Science & Technology GK Questions with Answers – Page 14

A SCADA system gathers readings from sensors and controllers spread over a plant, a grid or a water network, shows them on screens in a control room, records them, and lets an operator send commands back, which is why it is described as supervisory control together with data acquisition.

A PLC is a rugged industrial computer that reads the state of switches and sensors as inputs, runs a stored programme of logic, and switches motors, valves and lamps as outputs, so that a machine or a whole line runs by itself.

Vyommitra has a head, a face, arms and a torso but no legs, which is why it is called half humanoid, and it has been built to ride an uncrewed flight of the Gaganyaan human spaceflight programme, operate switches, watch the panels and report conditions as a crew member would.

Lakshya was developed by the Aeronautical Development Establishment of the DRDO to be flown as a target so that gun crews and missile units can practise against a realistic moving aircraft, and it is recovered by parachute.

A UAV is an aircraft with no pilot on board, flown either by a remote pilot or by its own programme, and when it is counted together with its ground control station and the radio link between them the whole is called an unmanned aircraft system.

Digital Sky is the online platform of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation on which a drone is registered and given its unique identification number, on which the airspace map with its green, yellow and red zones is published, and through which flight permissions are sought.

The rules class drones by all up weight, which includes the battery and the payload, and the nano class is the smallest, up to 250 grams, which is why the lightest toy and camera drones fall in it and are treated most lightly by the law.

Asimov set out the three laws in his science fiction, by which a robot may not harm a human being, must obey the orders given by human beings except where that conflicts with the first law, and must protect itself except where that conflicts with the first two laws; he…

The Czech writer Karel Capek used the word in his play R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots, written in 1920, taking it from the Czech word robota, which means forced labour.

Automation is the technology in which mechanical parts, electronics and computer based control are put together so that a process is controlled and operated with little human help, which is exactly the description in the question.

When a solid is divided into nanoparticles its total surface area grows enormously while the mass stays the same, so a very large fraction of the atoms lies exposed on the surface with unsatisfied bonds; chemical reactions happen at surfaces, so reactivity and catalytic activity rise sharply, which is why…

Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer built it at the IBM laboratory in Zurich in 1981; a sharp metal tip is moved a fraction of a nanometre above a conducting surface and the quantum tunnelling current between tip and sample maps the atoms one by one, work that brought them the…

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry of 2023 went to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots, semiconductor nanocrystals whose emitted colour depends on their size because of quantum confinement, and which are used in television displays, in light emitting diodes and as…

In 1911 the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who had already liquefied helium, cooled mercury to about four kelvin and found that its electrical resistance vanished completely, which is the discovery of superconductivity and won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913.

Nitinol is an alloy of roughly equal parts nickel and titanium, and even its name records this, being formed from nickel, titanium and the Naval Ordnance Laboratory where it was developed.

The Nano Mission, formally the Nano Science and Technology Mission, was launched in 2007 under the Department of Science and Technology, which had already been running the Nano Science and Technology Initiative since 2001, and the mission works on basic research, human resources, infrastructure and the transfer of results to…

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for groundbreaking experiments on graphene, the single atom thick sheet of carbon they had lifted from graphite with ordinary adhesive tape.

The Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima, then at the NEC laboratory, reported multi walled carbon nanotubes in 1991 using a transmission electron microscope, and the date and the name are the facts asked.

Buckminsterfullerene, discovered in 1985, has sixty carbon atoms arranged in a closed cage of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, exactly the pattern of a stitched football, and the twelve pentagons are what allow a flat hexagonal sheet to curve into a closed ball.

The American physicist Richard Feynman delivered the talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom to the American Physical Society at Caltech in December 1959, in which he argued that there is no law of physics forbidding the manipulation of individual atoms, and the lecture is treated as the conceptual…