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Category Innovation

How was PARAM supercomputer discovered?

When India built its own supercomputer, PARAM, it took the world by surprise, especially the U.S. In the 1980s, India was buying supercomputers from the U.S. but it had to fight constant battles with it over license. The then George H.W. Bush administration in the U.S. denied to export Cray supercomputer to India fearing we could use it to make nuclear weapons and missiles. This forced India to develop its own supercomputer. It set up the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), with Vijay Bhatkar as its director, in Pune, in March 1988, to develop a HPC system to meet high-speed computational needs in solving scientific and other developmental problems. Within three years, Indian scientists succeeded in creating a supercomputer, PARAM 8000, with a capability of one giga floating point operations a second (1 Gflops). This was 28 times more powerful than the Cray supercomputers, India was supposed to import from the U.S. Apart from taking over the home market, PARAM attracted 14 other buyers. It set the platform for a whole series of parallel computers, called the PARAM series. The success in supercomputers catapulted India to new heights in Information and Communication Technology, space science, missile development, weather forecasting, pharmaceutical research and much more.

 

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How was Crescograph discovered?

Crescograph is a highly sensitive instrument used in the detection of minute responses by living organisms to external stimuli. It was invented by Indian plant physiologist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose in the early 20th century. Crescograph is capable of magnifying the motion of plant tissues to about 10,000 times of their actual size, Using this, J.C. Bose found many similarities between plants and other living organisms. He demonstrated that plants are also sensitive to heat, cold, light, noise and various other external stimuli. He also invented several other instruments which would help in detecting even the slightest of change in plants. Crescograph helped make a striking discovery such as quivering in injured plants, which Bose interpreted as a power of ‘feeling’ in plants.

Also a physicist, Bose pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics and extensively researched the properties of radio waves. A crater on the moon has been named in his honour.

 

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How was Raman Effect discovered?

On 28 February 1928, physicist C.V. Raman led an experiment on the scattering of light, when he discovered what now is called the Raman effect. When light interacts with a molecule, the light can give away a small amount of energy to the molecule. As a result of this, the light changes its colour can act as a ‘fingerprint’ for the molecule. This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman effect. The wavelengths and intensity of scattered lights are measured using Raman spectroscopy has a wide variety of applications in biology and medicine. It is used in laboratories all over the world to identify molecules and to analyse living cells and tissues to detect diseases such as cancer. It has been used in several research projects as a means to detect explosives from a safe distance.

Sir C. V. Raman remains the only Indian to receive a Nobel Prize in science. Three Indian-born scientists, Har Gobind Khorana, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, won Nobel Prizes, but they had become U.S. citizens by then.

 

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When is national science day celebrated?

India celebrates National Science Day every year on February 28 to mark Sir C.V. Raman’s discovery of the scattering of light, also known as the “Raman effect”. For his discovery, physicist Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930. The recognition put India on the global science map, but proofs to India’s scientific acumen go all the way back to the 5th century A.D, when ancient Indians developed the concept of zero. Zero, the cornerstone of modern mathematics and physics, is seen as one of the greatest innovations in human history. There are records of ancient Indians being among pioneers in irrigation, veterinary medicine, cataract surgeries and atomism. Indian astronomy also has a long history stretching from pre-historic to modern times.

Colonial era exposed a number of Indians to foreign institutions. Scientists from India also appeared throughout Europe and their work saw recognition and acceptance on a wider platform. Since Independence, India has built a number of satellites and sent probes to the Moon and Mars, established nuclear power stations, acquired nuclear weapon capability and became self-sufficient in the production of food and medicines. Not to mention the developments in meteorology, communication and Information Technology.

 

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HOW ARE FILMS PRINTED?

Printing converts the negative image of the film into a positive image on paper. Light is shone through the film onto light-sensitive paper. Passing the light through lenses makes the image larger. The print is then developed and fixed just as the film was.

