Daily Current Affairs

What it will take to make science communication work for India (GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)

Context:

• In 2023, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched Chandrayaan-3, the country’s most recent lunar exploration mission.
• The lander’s soft-landing was telecast on several channels, making it one of the largest demonstrations of a live scientific experiment in India.
• Overall, coverage of Chandrayaan-3 was an exemplar of the public communication of advanced science, and likely contributed to widespread understanding and discourse around the endeavour.

 

Science communication:

• Science communication involves all forms of communication around science, scientific work, its outcomes, discussions on its ethical, societal, or political impacts, and direct conversations with scientists as well as diverse audiences.
• Today, ‘science communication’ is an umbrella term that also includes the exchange of scientific knowledge, institutional outreach, and public engagement with science.

 

Gaps during COVID-19 pandemic:

• Even as governments implemented disaster management laws, the States’ as well as experts’ communication of scientific and healthcare-related information became significant.
• A good example is the manual on homemade masks issued by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, which accelerated the use and adoption of reusable and affordable masks.
• Similarly, the ‘Indian Scientists’ Response to COVID-19’ initiative shared evidence-based perspectives from experts on social media.
• But in spite of these initiatives, the pandemic exposed serious lacunae in the reliable communication of scientific information in India particularly vis-a-vis accurate data reporting, vaccine hesitancy, and prediction of the resurgence of infections.

 

Diverse nature:

• A space mission involves a well-defined and largely one-way relay of scientific information, and has the advantage of an inherent visual appeal, aspirational intent, and national sentiment.
• On the other hand, science communication in a pandemic is an interdisciplinary effort built around a grim, protracted, and evolving situation, and intended to promote public compliance with good ‘pandemic habits’ like physical distancing, masking, and vaccination.
• These contrasting communication endeavours underscore the diverse nature of contemporary science engagement.

 

Government’s efforts:

• The history of state-backed science communication in post-independence India can be traced to a series of policy resolutions and government-led programmes.
• In 1951, the government established the Publications & Information Directorate (PID) under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
• The PID published the national science magazines Vigyan Pragati (Hindi), Science Reporter (English), and Science Ki Duniya (Urdu).
• The government followed up with an attempt to define India’s scientific heritage and the cause of promoting science education through the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum in Calcutta in 1959.
• In 1976, Parliament passed the 42nd amendment to the Constitution. This included Article 51 A(h) and its statement: “It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to develop a scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform.”
• Soon after, the sixth Five Year Plan (1980-1985) promoted the need to popularise science and nurture scientific thinking in India, and established the National Council for Science and Technology Communication (NCSTC).
• In 1989, the Department of Science and Technology set up Vigyan Prasar, an autonomous organisation to popularise science at large.

 

Contemporary science communication landscape:

• In 2021, the government set up the CSIR-National Institute of Science Communication and Policy Research (CSIR-NIScPR) by merging two previous institutions. Nearly all national science funding agencies have science communication divisions, which issue press releases, conduct social media campaigns, and garner support for exhibitions, popular lectures, etc.
• Science communication activities from research organisations, universities, social enterprises, non-profit organisations, and professional collectives have also picked up. They include efforts to bridge science communication and journalism, science education and outreach, and even art and science.
• On the other hand, despite its remarkable achievements, the government closed Vigyan Prasar in early 2023.

 

Challenges:

Lack of science communication degree programme

• Science communication in India is currently not backed by formal education and training. A few institutes in India, including NIScPR, offer a PhD in science and technology communication while other organisations offer shorter training programmes. Also, while science communication research has grown significantly worldwide, it has yet to gain substantial focus in India.
• Expanding science communication degree programmes in India at the masters’ and doctoral levels could support training and research in the field.
• This will also lead to a trained cadre of science communicators with an informed understanding of the needs, perspectives and the consequences of their work in diverse educational, linguistic, and cultural contexts in the country.

 

Science communication a part of the scientific process:

• It’s important to make the practice of science communication a part of the scientific process itself. This involves building student, scientist, and institutional-level approaches to effectively communicate science in constantly changing social, scientific, and political environments.
• Other possibilities include rewarding scientists for communicating science, nourishing public engagement, building institutional outreach programs, and translating research papers to regional languages, while building reflective and reflexive evaluation into these initiatives.

 

Cut across disciplines:

• Given the role of scientific solutions in national challenges, India needs a large-scale science communication strategy.
• This could start with a professional organisation with experts from many fields that works closely with government-level science departments and offices, and other partners and stakeholders, to build communication frameworks we can use to respond to challenges, as well as long-term plans to foster scientific rationale and public understanding of science.
• These frameworks will have to cut across disciplines – of science, medicine, disaster-management, national security, and diplomacy groups as well as media formats, communication networks, and demographic groups.

 

What are light-emitting diodes and why are they prized as light sources?

(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)

Context:

• The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources"

What are diodes?

