Daily Current Affairs for UPSC CSE
Topics Covered
- Tsunami
- Psychoanalysis
- Radiocarbon Dating
- Xposat
- Facts for Prelims
1 . Tsunami
Context: Major Japan quake triggers tsunami waves, residents told to run.
About the news
- Tsunami waves over a metre high hit central Japan on January 1, 2024, after a huge earthquake that damaged homes, set off a major fire and prompted authorities to urge people to run to higher ground.
- the 7.5-magnitude quake struck Ishikawa prefecture on the Sea of Japan side of the main island of Honshu at 4:10 p.m.
About Tsunami
- It is a series of waves in a water body caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, generally in an ocean or a large lake.
- Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other underwater explosions (including detonations, landslides, glacier calvings, meteorite impacts and other disturbances) above or below water all have the potential to generate a tsunami.
- Unlike normal ocean waves, which are generated by wind, or tides, which are in turn generated by the gravitational pull of the Moon and the Sun, a tsunami is generated by the displacement of water from a large event.
Causes of Tsunami
- Underwater Earthquakes: Most tsunamis result from the vertical displacement of the seafloor during earthquakes. When tectonic plates shift beneath the ocean, they can push large volumes of water, creating a tsunami.
- Volcanic Eruptions: Underwater volcanic eruptions can displace water, generating tsunamis. This occurs when the explosion or collapse of an underwater volcano forces water upward.
- Landslides: Submarine landslides, often triggered by volcanic activity or undersea slope failures, can displace water and generate tsunamis. The sudden movement of sediments or rock into the ocean can create powerful waves.
- Glacier Calving – Glacier calving, or the collapse of a glacier’s front, can create powerful underwater tsunamis.
- Meteorite Impacts: While rare, a large meteorite impact in the ocean can displace water and lead to a tsunami.
Features
- Long Wavelengths: Tsunamis have long wavelengths, often hundreds of kilometres. This allows them to travel great distances across the open ocean with minimal energy loss.
- High Speeds: In deep ocean waters, tsunamis can travel at speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour (800 kilometres per hour), making them difficult to detect and giving coastal regions minimal time to prepare.
- Low Wave Height in Deep Water: Despite their high speed and energy, tsunamis may have a low amplitude (wave height) in deep water. Ships at sea may not even notice their passage.
- Amplification in Shallow Water: As tsunamis approach shallower coastal areas, their energy compresses, causing the wave height to increase significantly. This amplification can result in devastating waves upon reaching the shore.
- Multiple Waves: Tsunamis often come in a series of waves, with the first wave not necessarily being the largest. Subsequent waves can be just as powerful and arrive minutes to hours after the initial impact.
- Drawback Effect: Before a tsunami reaches the shore, coastal water may recede significantly, exposing the ocean floor. This drawback effect is often mistaken as a sign of low tide and can be dangerous as it precedes the incoming tsunami waves.
How do earthquakes generate tsunamis?
- The most destructive tsunamis are generated from large, shallow earthquakes with an epicenter or fault line near or on the ocean floor.
- These usually occur in regions of the earth characterized by tectonic subduction along tectonic plate boundaries. The high seismicity of such regions is caused by the collision of tectonic plates.
- When these plates move past each other, they cause large earthquakes, which tilt, offset, or displace large areas of the ocean floor from a few kilometers to as much as a 1,000 km or more.
- The sudden vertical displacements over such large areas, disturb the ocean’s surface, displace water, and generate destructive tsunami waves. It should be noted that not all earthquakes generate tsunamis. Usually, it takes an earthquake with a Richter magnitude exceeding 7.5 to produce a destructive tsunami.
- Most tsunamis are generated by shallow, great earthquakes at subductions zones. More than 80% of the world’s tsunamis occur in the Pacific along its Ring of Fire subduction zones
- When a great earthquake ruptures, the faulting can cause vertical slip that is large enough to disturb the overlying ocean, thus generating a tsunami that will travel outwards in all directions.
2 . Psychoanalysis
Context: Recently, the Delhi Police said the six individuals accused in the Parliament breach incident underwent psychoanalysis at a government institute in the city in order to ascertain their motives.
Origins of psychoanalysis
- Psychoanalysis isn’t a form of psychotherapy but in fact a worldview.
- It was the first modern Western system of psychotherapy.
- The Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud coined the term and developed it with many of his colleagues and peers.
- He developed psychoanalysis as a treatment modality for people presenting with symptoms that other physicians were unable to treat.
