23 OCT 2013 First Unit of Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant Synchronised with Southern Power Grid

The first unit of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) was on 22 October 2013 synchronised with the southern regional electricity grid.  Earlier, the nuclear reactor achieved criticality on 13 July 2013. 

The power generation in the nuclear reactor will be increased in stages to attain full capacity of 1000 MW by end of 2014. As the nuclear plant is synchronized to the southern grid, the power generation will now be increased to 500 MW, 750 MW, 900 MW and then finally 1000 MW.

Nuclear Power Corporation of India is constructing two 1000 MW units at KNPP jointly with Russia at Kudankulam in Tiruneveli district, 650 km from Chennai. The Kudankulam nuclear power plant which was to be commissioned on December 2007 got inordinately delayed because of protests by locals.

Kudankulam is the first pressurized water reactor belonging to light water reactor category in the country.

About KKNPP

The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) is an Indo‐Russian joint venture for establishig a nuclear power station with 2 units (KKNPP‐1&2) of 1000 MWe Pressurized Water Reactors of VVER design at Kudankulam in Tamilnadu.

22 OCT 2013 Scientists Developed the World's First Bionic Man

Scientists developed the world's first robot human (Bionic man) made entirely of prosthetic parts.  The bionic man can walk, talk and has a beating heart.

Bionic man was assembled from prosthetic body parts and artificial organs donated by laboratories around the world.
The bionic man also has a nearly complete set of artificial organs including an artificial heart, blood, lungs (and windpipe), pancreas, spleen, kidney and functional circulatory system. 

He also sports a cochlear implant, speech recognition and speech production systems. The engineers equipped the bionic man with a sophisticated chatbot  programme that can carry on a conversation.

It also has a pair of robotic ankles and feet from BiOM in Bedford, Massachusetts, designed and worn by bioengineer Hugh Herr of MIT's Media Lab, who lost his own legs after getting trapped in a blizzard as a teenager. 

To support his prosthetic legs, the bionic man wears a robotic exoskeleton dubbed Rex .It was made by REX Bionics in New Zealand. 
He lacks a few major organs including liver, stomach and intestines, which are too complex to replicate in a lab. His brain can mimic certain functions of the human brain and he has a retinal prosthesis. 

Roboticists Rich Walker and Matthew Godden of Shadow Robot Co in England developed the bionic man.

The robot was modeled in some physical aspects after Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, who wears one of the world's most advanced bionic hands.

21 OCT 2013 Chinese Scientists Developed Li-Fi Technology; Internet through Lightbulbs

Scientists from Fudan University, Shanghai successfully developed Li-Fi Technology-a new cheaper way of getting connected to internet by using signals sent through light bulbs instead of radio frequencies as in ‘Wi-Fi’.

According to the School of Information Science and Technology at Fudan University, researchers modulated Internet signals to a 1watt LED lamp. Under the light, four computers were able to access the Internet.

About Li-Fi Technology

The LED-based alternative to Wi-Fi, dubbed Li-Fi, or Light Fidelity, refers to a type of visible light communication technology that delivers a networked, mobile, high-speed communication solution in a similar manner to Wi-Fi.

As with radio waves, light is also a type of electromagnetic wave. The basic rule for sending and receiving Internet signals via light waves is similar to that for radio waves. Light-emitting diodes are switched on and off much faster than the eye can detect, which makes the light source appear to be continuous.

By adding a microchip to an LED bulb to control on and off switching, the data will flow as binary code: an on LED is a logical "1" while when off it is a logical "0".

The term Li-Fi was coined by Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh in the UK and refers to a type of visible light communication technology that delivers a networked, mobile, high-speed communication solution in a similar manner as Wi-Fi.

Sample Li-Fi kits will be on display at the China International Industry Fair that will kick off on 5 November 2013 in Shanghai.

21 OCT 2013 Brain Makes Use of Sleep to Drain Waste Toxins

The researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Centre, in the third week of October 2013 revealed that the brain makes use of sleep in order to drain the waste toxins which are built during the thinking of the hard day. The team of researchers explained that the waste removal system is actually one of the primary reasons of sleep. 

The study conducted by the researchers explained that the brain cells shrink when a person sleeps, in order to open the gaps between neurons and enable the fluid to clean the brain from toxins. The study also suggested that failure to clean a few toxic proteins can lead to brain disorders as well. 

The findings were developed on the discovery of brain's own network of glymphatic system. The discovery was made by the same team of researchers in the year 2012. The glymphatic system actually carries the waste material out from the brain. The researchers used the images of the mice for the study and concluded that the glymphatic system became at least 10 times more active while the mice were asleep. 

The researchers however explained that the actual importance of the findings would come up after the human studies only. Doing the same experiments in the MRI machine can prove relatively simpler. 

It is important to note that a lot of brain-related conditions such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease have the common characteristic of building up of damaged proteins in the brain. Both these diseases are caused because of the loss of brain cells. The researchers, in this context, explained that the issues with the cleaning mechanism of the brain can lead to diseases like these. However, further research was required on this.

21 OCT 2013 NASA discovered First Known Tilted Planetary System

NASA’s Kepler space telescope on 18 October 2013 discovered a distant planetary system in the Space. The newly discovered planetary system features two inner planets orbiting at a severe tilt to their host star called Kepler-56.  It is first known tilted star system. That axis is tilted 45 degrees to the line of sight from Earth. These findings allow scientists to get a detailed picture of a distant system that provides a new and critical test of our understanding of the structure of these how these solar systems.

Scientists measured those oscillation frequencies and they measured the star’s diameter and other properties using spectroscopy data about the star’s temperature and chemistry. Kepler-56 is more than four times the radius of our Sun. Its mass is also 30 per cent more than our Sun. It is about 3000 light years from Earth.