Recently, a UK-based teenager, Oran Knowlson, has become the first person in the world to be fitted with a brain implant to help bring his epileptic seizures under control.

Epilepsy

• Epilepsy, a condition that leads to recurring seizures, sees a person experience jerking of arms and legs, temporary confusion, staring spells, or stiff muscles.
• Causes: It is caused by abnormal electrical activity in the brain.
• Status in India: In India, between 3 and 11.9 per 1,000 people suffer from epilepsy, according to a comment in a 2022 Lancet study. Although several anti-seizure medicines are available in the market, 30% of the patients remain resistant to treatment.
• Process: The cells in your brain send messages to and receive messages from all areas of your body. These messages are transmitted via a continuous electrical impulse that travels from cell to cell.
• Epilepsy disrupts this rhythmic electrical impulse pattern. Instead, there are bursts of electrical energy — like an unpredictable lightning storm — between cells in one or more areas of your brain.
• This electrical disruption causes changes in your awareness (including loss of consciousness), sensations, emotions and muscle movements.
• Treatment: Doctors first use anti-seizure medicines and a ketogenic diet, which is high in fats and low in carbohydrates.

Brain Implant Device

• Working: The neurostimulator delivers constant electrical impulses to the brain to disrupt or block abnormal seizure-causing signals. A 3.5 cm square, 0.6 cm in thickness, the device was surgically implanted in Knowlson’s skull and anchored using screws.
• Procedure: The doctor then inserted two electrodes deep into his brain until they reached the thalamus — a relay station for all the motor and sensory information. The ends of the electrodes were connected to the neurostimulator.
• Recharge: It can be recharged by a wireless headphone.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS)

• Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a neurosurgical procedure that uses implanted electrodes and electrical stimulation to treat movement disorders associated with Parkinson''s disease (PD), essential tremor, dystonia and other neurological conditions.
• The device uses DBS, which is also utilised for movement disorders associated with Parkinson’s, and other neurological conditions.
• New DBS Method: Although DBS has been tried before for childhood epilepsy, until now neurostimulators were placed in the chest (instead of the brain), with wires running up to the brain where the leads were placed on the affected region.
• Effectiveness: Surgery is still preferable to implanting a DBS device. Currently, the DBS devices available in the market reduce seizures by around 40%. In comparison, seizures drop by nearly 90% if the patient undergoes surgery.

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe reported the most precise mass measurement of the Top Quark at 172.52 GeV/c2 having implications for the whole universe.

Quarks

• Elementary particles: Quarks are the ultimate building blocks of visible matter in the universe.
• They make up the protons and neutrons of an atom and lies on the ground floor of the Standard Model of particle physics.
• Experimental Evidence: At the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California in 1968, experimenters fired electrons, and muons, at protons, and found evidence that the electrons and muons were scattering off three smaller particles contained within the protons with each having their own electric charge.
• Bonds: Under normal condition Quarks are always bound together by the strong nuclear force and never exist alone forming composite particles called hadrons.
• Baryons: These are the particles made of three quarks which include protons (two up and one down quark) and neutrons (one up and two down quarks).
• Particles made of two quarks are called mesons.

• Flavours: In the present standard model, there are six “flavors” of quarks with each having its own set of quantum numbers, and with different masses.
• Up quark; Down quark; Strange quarks; Charm quark; Bottom quarks;Top quark ( It is the heaviest with a mass over 61,000 times more than the up quark)

Top Quark

• Top Quark is the most massive particle scientists have found to date.
• It is 10-times heavier than a water molecule, about three-times as much as a copper atom, and 95% as much as a full caffeine molecule.
• Decay: The top quark is a very unstable particle and breaks up into lighter, more stable particles in less than 10−25 seconds.
• By the mass-energy equivalence, a more massive particle is also a more energetic particle and the more energetic particles often break down into ones with less energy.
• Discovery: Top Quark was discovered in 1995 at a particle accelerator in the US called the Tevatron, measuring its mass to be 151-197 GeV/c2 at first.
• Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe reported the most precise figure yet at 172.52 GeV/c2.

Significance of measuring the precise mass of Top Quark

• To understand Higgs Boson: Higgs Boson interacts most strongly with the top quark as it is the most massive subatomic particle. By measuring the top quark’s mass as precisely as possible, a lot can be known about the Higgs boson as well.
• Higgs Boson interacts with particles providing them with their mass. Without this aspect of nature no particles would have mass.
• Universe quantum tunnelling event: Measuring the top quark mass precisely has implications for whether our universe will tunnel out of existence as The Higgs boson with its mass of 126 GeV/c2 is the precise enough to keep the universe in its current state.
• The atoms of most chemical elements will be destroyed, taking stars, galaxies, and earthlife with them if the Higgs field was slightly stronger than it is now.
• Peculiar nature: To determine its oddball nature as on the one hand, it is the one closest to the Higgs boson’s mass and on the other hand, all the other particles like it are much, much lighter.
• Researchers will be able to incorporate the top quark’s mass measurement into calculations that inform our understanding of our universe’s particles.
• Finding more particles: Precisely measuring the top quark’s mass is also key to knowing whether some other particle with mass close to that of the top quark could be hiding in the data.

