Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Silverline Project
Mains level: Not Much
Last week, the Kerala cabinet gave the green light to begin acquiring land for SilverLine, its flagship semi high-speed railway project.
What is the SilverLine project?
- The SilverLine Project entails building a semi high-speed railway corridor through the state linking its southern end and state capital Thiruvananthapuram with its northern end of Kasaragod.
- It is billed as one of the biggest infrastructure enterprises being pushed by the ruling Left government.
- The line is proposed to be 529.45 km long, covering 11 districts through 11 stations.
- When the project is realized, one can travel from Kasaragod to Thiruvananthapuram in less than four hours on trains traveling at 200 km/hr.
- The current travel time on the existing Indian Railways network is 12 hours.
- The project is executed by the Kerala Rail Development Corporation Limited (KRDCL), a joint venture between the Kerala government and the Union Ministry of Railways.
What was the need for the project?
- It has long been argued by urban policy experts that the existing railway infrastructure in the state cannot meet the demands of the future.
- Most trains run with an average speed of 45 km/hr due to a lot of curves and bends on the existing stretch.
- The government claims the SilverLine project is the need of the hour as it can take a significant load of traffic off the existing railway stretch and make travel easier and faster for commuters.
- This will in turn reduce the congestion on roads and help reduce accidents and fatalities.
Issues with the Project
- The unofficial deadline for the project is 2025 but many would say it’s not a realistic target, given the laborious nature of land acquisition in a highly densely populated state like Kerala.
- Acquiring land, especially from private players, in urban areas remains the key challenge for the project.
- There’s also significant opposition to the project by environmentalists citing potential damage to the state’s ecosystem in the path of the proposed route.
- They fear irreversible impact to the state’s rivers, paddy fields, and wetlands, triggering floods and landslides in the future.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Precision Iodine Value Analyzer
Mains level: Not Much
The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Central Scientific Instruments Organization (CSIR-CSIO) has developed and transferred the technology of Precision Iodine Value Analyzer (PIVA).
What is Precision Iodine Value Analyzer?
- It is an instrument for the measurement of the degree of unsaturation (iodine value) in vegetable oils.
- This indigenous food testing equipment was recognized by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) on World Food Safety Day on June 7, 2021.
- It has applications in oil extraction units, quality control and assurance labs, food regulatory authorities, soaps and cosmetics, bakeries, meat industry, paint industry, biodiesel analysis, and charcoal industry.
- It is also useful in determining adulteration in edible oils and fats.
Measuring iodine value
- Iodine value is conventionally determined using manual titration and a few analytical instruments based on automated titration.
- However, these methods take a longer time to analyze, are costly, and use toxic chemicals.
- Researchers at CSIR-CSIO developed a rapid analysis technique that takes just three minutes to carry out the same analysis.
- Currently, PIVA has been calibrated and tested for coconut, sunflower, mustard, palm, rice bran, soybean, groundnut, olive oil, and ghee.
- This new development is a part of the ongoing effort to strengthen the food testing capabilities by introducing quick and advanced food testing kits.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: New Shephard
Mains level: Space tourism
Last week, Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos’s space company called Blue Origin concluded the online auction for the first seat on New Shephard, a rocket system meant to take tourists to space.
What is New Shephard?
- New Shephard has been named after astronaut Alan Shephard – the first American to go to space – and offers flights to space over 100 km above the Earth and accommodation for payloads.
- Essentially, it is a rocket system that has been designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Karman line – the internationally recognized boundary of space.
- The idea is to provide easier and more cost-effective access to space meant for purposes such as academic research, corporate technology development, and entrepreneurial ventures among others.
- Apart from its academic and research-oriented goal, New Shephard will also allow space tourists to experience microgravity by taking them 100 km above the Earth.
Its components
- The rocket system consists of two parts, the cabin or capsule, and the rocket or the booster.
- The cabin can accommodate experiments from small Mini Payloads up to 100 kg.
- As per Blue Origin, the Mini Payloads provide easier space access to students, who are part of educational institutions that are developing their own space programs.
- Further, the cabin is designed for six people and sits atop a 60 feet tall rocket and separates from it before crossing the Karman line, after which both vehicles fall back to the Earth.
- All the six seats in the capsule are meant for passengers, each of whom gets their own window seat. The capsule is fully autonomous and does not require a pilot.