Photographic paper is a paper coated with a light-sensitive chemical formula, used for making photographic prints. When photographic paper is exposed to light, it captures a latent image that is then developed to form a visible image; with most papers the image density from exposure can be sufficient to not require further development, aside from fixing and clearing, though latent exposure is also usually present. The light-sensitive layer of the paper is called the emulsion. The most common chemistry was based on silver salts but other alternatives have also been used.

The print image is traditionally produced by interposing a photographic negative between the light source and the paper, either by direct contact with a large negative (forming a contact print) or by projecting the shadow of the negative onto the paper (producing an enlargement). The initial light exposure is carefully controlled to produce a gray scale image on the paper with appropriate contrast and gradation. Photographic paper may also be exposed to light using digital printers such as the Light-jet, with a camera (to produce a photographic negative), by scanning a modulated light source over the paper, or by placing objects upon it (to produce a photogram).

Despite the introduction of digital photography, photographic papers are still sold commercially. Photographic papers are manufactured in numerous standard sizes, paper weights and surface finishes. A range of emulsions are also available that differ in their light sensitivity, color response and the warmth of the final image. Color papers are also available for making color images.

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HOW IS FILM DEVELOPED?

After an image has been recorded on light-sensitive film in a camera, the film is moved along, so that the next photograph will be taken on a fresh piece of film. No more light must hit the exposed film until it is developed, or the picture would be spoiled. When all the photographs on a roll of film have been taken, the film is wound into its case, which is lightproof. The development process then takes place in a darkroom, or in a specially made machine.

Photographic processing or photographic development is the chemical means by which photographic film or paper is treated after photographic exposure to produce a negative or positive image. Photographic processing transforms the latent image into a visible image, makes this permanent and renders it insensitive to light.

All processes based upon the gelatin-silver process are similar, regardless of the film or paper’s manufacturer. Exceptional variations include instant films such as those made by Polaroid and thermally developed films. Kodachrome required Kodak’s proprietary K-14 process. Kodachrome film production ceased in 2009, and K-14 processing is no longer available as of December 30, 2010. llfochrome materials use the dye destruction process.

All photographic processing use a series of chemical baths. Processing, especially the development stages, requires very close control of temperature, agitation and time.

  1. The film may be soaked in water to swell the gelatin layer, facilitating the action of the subsequent chemical treatments.
  2. The developer converts the latent image to macroscopic particles of metallic silver.
  3. A stop bath, typically a dilute solution of acetic acid or citric acid, halts the action of the developer. A rinse with clean water may be substituted.
  4. The fixer makes the image permanent and light-resistant by dissolving remaining silver halide. A common fixer is hypo, specifically ammonium thiosulfate.
  5. Washing in clean water removes any remaining fixer. Residual fixer can corrode the silver image, leading to discolouration, staining and fading.

The washing time can be reduced and the fixer more completely removed if a hypo clearing agent is used after the fixer.

  1. Film may be rinsed in a dilute solution of a non-ionic wetting agent to assist uniform drying, which eliminates drying marks caused by hard water. (In very hard water areas, a pre-rinse in distilled water may be required – otherwise the final rinse wetting agent can cause residual ionic calcium on the film to drop out of solution, causing spotting on the negative.)
  2. Film is then dried in a dust-free environment, cut and placed into protective sleeves.

Once the film is processed, it is then referred to as a negative. The negative may now be printed; the negative is placed in an enlarger and projected onto a sheet of photographic paper. Many different techniques can be used during the enlargement process. Two examples of enlargement techniques are dodging and burning. Alternatively (or as well), the negative may be scanned for digital printing or web viewing after adjustment, retouching, and/or manipulation.

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HOW DOES A CAMERA WORK?

