Here's a quick recap of what made news in the world of science and technology this week.
India is officially on the Moon. The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) made history on 23 August after the Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander touched down near the Moon’s south pole region. With this, India became only the fourth nation in the world to perform a soft landing on the lunar surface, after the former Soviet Union, the US and China, and the first to reach its south polar region. Isro confirmed later on Wednesday that a communication link had been established with the lander, which chose a relatively flat surface for the landing, as it sent back some of the first images of the Moon’s surface. On 24 August, Isro also announced that the six-wheeled Pragyan rover had rolled out of the lander and started exploring the surface. Both the lander and the solar-powered rover have a mission life of one lunar day, roughly 14 Earth days, during which they will transmit an array of scientific data and images.
Also read: With the success of Chandrayaan-3, Isro has gone further than Sarabhai ever imagined
On 22 August, Meta introduced SeamlessM4T, a first, all-in-one multimodal and multilingual AI (Artificial Intelligence) translation model that will allow people to communicate through speech and text across different languages. According to the company, SeamlessM4T can perform speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech and text-to-text translations for up to 100 languages. SeamlessM4T is also being publicly released under a research licence to allow researchers and developers to build on this work. Meta said the announcement was the first significant step towards building a universal language translator. This has been a busy week for Meta, which also rolled out a web version of Threads, Instagram’s text-based conversation app, for some users on the same day.
On 23 August, scientists took another step towards understanding the human genome. An international team of researchers has generated the first complete sequence of a human Y chromosome, the final human chromosome to be fully sequenced. The new sequence, which fills in gaps across more than 50% of the Y chromosome’s length, uncovers important genomic features with implications for fertility. According to a Reuters report, the deciphering of the Y chromosome, present in males, is an achievement that could help guide research on infertility in them. The study was led by the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium, a team of researchers funded by the US-based National Human Genome Research Institute.
(With inputs from agencies)
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