How does it work?
- The system is a fully reusable, vertical takeoff and vertical landing space vehicle that accelerates for about 2.5 minutes before the engine cuts off.
- After separating from the booster, the capsule free falls in space, while the booster performs an autonomously controlled vertical landing back to Earth.
- The capsule, on the other hand, lands back with the help of parachutes.
A boost for space tourism
- Space tourism seeks to give laypeople the ability to go to space for recreational, leisure, or business purposes.
- The idea is to make space more accessible to those individuals who are not astronauts and want to go to space for non-scientific purposes.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Northern Limit of Monsoon (NLM)
Mains level: Indian Monsoon
The Northern Limit of Monsoon (NLM) continues to pass through Diu, Surat, Nandurbar, Bhopal, Nowgong, Hamirpur, Barabanki, Bareilly, Saharanpur, Ambala & Amritsar.
Try this question from CS Mains 2017:
Q.What characteristics can be assigned to monsoon climate that succeeds in feeding more than 50 percent of the won population residing in Monsoon Asia?
What is the Northern Limit of Monsoon?
- NLM, is the northernmost boundary of India up to which monsoon rains have advanced on any given day.
- So, it is a way of tracking the progress of monsoon clouds as they move over India’s landmass.
- The India Meteorological Department (IMD) adds that the monsoon “advances northwards, usually in surges, and covers the entire country around July 15″.
What are the Eastern and Western Arms?
- It is the mountains of southern India that split the south-western winds, giving the Indian monsoon its ‘two arms.
- The western arm of the monsoon is deflected northwards, by the Western Ghats, to (Mumbai) and then on to Pakistan.
- The eastern arm travels up through the Bay of Bengal to (Kolkata) and Assam and is deflected north-westwards by the Himalayas.
Also refer this link:
Explain the formation of Indian monsoons. Highlight the link between monsoons and India’s cropping pattern. (15 marks)
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Edible Oil imports of India
Mains level: NA
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India had decided this on March 31. This would end the practice to add other edible oil (like palms, rice bran, etc) to mustard oil.
Why such move?
- This is good news for mustard farmers whose fortunes were adversely hit as up to a fifth of mustard oil volume could earlier be blends of other oils.
- But why did India start the practice in the first place? And how has it affected consumer health?
Answer this question from CSP 2018:
Q.Consider the following statements:
- The quantity of imported edible oils is more than the domestic production of edible oils in the last five years.
- The Government does not impose any customs duty on all the imported edible oils as a special case.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 nor 2
Why did the blending begin?
- The Union health ministry had allowed blending in edible vegetable oil in a notification in 1990.
- In 1998, Delhi and other north Indian states witnessed the dropsy epidemic — a disease that caused swelling in the body due to the build-up of fluid in tissues.
- At least 60 people died and 3,000 were hospitalized in the national capital.
- Researchers believed the consumption of mustard oil caused the disease.
Adulteration is hazardous
- Upon investigation, it was found to be adulterated with Argemone Mexicana, a kind of weed that grows with yellow flowers.
- The adulteration, however, was highly suspicious: While mustard is a rabi crop that is cultivated in the winters, Argemone Mexicana grows in April-May.
- This meant that the possibility of mixing mustard seeds with that Argemone mexicana was rare.
- The suspicious adulteration stoked fear among the masses. It started a campaign against the consumption of oil.
- Several studies have found mustard oil unsafe for consumption.
The 1990 decision
- Experts have claimed that the blending of mustard oil was not only dangerous to health but also adversely impacted mustard farming.
- Some groups have also flagged the blending of refined oil.
- Following the Union health ministry’s 1990 notification allowing for the blending of edible vegetable oil, the FSSAI rolled out regulations in the regard in 2006.
- Producers and other companies involved in blending were regularised through the Agriculture Produce (Grading and Marking) Act (AGMARK).
- It also made it mandatory to write the kind of oil used for blending over the packet.
- The companies involved in blending strongly advocated for the cause, despite reports about its excess and unregulated use. The governments over the years have been tight-lipped about it.
Has blending led to dependence over the import of oil?
- In 1990-91, India was self-reliant in mustard oil production and produced 98 percent of the oil needed.
- Blending mustard oil with other edible oils considered to bolster nutritional profile, taste, and quality.
