zinc isotope ratios similar to a very rare group of meteorites that are likely the most primitive (ones with the closest composition to the Sun).
  • They are primitive because they likely formed in the outer solar system, where volatile elements are preserved.
  • In contrast, materials created closer to the Sun may have lost a part of their volatile inventory due to evaporation.
• Significance:
  • These samples could help evaluate the role of Ryugu-like objects in depositing volatile elements to terrestrial planets.
  • Volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are thought to have played a key role in forging complex organic molecules — ingredients essential to build habitable worlds like Earth.
  • It can also help to evaluate whether Ryugu-type materials also contributed to the origin of Mars.

What are Asteroids?

• About:
  • Asteroids are also known as minor planets.
  • They are rocky remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
  • Most asteroids are irregularly shaped, though a few are nearly spherical.
  • Many asteroids are known to have a small companion moon (some have two moons).
  • There are also binary (double) asteroids, in which two rocky bodies of roughly equal size orbit each other, as well as triple asteroid systems.
• Classification of Asteroids:
  • Main Asteroid Belt: The majority of known asteroids orbit within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
  • Trojans: These asteroids share an orbit with a larger planet, but do not collide with it because they gather around two special places in the orbit (called the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points). There, the gravitational pull from the sun and the planet are balanced.
  • Lagrange Points are positions in space where the gravitational forces of a two-body system like the Sun and the Earth produce enhanced regions of attraction and repulsion. These can be used by spacecraft to reduce fuel consumption needed to remain in position.
  • Near-Earth Asteroids: These objects have orbits that pass close by that of Earth. Asteroids that actually cross Earth's orbital path are known as Earth-crossers.

Chat GPT Chatbot

Why in News?

Recently, Open AI has introduced a new chatbot called Chat GPT, which is a ‘conversational’ AI and will answer queries just like a human would.

What is Chat GPT?

• About:
  • The Chat GPT can answer “follow-up questions”, and can also “admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”
  • It is based on the company’s GPT 3.5 series of language learning models (LLM).
  • GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 and this is a kind of computer language model that relies on deep learning techniques to produce human-like text based on inputs.
  • The model is trained to predict what will come next, and that’s why one can technically have a ‘conversation’ with ChatGPT.
  • The chatbot was also trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).
• Usage:
  • It can be used in real-world applications such as digital marketing, online content creation, answering customer service queries or as some users have found, even to help debug code.
  • The bot can respond to a large range of questions while imitating human speaking styles.
  • It is being seen as a replacement for the basic emails, party planning lists, CVs, and even college essays and homework.
  • It can also be used to write code, as examples have shown.
• Limitations:
  • The chatbot displayed clear racial and sexist biases, which remains a problem with almost all AI models.
  • The chatbot gives answers which are grammatically correct and read well– though some have pointed out that these lack context and substance, which is largely true.
  • Chat GPT occasionally produces inaccurate information and that its knowledge is restricted to global events that occurred before 2021.

What is a Chatbot?

• About:
  • Chatbots, also called chatterbots, is a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in messaging apps.
  • This tool helps add convenience for customers—they are automated programs that interact with customers like a human would and cost little to nothing to engage with.
  • Key examples are chatbots used by businesses in Facebook Messenger, or as virtual assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa.
  • Chatbots tend to operate in one of two ways—either via machine learning or with set guidelines.
  • However, due to advancements in AI technology, chatbots using set guidelines are becoming a historical footnote.

Types

• Chatbot with Set Guidelines:
  • It can only respond to a set number of requests and vocabulary and is only as intelligent as its programming code.
  • An example of a limited bot is an automated banking bot that asks the caller some questions to understand what the caller wants to do.
• Machine Learning Chatbot:
  • A chatbot that functions through machine learning have an artificial neural network inspired by the neural nodes of the human brain.
  • The bot is programmed to self-learn as it is introduced to new dialogues and words.
  • In effect, as a chatbot receives new voice or textual dialogues, the number of inquiries that it can reply to and the accuracy of each response it gives increases.
  • Meta (as Facebook's parent company is now known) has a machine learning chatbot that creates a platform for companies to interact with their consumers through the Messenger application.
• Advantages:
  • Chatbots are convenient for providing customer service and support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • They also free up phone lines and are far less expensive over the long run than hiring people to perform support.
  • Using AI and natural language processing, chatbots are becoming better at understanding what customers want and providing the help they need.
  • Companies also like chatbots because they can collect data about customer queries, response times, satisfaction, and so on.
• Disadvantages:
  • Even with natural language processing, they may not fully comprehend a customer's input and may provide incoherent answers.
  • Many chatbots are also limited in the scope of queries that they are able to respond to.
  • Chatbots can be expensive to implement and maintain, especially if they must be customized and updated often.
  • The challenges of AI metamorphosing into sentient are far in the future; however, unethical AI perpetuating historical bias and echoing hate speech are the real dangers to watch for.

