Science & Technology Current Affairs May 2016

Reliance Dio launched Bay of Bengal Gateway

• Reliance Jio announced the launch of its 8100 km Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) on April 18, 2016.
• It connects India to South-East Asia and the Middle-East, with onward connectivity to Europe, Africa and Far East Asia via connections to other cable systems.
• The BBG uses high-speed broadband fibre optic technology; Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) vvhich allows the capacity to be increased without any additional submarine intervention.
• It has’an initial capacity of 9 Tbps, based on 100-Gbps wavelengths. Other members of the consortium include Dialog Axiata, Etisalat, Omant Telecom Malaysia, and Vodafone.

Infosys Co-founder Launched a New App ‘Itihaasa’

• Infosys cofounder, Gopalakrishnan launched a new app Itihaasa on April’ 17, 2016 which tells about the journey of the Indian IT Industry.

• Itihaasa is one of the largest chronicles of its kind having 600 videos featuring 44 technology stalwarts, over 37 hours of footage, 350 archived photographs and articles and easy browsing with 12000 tags.

• To make browsing through such a vast volume of content easy, the app includes features to help users personalise stories on six dimensions— time, people, organisation, policy, technical terms and place.

Supercomputer ‘Param Kanchenjunga’ Unveiled by Sikkim Government

• The supercomputer, named ‘Param Kanchenjunga’ unveiled on April 15, 2016 by Sikkim Governor Shrinivas.Patil at the NTT-Sikkim campus.
• Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing ‘C-DAC’ and the NIT-Sikkim have jointly established the supercomputer. This computer has a cost of I 3 crore.
• The National Institute of Technology (NIT) Sikkim has secured a rare distinction of having a supercomputer, which is said to be the most powerful and fastest among all the 31 NITs.

BSNL Tested WiFi-based Network to Connect Panchayats

• The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) tested of WiFi based network to connect 1 lakh panchayats under rural broadband project of the government on April 11, 2016.
• The State run company in connection withVihaan Networks tested the sustainability of WiFi network in 3 villages namely Karenda, Phalsa and Bahadri in Alwar district of Rajasthan.
• Under this project, a wireless network over 6 km has been set-up. The project is being handled by a SPV under the Telecom Ministry which has distributed work to three CPSUs BSNL, Railtel and Powergrid.

Scientists Detect a New State of Matter

• An international team of scientists has successfully detected a mysterious new state of matter on April 9, 2016 which causes electrons, to break into pieces. The new state is known as a quantum spin liquid. Scientists have found this new state in a two-dimensional material with a structure similar to graphene.
• In a typical magnetic material, each electron behaves like tiny bar magnets. When a material is cooled to a low enough temperature, they will order themselves so that all the North magnetic poles point in the same direction. But, in a material containing a spin liquid state, even if cooled to absolute zero, the bar magnets would not align but form an entangled soup.
• They were first predicted 40 years ago and were thought to be hiding in certain magnetic materials, but had not been conclusively sighted in nature.