A camera is a lightproof box containing light-sensitive film. To take a picture, the photographer presses a button to open a shutter and let light pass through the aperture, a hole in the front of the camera. The camera’s lens focuses the light so that it forms a sharp image on the photographic film, just as the lenses in our eyes focus the light onto our retinas. Then the shutter closes again so that no more light reaches the film. The whole process usually takes just a fraction of a second.

A still film camera is made of three basic elements: an optical element (the lens), a chemical element (the film) and a mechanical element (the camera body itself). As we’ll see, the only trick to photography is calibrating and combining these elements in such a way that they record a crisp, recognizable image.

There are many different ways of bringing everything together. In this article, we’ll look at a manual single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera. This is a camera where the photographer sees exactly the same image that is exposed to the film and can adjust everything by turning dials and clicking buttons. Since it doesn’t need any electricity to take a picture, a manual SLR camera provides an excellent illustration of the fundamental processes of photography.

The optical component of the camera is the lens. At its simplest, a lens is just a curved piece of glass or plastic. Its job is to take the beams of light bouncing off of an object and redirect them so they come together to form a real image — an image that looks just like the scene in front of the lens.

But how can a piece of glass do this? The process is actually very simple. As light travels from one medium to another, it changes speed. Light travels more quickly through air than it does through glass, so a lens slows it down.

When light waves enter a piece of glass at an angle, one part of the wave will reach the glass before another and so will start slowing down first. This is something like pushing a shopping cart from pavement to grass, at an angle. The right wheel hits the grass first and so slows down while the left wheel is still on the pavement. Because the left wheel is briefly moving more quickly than the right wheel, the shopping cart turns to the right as it moves onto the grass.

The effect on light is the same — as it enters the glass at an angle, it bends in one direction. It bends again when it exits the glass because parts of the light wave enter the air and speed up before other parts of the wave. In a standard converging, or convex lens, one or both sides of the glass curves out. This means rays of light passing through will bend toward the center of the lens on entry. In a double convex lens, such as a magnifying glass, the light will bend when it exits as well as when it enters.

This effectively reverses the path of light from an object. A light source — say a candle — emits light in all directions. The rays of light all start at the same point — the candle’s flame — and then are constantly diverging. A converging lens takes those rays and redirects them so they are all converging back to one point. At the point where the rays converge, you get a real image of the candle. In the next couple of sections, we’ll look at some of the variables that determine how this real image is formed.

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WHO WAS THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPHER?

The first person to take a photograph was a Frenchman, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, in 1822. However, as is often the case with new inventions, many other scientists had been experimenting with light, lenses and light-sensitive chemicals. Working with Niepce was a man called Louis Daguerre, who later improved on Niepce’s process. Some early photographs were called daguerreotypes.

Around 1717 Johann Heinrich Schulze captured cut-out letters on a bottle of light-sensitive slurry, but he apparently never thought of making the results durable. Around 1800 Thomas Wedgwood made the first reliably documented, although unsuccessful attempt at capturing camera images in permanent form. His experiments did produce detailed photograms, but Wedgwood and his associate Humphry Davy found no way to fix these images.

In the mid-1822s, Nicephore Niepce first managed to fix an image that was captured with a camera, but at least eight hours or even several days of exposure in the camera were required and the earliest results were very crude. Niépce’s associate Louis Daguerre went on to develop the daguerreotype process, the first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic process. The daguerreotype required only minutes of exposure in the camera, and produced clear, finely detailed results. The details were introduced to the world in 1839, a date generally accepted as the birth year of practical photography. The metal-based daguerreotype process soon had some competition from the paper-based calotype negative and salt print processes invented by William Henry Fox Talbot and demonstrated in 1839 soon after news about the daguerreotype reached Talbot. Subsequent innovations made photography easier and more versatile. New materials reduced the required camera exposure time from minutes to seconds, and eventually to a small fraction of a second; new photographic media were more economical, sensitive or convenient. Since the 1850s, the collodion process with its glass-based photographic plates combined the high quality known from the Daguerreotype with the multiple print options known from the calotype and was commonly used for decades. Roll films popularized casual use by amateurs. In the mid-20th century, developments made it possible for amateurs to take pictures in natural color as well as in black-and-white.