Zombie Virus 

Context

Recently, the French scientists have warned of the onset of another outbreak after they revived a 48,500-year-old zombie virus buried under a frozen lake in Russia.

• This has broken the previous record held by a 30,000-year-old virus discovered by the same team in Siberia in 2013.

What is a Zombie Virus?

• Zombie virus is the term given to a virus that is frozen in ice and therefore dormant.
• The virus emerged due to the thawing of permafrost as the global temperature is rising.
• It is a group of viruses which have been dormant for thousands of years. 
• It is dubbed Pandoravirus yedoma after the mythological character Pandora which was 48,500 years old and has the potential to infect other organisms. 
• It was discovered below the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas in Yakutia, Russia.

What could be the cause of it?

• One-quarter of the Northern hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground which is referred to as permafrost.
• Due to climate warming, irreversibly thawing permafrost is releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million years and most of which decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane which further enhances the greenhouse effect.
• Part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistoric times. 

Is the virus potentially harmful?

• All of the zombie viruses have the potential to be infectious and hence pose a health danger.
• It is believed that pandemics like Covid-19 will become more common in the future as melting permafrost releases long-dormant viruses.

End-to-End Encryption

Why in News?

Recently, Apple has announced it will be increasing the number of data points protected by End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) on iCloud from 14 to 23 categories.

What is the Purpose of Announcing this?

• According to a data-breach-research by Apple, the total number of data breaches more than tripled between 2013 and 2021. Data of 1.1 billion personal records were exposed in 2021 alone.
• With end-to-end encryption, user data will be protected even in case data is breached in the cloud. The extra layer of protection would be valuable to targets of hacking attacks launched by well-funded groups.

What is End-to-End Encryption?

• About:
  • End-to-end encryption is a communication process that encrypts data being shared between two devices.
  • It prevents third parties like cloud service providers, internet service providers (ISPs) and cybercriminals from accessing data while it is being transferred.
• Mechanism:
  • The cryptographic keys used to encrypt and decrypt the messages are stored on the endpoints.
  • The process of end-to-end encryption uses an algorithm that transforms standard text into an unreadable format.
  • This format can only be unscrambled and read by those with the decryption keys, which are only stored on endpoints and not with any third parties including companies providing the service.
• Usage:
  • E2EE has long been used when transferring business documents, financial details, legal proceedings, and personal conversations.
  • It can also be used to control users’ authorisation when accessing stored data.
  • End-to-end encryption is used to secure communications.
  • It is also used to secure passwords, protect stored data and safeguard data on cloud storage.

What are the Advantages of E2EE?

• Security in Transit:
  • End-to-end encryption uses public key cryptography, which stores private keys on the endpoint devices. Messages can only be decrypted using these keys, so only people with access to the endpoint devices are able to read the message.
• Safety from Third Parties:
  • E2EE ensures that user data is protected from unwarranted parties including service providers, cloud storage providers, and companies that handle encrypted data.
• Tamper-Proof:
  • With E2EE, the decryption key does not have to be transmitted; the recipient will already have it.
  • If a message encrypted with a public key gets altered or tampered within transit, the recipient will not be able to decrypt it, so the tampered contents will not be viewable.
• Compliance:
  • Many industries are bound by regulatory compliance laws that require encryption-level data security.
  • E2EE can help organizations protect that data by making it unreadable.

What are the Disadvantages of E2EE?

• Complexity in Defining the Endpoints:
  • Some E2EE implementations allow the encrypted data to be encrypted and re-encrypted at certain points during transmission.
  • This makes it important to clearly define and distinguish the endpoints of the communication circuit. If endpoints are compromised, encrypted data may be revealed.
• Too Much Privacy:
  • Government and law enforcement agencies express concern that E2EE can protect people sharing illicit content because service providers are unable to provide law enforcement with access to the content.
• No Protection to Metadata:
  • Although messages in transit are encrypted and impossible to read, information about the message - date of sending message and recipient, for instance - is still visible, which may provide useful information to an interloper.