- The prominence of such ‘classical psychoanalysis’ has declined over time, while the topic has itself transformed to become less authoritarian and more practical.
- Its evolution has been influenced by developments in neurology, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences.
- Psychoanalysis aims to give people a greater degree of agency by facilitating awareness of their unconscious wishes and defences.
- In 1886, Freud collaborated with physician Josef Breuer, known for his dramatic successes in treating clients with “hysteria”. Their approach involved nudging people to talk about themselves in a bid to recount buried traumatic experiences.
- Breur found that when these people were able to recall traumatic experiences in an affectively charged fashion, their symptoms diminished. This approach came to be known as “the talking cure”.
What is the unconscious?
- The unconscious is conceptually central to psychoanalytic theory.
- Freud posited that certain memories and associated affects are cut off from consciousness because of their threatening nature.
- Over time, he came to believe instinctual impulses and associated wishes in addition to traumatic memories were also not allowed into awareness, and that this happened via cultural conditioning: in which people believed such instincts were ‘unacceptablee’.
- Repression is an important psychoanalytic construct characterised by the unconscious forgetting of painful ideas or impulses in order to protect the psyche.
- Freud elaborated on this idea by distinguishing between the id, the ego, and the superego.
- The id is the part of the psyche present from birth and is based on instincts. It presses for instant gratification and discounts situational realities.
- The ego, emerging out of the id, is its more rational counterpart.
- Unlike the id, the ego weighs situations before pressing for gratification. It also delays gratification by channeling instinctual needs in a socially acceptable manner.
- The superego emerges by internalising social values and norms. This psychic agency can be overly harsh and demanding, often leading a person to adopt a punitive stance towards their own instinctual needs.
- Many contemporary psychoanalysts no longer find this distinction useful, and instead view the mind as being composed of multiple self-states that emerge in different contexts.
Fantasies, defences, and resistance?
- Freud posited that fantasies served numerous psychic functions, including the need to feel safe, regulate self-esteem, and overcome traumatic experiences.
- He’d previously theorised that fantasies were linked to sexual or aggressive wishes and provided imaginary wish fulfilment.
- Since fantasies were expected to motivate a person’s behaviour, he believed exploring and interpreting them was vital for psychoanalysis.
- A defence is an intrapsychic process that helps individuals avoid emotional pain by pushing thoughts, wishes, feelings, and fantasies out of conscious awareness. Via projection, individuals can attribute their own threatening feelings or motives to another person. And via reaction formation, they can deny a threatening feeling by claiming they’re experiencing the opposite.
- Using rationalisation, an individual can find excuses that justify unacceptable behaviours when self-esteem is threatened. Splitting is a way for individuals with borderline personality disorder to think in extremes, regarding people as either perfect or deeply flawed, exclusively nurturing or rejecting, etc.
- Individuals with serious physical illnesses may deny being informed of the illness because that would threaten their reality. Through displacement, individuals can shift emotions from one object onto a less threatening one so that the latter replaces the former.
- Through identification, a victim may assume the faults of the opponent. For example, a woman facing domestic violence may believe she deserves to be beaten to justify her husband’s aggression.
- Via sublimation, a person may transfer unacceptable impulses onto more acceptable alternatives, like channeling anger into political activism.
- Freud formalised the concept of resistance when he found his clients were reluctant to work with him. He responded by asking them to engage in free-association: that is, they could say anything that came to their minds, without self-censorship.
Transference
- It wasn’t uncommon for Freud’s clients to view him as tyrannical if they had a tyrannical father. In his view, his clients were transferring a template from the past into the present.
- He believed transference provided a window of opportunity for a person to gain insights into the effects of adverse past experiences on current behaviour.
- He also believed that if a therapist maintained anonymity, by withholding information about the therapist’s own life or views, the person became less likely to develop transference towards the therapist.
- Freud also held that the therapist may have their own unresolved unconscious conflicts and that they paved the way for the therapist to develop feelings towards the client. So, in his view, the therapist had to work through their own countertransference via personal supervision or self-analysis.
How does psychoanalysis help?
- It was common practice for Freud to interpret his and his clients’ dreams. He considered dreams to be forms of wish fulfilment, and believed interpreting them to be central to psychoanalysis. However, Contemporary psychiatrists disagree.
- Change generally involves making the unconscious conscious. In Freud’s view, humans are driven by unconscious wishes that aren’t in our awareness and that this lack of awareness drives self-defeating behaviour.
- He reasoned that individuals deluded themselves about the reasons for their behaviour and that the self-deception limited their choices.