The commercial introduction of computer-based electronic digital cameras in the 1990s soon revolutionized photography. During the first decade of the 21st century, traditional film-based photochemical methods were increasingly marginalized as the practical advantages of the new technology became widely appreciated and the image quality of moderately priced digital cameras was continually improved. Especially since cameras became a standard feature on smartphones, taking pictures (and instantly publishing them online) has become a ubiquitous everyday practice around the world.

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HOW IS A HARDBACK BOOK COVER MADE?

Glueing, sewing or stapling pages together and placing them within a cover is called binding. Several pieces of card and paper are required to bind a hardback book. It is also possible to add bookmark ribbons and little pieces of fabric called headbands at the top and bottom of the spine (back) of the book.

A hardcover or hardback (also known as hardbound, and sometimes as case-bound) book is one bound with rigid protective covers (typically of binder’s board or heavy paperboard covered with buckram or other cloth, heavy paper, or occasionally leather). It has a flexible, sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened. Following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk.

Hardcover books are often printed on acid-free paper, and they are much more durable than paperbacks, which have flexible, easily damaged paper covers. Hardcover books are marginally more costly to manufacture. Hardcovers are frequently protected by artistic dust jackets, but a “jacketless” alternative has increased in popularity: these “paper-over-board” or “jacketless hardcover” bindings forgo the dust jacket in favor of printing the cover design directly onto the board binding.

Hardcovers typically consist of a page block, two boards, and a cloth or heavy paper covering. The pages are sewn together and glued onto a flexible spine between the boards, and it too is covered by the cloth. A paper wrapper, or dust jacket, is usually put over the binding, folding over each horizontal end of the boards. Dust jackets serve to protect the underlying cover from wear. On the folded part, or flap, over the front cover is generally a blurb, or a summary of the book. The back flap is where the biography of the author can be found. Reviews are often placed on the back of the jacket. Many modern bestselling hardcover books use a partial cloth cover, with cloth covered board on the spine only, and only boards covering the rest of the book.

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WHY CAN THE NUMBER OF PAGES IN A BOOK USUALLY BE DIVIDED EXACTLY BY 16?

Pages in a book are not printed one by one. They are printed on huge sheets of paper that then pass through another machine to be folded. When the book is bound (put into its cover), the edges of the pages are cut on a guillotine. A piece of paper folded in half creates four pages. Larger sheets of paper are folded to make 16, 32 or even 64 pages.

Most booklets are created with the Saddle-Stitch binding method. This method uses printed sheets that are folded and nested one inside the other and then stapled through the fold line with wire staples. The staples pass through the folded crease from the outside and are clinched between the centermost pages. The result is a very simple yet professional looking document.

Despite its relative simplicity, saddle-stitch booklets often pose a challenge for someone new to graphic design. This is because the page set-up for saddle-stitched booklets requires a different approach than for other types of bound books.

Saddle-stitched booklets are constructed of folded sheets. As such, each folded sheet joined within the finished booklet will form four pages of the booklet. This means the page count of every saddle-stitched booklet must always be a multiple of four (4). It is not possible to create a 7-page, 10-page, or 25-page saddle-stitched booklet. All saddle-stitched booklets must contain 4 pages, 8 pages, 12 pages, 16 pages, 20 pages, 24 pages and so on. Even if a page in the booklet is blank, it still counts as a page.

Needless to say, creating the layout file properly at the onset will help optimize your booklet’s press run…saving time, effort, and expense for all involved. The software you use to create the booklet will likely give you file layout choices, such as Reader Spreads or Printer Spreads. Because printing presses and production methods vary from print shop to print shop, do not automatically set up your booklet file in a particular spread or configuration without first consulting the printer you intend to use for producing your booklet.

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