Daily Current Affairs

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) (GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)

Context:

• In 2020, Dubai passed a new regulation “to help flying taxis and drone deliveries to take off” alongside a network of mini-airports within the city. For a long time, there have been helicopter services from airports to city centres.
• Advances in battery and electric propulsion technology, and Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) design have supported Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and now given a flip. Tilt-rotor systems have been tried and tested and will support regional connectivity till 300 km.

UAM ecosystem:

• UAM envisions a safe and efficient aviation transportation system that will use highly automated aircraft that will operate and transport passengers or cargo at lower altitudes within urban and suburban areas.
• UAM will be composed of an ecosystem that considers the evolution and safety of the aircraft, the framework for operation, access to airspace, infrastructure development, and community engagement. It will envisage commercial inter-city travel (like air taxis), cargo delivery, public services, and private or recreational vehicles.
• The initial UAM ecosystem will use existing helicopter infrastructure such as routes, helipads, and Air Traffic Control (ATC) services. Looking toward the future, the agencies are evolving infrastructure specially designed for UAM. It would mean designating routes along the main city arteries and developing new vertiports.
• The urban airspace would have to look at safety factors, social aspects, system and aircraft issues.

 

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles:

• The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been flying since the 1970s, and the safety record has been continuously improving. Removing pilots dramatically increases payload and reduces personnel costs. Also there has been a boom in less expensive civil travel and light personal jets.
• UAM is the next logical step. UAM evolved from the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), a joint initiative of the FAA, NASA, and the industry to develop an air transportation system that moves passengers and cargo with new electric (i.e. green) air vehicles to places previously under-served by traditional aviation.
• Nearly 150 companies worldwide are in the race with under-testing UAM prototypes. The UAVs had to be made more robust for passenger flights.

 

Hybrid Propulsion:

• Electric motors in multi-rotor designs for “lift-and-cruise” have started maturing. More efficient rotors are using lightweight materials. Hybrid-electric turbo-generators are being combined with rugged turbine engines using conventional or bio-derived jet fuel that power motors or high-capacity batteries.
• The battery endurance is increasing, and the same is evolving further by the surface transport industry. The electromechanical actuators would be very important for UAM aircraft.
• Since the flight will be at low heights, they will experience thermals and the unusual winds caused by buildings.
• The pinpoint landings dozens of times a day would require fly-by-wire computers to make hundreds of small adjustments every second. The actuators would make these movements maintaining the highest degrees of precision and reliability.

 

Flight Safety Issues:

• Unlike a traditional helicopter, the UAMs will use multiple motors and propellers, electric engines, and lighter materials, which make them cheaper, quieter, and more efficient. The operations will be both urban and regional.
• Limited airspace and a larger number of operators would cause congestion. It may push the industry to adopt smaller separation standards.
• The safety record and acceptable risk models for hobby drones are clearly unacceptable. The on-board systems will have to have quadruple safeties and high reliability.
• Since the UAM vehicles will have more degrees of freedom to freely choose their position, altitude, heading, and speed, this will require safety clearances. That would also require high technological capabilities, such as dynamic geo-fences and advanced sense-and-avoid capabilities, to maintain the required safety levels.

 

Technologies and Certification:

• LTE and 5G-and-beyond cellular technologies and secure satellite links will be required for communication. Assured accurate GPS and backups will be crucial. Battery and hybrid fuel cell technologies will be important. Lighter yet stronger materials must keep evolving.
• The UAM certification and regulations have to evolve through global standardisation. Volocopter eVTOL pilots and maintenance technician training is being evolved. There will be demand for pilots and they would need certification to operate an eVTOL and remote eVTOLs.
• The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and FAA are leading the process. UAM transportation policy and aircraft certification guidelines have to be in place first.

 

Portable Personal Air Mobility System:

• The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is in the process of granting contracts for construction and flight demonstration of “Portable Personal Air Mobility System” that can be used by soldiers for shorts hops of around 10 km.
• These will be mobile, small, light-weight, and compact. One can assemble them in a short time with minimal training. Once successful, it would be available for civil use akin to the bicycle of the air.

 

Way Forward:

• Automation and electricity storage technologies, and higher flight safety will spur urban unmanned aviation.
• By 2030, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban, and this will create UAM demand. Hundreds of start-ups are evolving new automated aircraft. Issues related to regulation, air-traffic management and public perception are being addressed.
• A holistic approach to urban air mobility, would mean seamlessly integrating a variety of critical components. Most commercial airports are currently located in the suburbs. The vertiports will mostly be located in more densely populated areas. NASA, FAA, including India’s DGCA, are actively involved.
• Emerging big economy like India would have to get on-board early and reap the benefits. India must also try to become a manufacturing hub and support the huge automation software demands.

 

AlphaFold: 3D structure of protein

(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)

 

Why in news?