- According to psychoanalysis, the therapeutic relationship is itself a change mechanism. By acting in a different way than a client’s parents did, the therapist can present a new relational experience that challenges the client’s maladaptive models.
- Traditional psychoanalysis involves four to six sessions per week, and often lasts for years. Contemporary psychoanalysts believe longer-term intensive treatment has certain advantages. While circumscribed symptoms can change in the short term, more fundamental changes in personality functioning need more time to manifest. However, long-term intensive treatment isn’t always feasible, practical or even desirable.
- Contemporary psychoanalytic practice involves shorter term consultations happening once or twice a week.
3 . Radiocarbon Dating
Context: From thermodynamics to GPS, from social systems theory to studies of consciousness, time plays an essential role in how we study, interpret, and understand the natural universe and the peoples and technologies that occupy it.
What is radiocarbon dating?
- ‘Dating’ is a method by which the age of an object can be determined. Radiocarbon dating refers to a method that does this using radiocarbon, a name for the isotope carbon-14.
- Carbon-14 is created in the earth’s atmosphere when cosmic rays – energetic streams of charged particles coming from sources in outer space – slam into the atoms of the gases and release neutrons. When these neutrons interact with the nitrogen-14 nitrogen isotope, they can produce carbon-14.
- Since cosmic rays are ceaselessly passing through the earth’s atmosphere, carbon-14 is created constantly there.
- Carbon-14 readily combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide. This compound then enters the bodies of plants (via photosynthesis), animals (when they consume plants), and other biomass through the carbon cycle.
- the American physical chemist Willard Libby is credited with conceiving the idea of using carbon-14 to date organic materials.
- Notably, Libby’s idea made two assumptions that weren’t exactly known to be true at the time.
- First, the concentration of carbon-14 in the earth’s atmosphere doesn’t change across thousands of years. If it did, radiocarbon dating, which dates organic materials by measuring the amount of carbon-14 they contain, wouldn’t work.
- Second, carbon-14, in the form of carbon dioxide and other carbon compounds, would have to be able to diffuse into the earth’s various ecosystems such that the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere was comparable to the concentration of carbon-14 in the planet’s other biospheres.
- Fortunately for Libby, scientific studies that came later proved both these assumptions to be valid.
How does radiocarbon dating work?
- When an organic entity like the human body is ‘alive’, it constantly exchanges carbon with its surroundings by breathing, consuming food, defecating, shedding skin, etc.
- Through these activities, carbon-14 is both lost from the body as well as replenished, so its concentration in the body is nearly constant and in equilibrium with its surroundings. When this individual dies, the body no longer performs these activities and the concentration of carbon-14 in the body begins to dwindle through radioactive decay.
- The more time passes, the more the amount of carbon-14 lost, and the less there will remain. This decay rate can be predicted from theory.
- Radiocarbon dating dates an object by measuring the amount of carbon-14 left, which scientists and/or computers can use to calculate how long ago the body expired. In the late 1940s, Libby and chemist James Arnold tested this technique by dating objects whose ages were already known through other means – including redwood trees (age estimated from tree rings) and a piece of the funerary boat of an Egyptian pharaoh (whose death had been recorded at the time).
- They found the technique could indeed estimate their ages correctly.
- Since carbon-14 decays with a half-life of around 5,730 years, its presence can be used to date samples that are around 60 millennia old.
- Beyond that, the concentration of carbon-14 in the sample would have declined by more than 99%.
What are the tools of radiocarbon dating?
- The instrument of choice in Libby’s time to study radioactive decay was the Geiger counter. It consists of a Geiger-Muller tube connected to some electronics that interpret and display signals.
- The Geiger-Muller tube contains a noble gas, such as helium or neon, and a rod passing through the centre. A high voltage is maintained between the tube’s inner surface and the rod.
- The gas is insulating, so no current can pass between the two. But when energetic particles (including gamma radiation), such as those emitted during radioactive decay, pass through the gas, they can energise electrons in the gas’s atoms and produce an electric discharge.
- The persistent voltage could also encourage these electrons to knock off electrons in more atoms, producing a bigger discharge (called the Townsend discharge).
- This electric signal is relayed to the electronics, where, say, a light may come on in response, indicating that radioactive decay is happening nearby.
- Libby and his colleagues built on the Geiger counter to create a device called the ‘anti-coincidence counter’: a sample was surrounded by Geiger counters that had been tuned to ignore the background level of radiation, and the setup was housed inside thick shielding that further subtracted background radiation. To further improve results, the team also purified the sample.