What is the Legal Framework for Encryption in India?

• Minimum Encryption Standards:
  • India does not have a specific encryption law. Although, a number of industry rules, such as those governing the banking, finance, and telecommunications industries, include requirements for minimum encryption standards to be utilised in protecting transactions.
• Prohibition on Encryption Technologies:
  • Users are not authorised to employ encryption standards larger than 40 bits using symmetric key algorithms or similar methods without prior clearance and deposition of decryption keys, according to the licencing agreement between the ISP and the DoT.
  • There are a variety of additional rules and recommendations that use a greater encryption level than 40 bits for particular sectors.
• The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021:
  • It superseded the earlier Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules 2011.
  • The new set of rules have the potential to impact the end-to-end encryption techniques of social messaging applications like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.
• Information Technology Act of 2000:
  • It regulates electronic and wireless modes of communication, is devoid of any substantive provision or policy on encryption.

India’s First Private Space Vehicle Launchpad

Why in News?

• Recently, Chennai-based space tech startup Agnikul Cosmos inaugurated India’s first private space vehicle launchpad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota.
• It was executed in support of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and IN-SPACe (Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Center).

What is Agnikul’s Launchpad Facility?

• About:
  • The facility has two parts: the Agnikul launchpad and the Agnikul mission control centre, which are four kilometres apart.
  • The launchpad has been designed to accommodate and support liquid stage-controlled launches.
  • Agnikul Cosmos is planning to launch its Agnibaan rocket from this launchpad.
• Significance:
  • The launchpad is specifically built to address the need for ISRO’s range operations team to monitor key flight safety parameters during launches.
  • Additionally, it has the ability to share data and other critical information with ISRO’s Mission Control Center.

What is Agnibaan?

• Agnibaan is a two-stage launch vehicle that is capable of taking payloads of up to 100 kilograms to a low-earth orbit around 700 kilometres from the surface of the Earth.
• It will be powered by the company’s 3D-printed Agnilet engines.
• Agnilet is the world’s first single-piece 3-D printed engine fully designed and manufactured in India and was successfully test-fired in early 2021, making Agnikul the first company in the country to test its engines at ISRO.
• The Agnilet rocket is a “semi-cryogenic” engine that uses a mixture of liquid kerosene and supercold liquid oxygen to propel itself.
• The engine is very complex and it functions at very high temperatures.

ISRO Inks MoU To Establish Space Tech Innovation Network

Why in the news?

Recently, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Social Alpha signed an MoU to launch SpaceTech Innovation Network (SpIN).

It is India’s first dedicated platform for innovation curation and venture development for the burgeoning space entrepreneurial ecosystem.

• About SpaceTech Innovation Network (SpIN)
  • It is a one-of-its-kind public-private collaboration for start-ups and SMEs in the space industry.
  • SpIN will primarily focus on facilitating space tech entrepreneurs in three distinct innovation categories:
  • Geospatial Technologies and Downstream Applications;
  • Enabling Technologies for Space & Mobility; and
  • Aerospace Materials, Sensors, and Avionics.
• Significance
  • Commercial Potential: This innovative cooperation will aim to uncover and unleash the commercial potential of India's most promising space tech inventors and entrepreneurs.
  • Space reforms: It also represents a significant step forward in providing additional impetus to India's recent space reform measures.
  • Innovation:There are currently over 100 active space start-ups in India, according to the Economic Survey Report 21-22; the number of start-ups in this industry has more than doubled in the past year alone.
  • Through this agreement, ISRO will encourage active collaboration to ensure the success of early-stage space start-ups and assist the development of an open innovation and scale-up platform for all space ecosystem stakeholders.
  • In accordance with the collaboration announcement, SpIN has announced its first innovation challenge.
  • In accordance with the current regulations, the chosen start-ups and innovators have access to the infrastructure and resources of both Social Alpha and ISRO.
  • In addition to other technical and business inputs, they will receive active support in key areas such as access to product design, testing and validation infrastructure, intellectual property management, go-to-market strategy, and access to long-term patient financing.

Way Forward

Space science, technology, and data have the potential to help achieve a number of Sustainable Development Goals, with particularly high-impact applications in assuring food security, lowering disaster risks, averting humanitarian crises, and monitoring natural resources.