- Despite the harmful effects, the processing industry took advantage of blending.
- Cheap palm oil would be blended up to 80 percent in mustard oil sometimes.
- As a result, profits of mustard farmers dried up, which discouraged them from cultivating the crop.
- This could be one of the reasons behind India’s increasing dependency on oil imports over the last two decades.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: PASIPHAE
Mains level: Theory of expansion of the universe
The development of a vital instrument PASIPHAE, which will be used in upcoming sky surveys to study stars, is being led by an Indian astronomer.
What is PASIPHAE?
- PASIPHAE stands for Polar-Areas Stellar-Imaging in Polarisation High-Accuracy Experiment.
- It is an international collaborative sky surveying project. Scientists aim to study the polarisation in the light coming from millions of stars.
- The name is inspired by Pasiphae, the daughter of Greek Sun God Helios.
- The survey will use two high-tech optical polarimeters to observe the northern and southern skies, simultaneously.
- It will focus on capturing starlight polarisation of very faint stars that are so far away that polarisation signals from there have not been systematically studied.
- By combining the data, astronomers will perform a maiden magnetic field tomography mapping of the interstellar medium of very large areas of the sky using a novel polarimeter instrument known as WALOP.
Why is PASIPHAE important?
- Since its birth about 14 billion years ago, the universe has been constantly expanding, as evidenced by the presence of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation which fills the universe.
- Immediately after its birth, the universe went through a short inflationary phase during which it expanded at a very high rate before it slowed down and reached the current rate.
- However, so far, there have only been theories and indirect evidence of expansion associated with the early universe.
- A definitive consequence of the inflationary phase is that a tiny fraction of the CMB radiation should have its imprints in the form of a specific kind of polarisation (known scientifically as a B-mode signal).
- All previous attempts to detect this signal met with failure mainly due to the difficulty posed by our galaxy, the Milky Way, which emits copious amounts of polarized radiation.
- Besides, it contains a lot of dust clouds that are present in the form of clusters. When starlight passes through these dust clouds, they get scattered and polarized.
What will PASIPHAE do?
- The PASIPHAE survey will measure starlight polarisation over large areas of the sky.
- This data along with distances to the stars will help create a 3-Dimensional model of the distribution of the dust and magnetic field structure of the galaxy.
- Such data can help remove the galactic polarized foreground light and enable astronomers to look for the elusive B-mode signal.
What is WALOP?
- Wide Area Linear Optical Polarimeter (WALOP) is an instrument when mounted on two small optical telescopes, that will be used to detect polarized light signals emerging from the stars along high galactic latitudes.
- The images will simultaneously have the finest of details of a star along with its panoramic background.
- WALOP will operate on the principle that at any given time, the data from a portion of the sky under observation will be split into four different channels.
- Depending on the manner in which light passes through the four channels, the polarisation value from the star is obtained.
- That is, each star will have four corresponding images which when stitched together will help calculate the desired polarisation value of a star.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: EnVision Mission
Mains level: Interplanetary missions
Following NASA’s footsteps, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that it has selected EnVision as its next orbiter that will visit Venus sometime in the 2030s.
Last week, NASA selected two missions to the planet Venus, Earth’s nearest neighbour. The missions called DAVINCI+ and VERITAS have been selected based on their potential for scientific value and the feasibility of their development plans.
What is EnVision?
- EnVision is an ESA-led mission with contributions from NASA. It is likely to be launched sometime in the 2030s.
- The earliest launch opportunity for EnVision is 2031, followed by 2032 and 2033.
- Once launched on an Ariane 6 rocket, the spacecraft will take about 15 months to reach Venus and will take 16 more months to achieve orbit circularization.
- The spacecraft will carry a range of instruments to study the planet’s atmosphere and surface, monitor trace gases in the atmosphere and analyses its surface composition.
What are other such missions?
- EnVision will follow another ESA-led mission to Venus called ‘Venus Express’ (2005-2014) that focused on atmospheric research and pointed to volcanic hotspots on the planet’s surface.
- Other than this, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft has also been studying the planet’s atmosphere since 2015.
Why are scientists interested in studying Venus?
- At the core of the ESA’s mission is the question of how Earth and Venus evolved so differently from each other considering that they are roughly of the same size and composition.
- Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system because of the heat that is trapped by its thick cloud cover.
