India’s first indigenously built Floating Dock (FDN-2) for the Indian Navy has launched at the L&T Shipbuilding Yard at Kattupalli near Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The Floating Dock is 185 metres long and 40 metres wide and will enable docking of all kinds of vessels, including Naval ships and submarines (excepting aircraft carriers and tankers) of up to 8,000 tonnes displacement, with draughts of up to seven metres, during both day and night. FDN-2 was designed and built by Larsen & Toubro Ltd. (L&T) at a cost of Rs 468 crore.

In a first, China is planning to send mini-ecosystems — containing potato seeds and silkworm eggs — to the Moon next year, in an attempt to study how the organisms develop on the lunar surface. The 3-kilogramme mini-ecosystem, developed by research teams led by Chongqing University in China, will be sent to the Moon by the Chang’e 4 scheduled to be launched in 2018, authorities announced at the Global Space Exploration Conference. An 18-centimetre-tall cylinder will carry potato seeds and silkworm eggs to be incubated.

Bengaluru has became the second city in the country, and the first in south India, to have a full-fledged Metro rail in operation following the opening of a final 12-km section of the 42-km first phase of the Metro project. The first phase, comprising an 18-km east-west line and a 24-km north-south line, built at a cost of Rs 13,845 crore, was dedicated to the nation by President Pranab Mukherjee at an event in Bengaluru.

At 2017 Frost & Sullivan India Digital Transformation Awards. Tata Communications received top honors at the 2017 Frost & Sullivan India Digital Transformation Awards, with four awards in the Enterprise Telecom Services category and one award in the Enterprise Infrastructure category. T ata Communications took centerstage at the awards ceremony and received four Service Provider of the Year awards for: (1) Enterprise Data (2) Hosted Contact Center (3) Enterprise Telecom – Large Enterprise Segment, and (4) Third Party Datacenter. It also won New Product/Service Innovation Award for IoT – a new award category this year.