• DeepMind, a company based in London and owned by Google, announced recently that it had predicted the three-dimensional structures of more than 200 million proteins using AlphaFold. This is the entire protein universe known to scientists today.

 

What is AlphaFold?

• AlphaFold is an AI-based protein structure prediction tool. It is based on a computer system called deep neural network. Inspired by the human brain, neural networks use a large amount of input data and provides the desired output exactly like how a human brain would.
• The real work is done by the black box between the input and the output layers, called the hidden networks. AlphaFold is fed with protein sequences as input.
• When protein sequences enter through one end, the predicted three-dimensional structures come out through the other. It is like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

 

How does AlphaFold work?

• It uses processes based on “training, learning, retraining and relearning.” The first step uses the available structures of 1,70,000 proteins in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) to train the computer model. Then, it uses the results of that training to learn the structural predictions of proteins not in the PDB.
• Once that is done, it uses the high-accuracy predictions from the first step to retrain and relearn to gain higher accuracy of the earlier predictions.
• By using this method, AlphaFold has now predicted the structures of the entire 214 million unique protein sequences deposited in the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) database.

 

What are the implications of this development?

• Proteins are the business ends of biology, meaning proteins carry out all the functions inside a living cell. Therefore, knowing protein structure and function is essential to understanding human diseases.
• Scientists predict protein structures using x-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, or cryogenic electron microscopy. These techniques are not just time-consuming, they often take years and are based mainly on trial-and-error methods.
• The development of AlphaFold changes all of that. It is a watershed movement in science and structural biology in particular.
• AlphaFold has already helped hundreds of scientists accelerate their discoveries in vaccine and drug development since the first public release of the database nearly a year back.

 

What does this development mean for India?

• India is no stranger to the field and has produced some fine structural biologists. The Indian community of structural biology is strong and skilled. It needs to quickly take advantage of the AlphaFold database and learn how to use the structures to design better vaccines and drugs. This is especially important in the present context.
• Understanding the accurate structures of COVID-19 virus proteins in days rather than years will accelerate vaccine and drug development against the virus. India will also need to speed up its implementation of public-private partnerships in the sciences.
• The public-private partnership between the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute and DeepMind made the 25-terabyte AlphaFold dataset accessible to everyone in the scientific community at no cost.
• Learning from this, India could facilitate joint collaborations with the prevalent hardware muscle and data science talent in the private sector and specialists in academic institutions to pave the way for data science innovations.

 

Is AlphaFold one-of-a-kind tool in predicting protein structures?

• Although a tour-de-force in structural biology, like any other method, AlphaFold is neither flawless nor the only AI-based protein structure prediction tool.
• RoseTTaFold, developed by David Baker at the University of Washington in Seattle, U.S., is another tool. Although less accurate than AlphaFold, it can predict the structure of protein complexes.
• The development of AlphaFold is sure to make many scientists feel vulnerable, especially when they compare their efforts from years of hard work in the lab to that of a computer system. However, this is the time to adjust and take advantage of the new reality.
• Doing this will reinvigorate scientific research and accelerate discovery.

 

NDC compliance not enough, world may still be 2.5°C warmer by 2100: Study

(GS Paper 3, Environment)

 

Why in news?

• According to a new research, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) which countries agreed as part of the Paris Agreement, will not be enough to arrest global warming. In fact, Earth can still be hotter by 2.4 degrees Celsius in 2100.
• The global community also need to prepare for even further rises in temperature, warned researchers.

 

Extreme events:

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports also have limited coverage of temperature rise of 3°C or higher.
• The focus has been mainly on lower-end risks such as 1.5°C or 2°C warming.
• Climate change can trigger famine and undernutrition, extreme weather events, conflicts and vector-borne diseases and can topple the global food supply by disrupting the world’s most agriculturally productive areas.

 

Worst-case scenario:

• Understanding the worst-case scenario is important because the current trajectory can raise temperatures to between 2.1°C and 3.9°C by 2100, the report highlighted.
• Climate models currently in the news do not consider important factors such as the release of methane and carbon dioxide from the thawing of the Arctic permafrost and the carbon loss due to intense droughts and fires in the Amazon forest.
• More research is needed in these areas. The report suggested that a warming of 3°C or more by the end of the century is a marker for extreme climate change.

 

Fragile State Index:

• The experts define global catastrophic risk as the probability of losing 25 per cent of the population worldwide and the severe disruption of food and other global critical systems within years or decades.
• A global decimation risk is a probability of losing 10 per cent or more of the global population and the severe disruption of food and other global critical systems within years or decades, they added.
• According to the 2021 Fragile State Index (FSI), India is vulnerable to climate risks. FSI is an annual report published by the United States think tank the Fund for Peace and the American magazine Foreign Policy.
• India scored 77 points and was placed under the elevated warning level. The scoreboard ranges from 10 to 120, with ten given to sustainable nations and 120 to those under alert.

