Four weighing stones excavated at Keeladi

What is in news?

Four weighing stones of varying sizes, all spherical and black in colour, have been excavated from Keeladi . various sizes — weighing 300g, 150g, 18g and 8g.

About :

• They were all made out of basalt.

• All the stones have a flat base and apolished surface,  the stones were found near a furnace, with traces of firing activity.

• Charcoal was commonly found in all the levels the stones were excavated from.

• Copper, iron objects and beads made out of different materials, including glass, were also found.

IITM: Converting written text to synthesised speech :

What is in news?

The researchers from IITM developing the technology to enable text to speech conversion for 13 Indian languages.

About :

• Having lectures originally presented in English made available in all Indian languages has obvious uses.

• The researchers are developing the technology to enable text to speech conversion for 13 Indian languages: Assamese, Bodo, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Odia, Rajasthani, Tamil, Telugu and their corresponding Indian English flavours.

• “The audio signal and the text were aligned including pauses. The text was syllabified using rules, and syllables and pauses were identified in the audio using acoustic properties.'

• An hour of speech contains about 350 - 400 sentences.

• The researchers collected 10 hours of data for every language.

• “Five hours of data was used for hypothesising, and a set of held out sentences from the database was used for testing the hypothesis,”

• The text sentences were chosen in such a way that maximum domain coverage is ensured.

• “This includes news, sports, fiction etc, as we work on open domain text tospeech synthesis systems.

• written text to spoken form is very useful, especially in this time of online classes.

Ophicordyceps nutans

What is in news?

Researchers have now found this fungi (Ophicordyceps nutans) for the first time in Central India it infects a stink bug.

About :

• Morphological studies showed that it was Ophicordyceps nutans which has been reported in India only from the Western Ghats.

• The fungus was found on its specific host insect Halyomorpha halys. Also called the stink bug, this insect is a pest to forest trees and agricultural crops.

• The simple but scary modus operandi of the fungi involves infecting the insect when alive, developing fungal mycelium inside its thorax, and when it is time for the spores to come out, kill the bug.

• They also explore the potential of using these fungi as biopesticide and medicine.

Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge

What is in news?

Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has urged the tech community to participate in the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge.

About:

• In a post published on LinkedIn, Prime Minister mentioned about the vibrant tech and start up an ecosystem in India and how the youngsters have excelled in providing tech solutions across sectors.

• With this objective in mind, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology along with Atal Innovation Mission has come up with the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation challenge which will run in two tracks:  promotion of existing apps  and development of new apps.

• This challenge will be jointly hosted by the Government and members of the tech community to make it more holistic.