How does modern radiocarbon dating work?
- The modern radiocarbon dating setup is more sophisticated. For example, one of the most sensitive dating setups uses accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), which can work with organic samples as little as 50 mg.
- Scientists use ‘regular’ mass spectrometry to isolate ions that have the same mass-to-charge ratio. They begin with a sample and bombard it with electrons to ionise its atoms.
- Next, they subject the ions to different physical conditions that cause them to separate according to their mass-to-charge ratio. For instance, they can be energised by being accelerated and then deflected by electric or magnetic fields.
- Ions with different mass-to-charge ratios are deflected to different extents.
- AMS adds one more filter to this setup: a particle accelerator that energises the ions a thousand-times more. As a result, isotope ions of the same mass and different ions with the same mass-to-charge ratio also become more separable. In this way, all the carbon-14 from a sample can be isolated and examined to estimate the bone fragment’s age.
- Geiger counters are available to purchase for a few tens of thousands of rupees and can be operated by hand. Particle accelerators require specialised training and skill as well as a few crore rupees, but their utility is equally disproportionate.
- Naturally occurring rubidium-87 decays to strontium-87 with a half-life of 49.2 billion years. Strontium-87 is one of four strontium isotopes and the only one to not also be produced by stars. So measuring the ratio of strontium-87 to any of the other isotopes could yield a rock’s age.
How did radiocarbon dating change science?
- According to the American Chemical Society, “radiocarbon dating provided the first objective dating method – the ability to attach approximate numerical dates to organic remains”.
- For this reason, its effects on the fields of archaeology and geology have come to be called the “radiocarbon revolution”.
- Radiocarbon dating allowed researchers to date sites of archaeological importance, check whether two objects found at the same time are equally old, and compare the ages of objects found at far-flung sites.
- It allowed scholars a clearer and measurable view of the past, opening the door to findings whose importance resonate to this day – including the history of human migration, the rise and fall of civilisations, the birth of languages and religions, the evolution of human-animal interactions, and undulations of the earth’s climate.
- Radiocarbon dating is also of political significance in India, where researchers and politicians alike have invoked its use to date objects retrieved from temples and mosques. Scientists have also continued to refine the technique and account for any remaining flaws.
- In 2020, researchers from Cyprus, the Netherlands, and Russia reported a way to improve the time resolution of radiocarbon dating from decades to specific points within a year, using “recent developments in atmospheric science“.
4 . Xposat
Context: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) put its first polarimetry mission X-ray Polarimeter Satellite (XPoSat) in a precise circular orbit of 650 km recently after a 21-minute flight.
What is XPoSat?
- X-ray Polarimeter Satellite (XPoSat) is India’s maiden mission dedicated to analysing the polarisation of X-rays emanating from bright celestial sources in the medium frequency band.
- XPoSat comprises two payloads, including Indian X-ray Polarimeter (POLIX) and X-ray Spectroscopy and Timing (XSPECT). They have been built by Raman Research Institute and UR Rao Satellite Centre, both located in Bengaluru.
- The spacecraft is designated for observation from low earth orbit (~ 650 km, low inclination of ~ 6 degree)
- It has an estimated mission life of about five years during which XPoSat will observe sources that emit polarised X-rays.
- The observations will be done when the magnetars or neutron stars (they are highly magnetic and display a wide array of X-ray activity) are in transit through the Earth’s shadow, for instance, during the eclipse period.
What are the two scientific payloads onboard XPoSat?
- POLIX: It is the world’s first instrument designed to operate in the medium X-ray of 8 to 30 kilo electron Volt (keV) energy band. It comprises a collimator, which is the key component to filter light originating from bright sources in the field of view. Moreover, there is a scatterer consisting of four X-ray proportional counter detectors (that prevent the trapped light from escaping). It will observe a few tens of astronomical sources. It was conceived, designed, and built at RRI.
- XSPECT: It is designed to conduct fast timing and high spectroscopic resolution in a soft X-ray energy band (0.8-15 keV). It will observe a variety of sources like X-ray pulsars, black hole binaries, low-magnetic field neutron stars, active galactic nuclei or AGNs (a compact region at the centre of a galaxy that emits a significant amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum) and magnetars.
Why is the XPoSat mission significant?
- Till now, astronomers have largely used and depended on spectroscopic, imaging and timing–based data obtained from either ground-based telescopes or satellite-based missions from the optical to the radio frequency band of the electromagnetic spectrum.