• A diode is an electronic component about 5 mm wide. It has two points of contact, or terminals, called its anode and cathode. A diode’s primary purpose is to allow current to flow in only one direction. It achieves this using a p-n junction.
• A p-n junction is made of two materials laid next to each other. One material is a p-type material: its primary charge-carriers are holes.
• The other is an n-type material: its primary charge-carriers are electrons. Electrons are ‘places’ inside atoms that carry negative charge. A hole denotes a ‘place’ in an atom or a group of atoms where there could be an electron but isn’t. Thus, a hole is an electron placeholder but without the electron, so it has a positive charge.
• A p-n junction is an interface where the surface of a p-type material and the surface of an n-type material meet. At this interface, electrons can pass easily from the n-type material to the p-type material but can’t go the other way. This asymmetry creates the diode’s ability to allow current to pass in only one direction.
• A wire attached to the p-type material is called the diode’s anode; that attached to the n-type material is the cathode. These are the diode’s two terminals.
• When the two materials are first placed next to each other, some electrons move from the n-side to the p-side until there is a layer, between the two sides, where there are neither (free) electrons nor holes present.
• When a suitable voltage is applied across the diode, more electrons flow from the n-side to the p-side, implying an electric current flowing from the p-side to the n-side, that is from the anode terminal to the cathode terminal. But if the voltage is reversed, current won’t flow in the opposite direction.

 

What is an LED?

• An LED is a diode that emits light. Inside the diode’s p-n junction, the electrons have more energy than the holes. When an electron meets and occupies a hole, it releases energy into its surroundings.
• If the frequency of this energy is in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the diode will be seen to emit light. The overall phenomenon is called electroluminescence.
• The energy of a wave is proportional to its frequency. So making sure the light emitted by an LED is visible light is a matter of making sure the electron-hole recombination releases a certain amount of energy, not more and not less. This is possible to achieve thanks to the band gap.

 

What is the band gap?

• Particles like electrons can only have specific energy values. They can occupy only particular energy levels. When a group of electrons comes together in a system, no two electrons can occupy the same energy level at the same time.
• These electrons generally prefer to have lower energy, and thus prefer to occupy the lowest available energy level. If that level is taken, they occupy the next available level. Sometimes they can acquire more energy, tear free from their atoms, and flow around the material.
• Electrons can acquire such extra energy when an electric field is applied to the material. The field will accelerate the electrons and energise them, and the electrons will be ‘kicked’ from lower to higher energy levels. In some materials, there is an energy gap between these lower and higher levels that is between when the electrons can’t and can flow around the material.
• An electron can’t have an amount of energy that would place it in one of these levels. It’s the reason why electrons in these materials can’t conduct an electric current unless they receive a minimum amount of energy, the energy required to jump across this gap. This gap is called the band gap.
• In LEDs, the energy emitted when an electron and a hole recombine is the energy of the band gap.
• Electron-hole recombination can be triggered by passing an electric current through the diode, which creates the electric field that ‘kicks’ the electrons.

 

What colours can an LED produce?

• Since LEDs can produce all three primary colours; red, green, and blue different LEDs can be combined on a display board to produce a large variety of colours.
• The scientists were able to create red and green LEDs more than 40 years before they created blue LEDs. The scientists had identified a compound, gallium nitride, that was electroluminescent and whose band gap could yield blue light, but they didn’t know how to create crystals of this compound with the precise physical, electronic, and optical properties.
• Gallium nitride was also fragile, quickly becoming a powder in the process used to create crystals. Inventing the blue LED eventually required a series of breakthroughs in epitaxy, the process by which p-type and n-type materials are built layer by layer.
• In the late 1980s, three Japanese researchers, Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura, led teams that produced a bright blue LED with gallium nitride.

 

What are the advantages of LEDs?

• According to Moore’s law, specified by American engineer Gordon Moore in the 1970s, the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years.
• Similarly, improvements to LEDs since 1970 have followed Haitz’s law. Named for scientist Roland Haitz, it states that for a given frequency of light, the cost per unit of light of an LED will drop 10x and the amount of light it produces will increase 20x every decade.
• But even before Haitz’s law, researchers prized LEDs because they were more efficient than incandescent bulbs and fluorescent lamps.
• Per watt of power consumed, LEDs can produce up to 300 lumen (amount of visible light emitted per second) versus incandescent bulbs’ 16 lumen and fluorescent lamps’ 70 lumen. Together with their greater durability and light contrast, LEDs’ advantages translated to higher cost savings and less material waste.

 

Applications:

• LEDs have several applications in industry, consumer electronics, and household appliances: from smartphones to TV screens, signboards to ‘feeding’ plants light in greenhouses, barcode scanners to monitoring air quality.
• Today, LEDs can also produce a variety of colours or emit energy at higher and lower frequencies; LEDs can be ‘embedded’ in skin; and organic LEDs emit more light (albeit by a different mechanism). Researchers are also exploring more efficient LEDs made of materials called perovskites.