Jeff Bezos-led Blue Origin has partnered with the Space Exploration and Research Agency (SERA) to give common Indian citizens an opportunity to go into space in New Shepard spacecraft.

New Shepard Spacecraft:

• It is a suborbital space travel vehicle, offering a unique experience for both scientific research and space tourism.
• It is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space, New Shepard is a fully reusable rocket system designed for human spaceflight.
• It consists of two main components: a reusable booster and a pressurized crew capsule.
• The capsule can accommodate six passengers, providing each with a window seat to witness breathtaking views of Earth.
• Among its notable features are the largest windows ever flown in space, offering an unparalleled visual experience for astronauts.
• New Shepard''s 11-minute journey takes passengers beyond the Karman line. During the flight, passengers experience several minutes of weightlessness before making a controlled descent back to Earth aided by parachutes.
• In addition to its space tourism potential, New Shepard serves as a valuable platform for scientific research.

What is the Karman line?

• Located at 100 km (62 miles) above sea level, it is an imaginary line that demarcates the earth’s atmosphere from space.
• It was established in the 1960s by a record-keeping body called the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI).
• It was named after aerospace pioneer Theodore von Kármán.
• Though not all scientists and spacefarers accept it (for example, the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, and the U.S. military place the line between outer space and the atmosphere at 80 km (50 miles) above the Earth’s surface) , a majority of countries and space organisations recognise this boundary between earth sky and space.
• Anything traveling above the Kármán line needs a propulsion system that doesn’t rely on lift generated by Earth’s atmosphere—the air is simply too thin that high up.

Astronomers recently discovered a new radio galaxy using the LOw-Frequency ARray (LOFAR).

LOw-Frequency ARray (LOFAR):

• It is a highly innovative, pan-European distributed radio interferometer and the first of its kind.
• It observes the Universe at low radio frequencies, close to the FM radio band, from 90 to 200 MHz.
• It was developed by the Dutch Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) with the goal of exploring the early, distant universe, solar activity, and the terrestrial atmosphere.
• LOFAR can observe in several directions simultaneously, which allows for a multi-user operation.
• For this reason, LOFAR is novel in its design because it is the first telescope that can look at the entire sky at the same time, unlike other telescopes which you have to point.
• LOFAR does not have moving parts; steering and tracking across the sky are achieved by treating the signal from the individual antennas in each station with advanced digital beam-forming techniques that make the system agile, allowing for rapid repointing of the telescope as well as giving the potential for multiple simultaneous observations in different directions.
• The LOFAR main core is based in the north of the Netherlands, with other stations located in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

What are Radio Galaxies?

• Radio Galaxies, also known as radio-luminous galaxies or radio-loud galaxies, are a particular type of active galaxy that emits more light at radio wavelengths than at visible wavelengths.
• These happen through the interaction between charged particles and strong magnetic fields related to supermassive black holes at the galaxies’ center.
• They are driven by non-thermal emissions.
• They are much bigger than most of the other galaxies in the universe.
• The first radio galaxy to be discovered, and still the brightest, is called Cygnus A.

Scientists have identified a species of desert moss called ''Syntrichia caninervis'' that could be a game-changer for future space exploration and colonisation efforts.

Syntrichia caninervis:

• It is one of the most abundant desert mosses in the world.
• It possesses remarkable tolerance to multiple environmental stress factors (drought, cold, and radiation).
• Extreme desiccation tolerance: recover within seconds after >98% water loss.
• Extraordinary freezing tolerance: withstand −196°C ultra-low temperature.
• Super resistance to gamma radiation: with half-lethal dose estimated to be 5,000 Gy.
• Distribution: It has a wide spread global distribution.
• It is predominant in dryland regions, including the Gurbantunggut and Tengger Deserts in China and the Mojave Desert in the United States.
• caninervis crusts are also present in mountainous regions of the Pamir, Tibet, Middle East, Antarctica, and circumpolar regions.
• It has a unique adaptation: it uses a tiny hair (awn) on the end of each leaf to collect water, in addition to that collected by the leaves themselves.

What is a Moss?

• A moss is a flowerless, spore-producing plant - with the spores produced in small capsules.
• Mosses are distributed throughout the world except in salt water and are commonly found in moist shady locations.
• They are best known for those species that carpet woodland and forest floors.
• Ecologically, mosses break down exposed substrata, releasing nutrients for the use of more-complex plants that succeed them.
• They also aid in soil erosion control by providing surface cover and absorbing water, and they are important in the nutrient and water economy of some vegetation types.
• Economically important species are those in the genus Sphagnum that form peat.