- Polarisation of celestial sources was done either in the optical or radio bands.
- XPoSat, however, will be a game-changer and facilitate X-ray polarisation measurements possible from bright sources, that too, in the medium energy band (8-30 keV) energy range – which has never been attempted ever before.
- The XPoSat team has identified several tens of sources radiating X-rays. XPoSat will observe two kinds of sources — persistent sources (targeted and known sources) and transient sources (pulsars, active galactic nuclei, magnetars).
- Out in space, X-rays get polarised due to multiple causes. So, by studying the polarised X-rays emanating from excellent sources like magnetars, black holes and their surrounding environments, and neutron stars, scientists can probe the nature of the radiations and the multitudes of processes involved in the generation of these radiations.
- POLIX will undertake important measurements like the degree and angle of polarisation of X-ray photons from the environment surrounding black holes, neutron stars, and other such cosmic entities. These two additional parameters, along with the spectrographic, timing and imaging data, will aid researchers to overall improve the present understanding of the celestial bodies and ultimately unravel some of the unknown mysteries of the Universe.
What is the polarisation of X-rays and why study it?
- X-rays comprise electric and magnetic waves that are constantly in motion. Being sinusoidal waves, they do not follow a patterned direction of motion. Whereas, a polarised X-ray is both organised and has two waves vibrating in the same direction.
- When magnetars or black holes emit X-rays, they encounter a wide variety of materials in the Universe. As X-rays pass through the thick cloud of materials, the electric component of the X-ray emits a photon in a changed direction, as it has now undergone scattering. In the process, the new photon has got polarised in a direction perpendicular to the plane formed between the original and scattered photon.
- The polarisation measurements , angular and degree of polarisation , are believed to provide clues about the bright X-ray emitting sources the nature of these radiations and the complex process they undergo.
How does XPoSat compare with X-ray experiments or missions globally?
- Missions on X-ray polarisation measurements have been a handful, the world over. Some like HX-POL and XL-Calibur have been balloon-based and short-duration experiments by NASA and collaborators.
- Indian astronomers, using AstroSat which is India’s first astronomy-based space missions launched in September performed timing and broadband spectroscopy of X-ray sources but no polarisation studies were performed.
- The lack of development of highly sensitive and precise instruments makes missions for polarisation measurements of X-rays extremely challenging, thus fewer missions have been attempted so far.
- In 2021, NASA launched Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). It has been designed to operate and perform X-ray polarisation measurements within the soft X-ray band (2 to 8 keV energy band).
- Besides complementing IXPE, XPoSat’s payload POLIX will offer an expanded observational energy band, as it is designated to perform X-ray polarisation in the medium X-ray band (8 to 30keV).
5 . Facts for Prelims
Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC)
- The Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC) established at Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Sciences, (INCOIS), Hyderabad, under Ministry of Earth Sciences is the national authority to issue tsunami advisories for India.
- The ITEWC functions as an approved Tsunami Service Provider of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning & Mitigation System (IOTWMS) that is an integral part of the Global Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System, established and coordinated by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO.
- The end-to-end tsunami early warning and mitigation system consists of Risk Assessment & Reduction, Detection, Warning & Dissemination, and Awareness & Response.
INCOIS
- INCOIS was established as an autonomous body in 1999 under the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) and is a unit of the Earth System Science Organisation (ESSO).
- ESSO- INCOIS is mandated to provide the best possible ocean information and advisory services to society, industry, government agencies and the scientific community through sustained ocean observations and constant improvements through systematic and focussed research.
- Activities: Provides round-the-clock monitoring and warning services for the coastal population on tsunamis, storm surges, high waves, etc. through the in-house Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC).
- Provides daily advisories to fisher folk to help them easily locate areas of abundant fish in the ocean while saving on both fuel and time used to search for the same. These advisories called Potential Fishing Zone Advisories are issued in Hindi, English and 8 vernacular languages.
Samvid Gurukulam Girls Sainik School
- Sainik Schools are a system of public schools in India established and managed by the Sainik Schools Society under Ministry of Defence (MoD).
- They were conceived in 1961 by V. K. Krishna Menon, the then Defence Minister of India, to rectify the regional and class imbalance amongst the officer cadre of the Indian Military.
- The primary objective of the Sainik Schools is to prepare students academically, mentally and physically for entry into the National Defence Academy (NDA) and Indian Naval Academy (INA)
- Samvid Gurukulam Sr. Sec. School is the first all girls Sainik school. It is located inside Vatsalya Gram in the outskirt of holy town Vrindavan in Mathura.