 

Recommendations:

• The researchers have charted a proposal for addressing the concerns highlighted in the report. These include:

1. Understanding extreme climate change dynamics and impacts in the long term
2. Exploring pathways to mass morbidity and mortality triggered by climate
3. Investigating social fragilities such as vulnerabilities, risk cascades and risk responses
4. Synthesising the research findings into integrated catastrophe assessments.

 

Way Forward:

• The countries would have to evaluate the indirect impacts of climate change as they are understudied.
• There is a need for an interdisciplinary endeavour to understand how climate change can trigger human mass morbidity and mortality.
• There is need for interventions to reduce the likelihood of conflicts, such as — nuclear disarmament, banning the development of new dangerous weapons such as lethal autonomous weapons and support for adaptation in vulnerable countries and international diplomacy.
• The immediate focus should be on slashing emissions.

 

PM and President’s photos in govt ads

(GS Paper 2, Governance)

Why in news?

• Recently, the Madras High Court directed the Tamil Nadu government to include the photographs of the President of India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in advertisements on the 44th Chess Olympiad underway in Chennai.
• The HC relied on a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that issued guidelines on government spending on advertisements.

What was the 2015 ruling?

• In Common Cause v Union of India, the Supreme Court sought to regulate the way the government spends on advertisements.
• It essentially regulated the 2007 New Advertisement Policy of the Government of India.
• The petitioners had argued that there is arbitrary spending on advertisements by the government. The allegations ranged from wastage of public money for political mileage to using advertisements as a tool to manipulate media.

 

What was the observations made by the court?

• Since the primary cause of government advertisement is to use public funds to inform the public of their rights, obligations, and entitlements as well as to explain Government policies, programs, services and initiatives, however, when these requisites are not fulfilled in a government advertisement then the whole purpose would be frustrated.
• Patronization of any particular media house(s) must be avoided and award of advertisements must be on an equal basis to all newspapers who may, however, be categorized depending upon their circulation.
• The DAVP (Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity) guidelines do not deal with the said aspect of the matter and hence the necessity of incorporating the same in the present directions to ensure the independence, impartiality and the neutrality of the fourth estate which is vital to the growth and sustenance of democracy will have to be weighed and considered by us.
• A three-judge Bench had set up a committee to suggest a better policy.

 

What did the committee suggest?

• The three-member committee suggested a fresh policy, the Government Advertisements (Content Regulation) Guidelines 2014 with five broad principles:

1. Advertising campaigns are to be related to government responsibilities
2. Materials should be presented in an objective, fair manner and designed to meet objectives of the campaign
3. Advertisements must not directed at promoting political interests of a party
4. Campaigns must be justified and undertaken in a cost-effective manner
5. Advertisements must comply with legal requirements and financial regulations

 

What did the Supreme Court rule?

• It largely accepted the committee report except on a few issues, the appointment of an ombudsman to oversee the implementation of the guidelines, a special performance audit of government spending, and an embargo on publication of advertisements on the eve of elections.
• The ruling mandated that government advertisements will not contain a political party’s symbol, logo or flag and are required to be politically neutral and must refrain from glorifying political personalities.

 

What about photographs in advertisements?

• The Supreme Court agreed with the committee’s suggestion “that photographs of leaders should be avoided and only the photographs of the President/ Prime Minister or Governor/ Chief Minister shall be used for effective government messaging”.
• Then Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi had opposed the recommendation arguing that if the PM’s photograph is allowed in the advertisement, then the same right should be available to his cabinet colleagues as the PM is the “first among the equals”.
• The court, while restricting the recommendation to the photos of the President and Prime Minister, added the photograph of the Chief Justice of India to that list of exceptions.

 

Review in 2018:

• In 2018, the Centre and states including Karnataka, West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Chhattisgarh sought a review of the verdict on the ground that not permitting the publication of the CM’s photograph would violate the federal structure.
• An SC Bench comprising Justices Gogoi and P C Ghose relaxed the bar, allowing pictures of Union ministers, Chief Ministers, Governors and State ministers in government advertisements.

 

What are the takeaways from the SC and HC verdicts?

• The SC ruling stepped into content regulation, which is a facet of the right to freedom of speech and expression, and was also in the domain of making policy. This raised questions on the judiciary stepping on the executive’s domain.
• The SC ruling did not mandate publication of the photograph of the PM and President, but only restricts publication of photos of government officials other than the President, PM, CJI, CM and the Governor.
• In an opposition-ruled state such as Tamil Nadu, exclusion of the PM’s photos is seen as a political move. The HC said that considering the “national interest” in the issue, the “excuses taken by the state” cannot be accepted.