- Last year, a team of scientists reported that they had found phosphine gas (a chemical produced only through biological processes) in the atmosphere of Venus.
- This triggered excitement in the scientific community that some life forms might be supported by the planet.
- But the existence of life on the planet is nearly impossible given the high temperatures of Venus and its acidic atmosphere.
Back2Basics: Venus Planet
- For those on Earth, Venus is the second-brightest object in the sky after the moon.
- It appears bright because of its thick cloud cover that reflects and scatters light.
- But while Venus, which is the second closest planet to the Sun, is called the Earth’s twin because of their similar sizes, the two planets have significant differences between them.
- For one, the planet’s thick atmosphere traps heat and is the reason that it is the hottest planet in the solar system, despite coming after Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun.
- Surface temperatures on Venus can go up to 471 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to melt lead.
- Further, Venus moves forward on its orbit around the Sun but spins backwards around its axis slowly.
- This means on Venus the Sun rises in the west and sets in the East.
- One day on Venus is equivalent to 243 Earth days because of its backward spinning, opposite to that of the Earth’s and most other planets.
- Venus also does not have a moon and no rings.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Content delivery network (CDN)
Mains level: Need for data localization
Several big websites around the world went down for about half an hour because of a major issue with the content delivery network (CDN) of American cloud computing services provider Fastly.
Global internet outage: Which websites were affected?
- com, Reddit, Twitch, Spotify, Pinterest, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo and Shopify are some of the big names.
- Prominent news websites impacted were the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN, and Verge, to name some.
- Most users would have seen a 503 error when trying to access these websites, indicating that the browser was not able to access the server.
What is Fastly?
- Fastly is a cloud computing services provider, which offers CDN, edge computing, cloud storage services.
- All of its geographies, including the three stations it has in India — Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi — were suffering from “Degraded Performance”.
Answer this PYQ from CSP 2018:
Q.The terms ‘WannaCry, Petya, Eternal Blue’ sometimes mentioned news recently are related to
(a) Exoplanets
(b) Crypto currency
(c) Cyber attacks
(d) Mini satellites
What is a CDN?
- A CDN refers to a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
- They house content close to the telecom service providers’ networks.
- Majority of web traffic across the world today is routed through CDNs.
- Platforms such as Netflix, Facebook, Amazon — ones with large quantities of data held in global libraries — host their geographically relevant content closer to where that content is to be consumed.
- This ensures the end customer is able to access the content faster.
- Another reason companies rely on these CDNs is to help protect their sites against traffic spikes, distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, etc.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: CHIME Telescope, Fast Radio Bursts
Mains level: NA
Scientists with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Collaboration have assembled the largest collection of fast radio bursts (FRBs) in the telescope’s first FRB catalog.
CHIME Telescope
- CHIME is an interferometric radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, Canada.
- It consists of four antennas consisting of 100 x 20-meter cylindrical parabolic reflectors with 1024 dual-polarization radio receivers suspended on support above them.
- The telescope receives radio signals each day from half of the sky as the Earth rotates.
- While most radio astronomy is done by swiveling a large dish to focus light from different parts of the sky, CHIME stares, motionless, at the sky, and focuses incoming signals using a correlator.
- This is a powerful digital signal processor that can work through huge amounts of data, at a rate of about seven terrabytes per second, equivalent to a few percent of the world’s Internet traffic.
What are FRBs?
- FRBs are oddly bright flashes of light, registering in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which blaze for a few milliseconds before vanishing without a trace.
- These brief and mysterious beacons have been spotted in various and distant parts of the universe, as well as in our own galaxy.
- Their origins are unknown and their appearance is highly unpredictable.
- But the advent of the CHIME project has nearly quadrupled the number of fast radio bursts discovered to date.
- With more observations, astronomers hope soon to pin down the extreme origins of these curiously bright signals.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Hindu Kush Himalayas
Mains level: Melting of glaciers
Up to two billion people in southeast Asia can face food and water shortages even as the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) mountain ranges lose up to two-thirds of its ice by 2100, a United Nations-backed research flagged.
Hindu Kush Himalayas
- The HKH region, often referred to as the ‘Third Pole’, is spread over 3,500 square kilometers across eight countries including India, Nepal, and China.
- The range forms the western section of the Hindu Kush Himalayan Region (HKH) and is the westernmost extension of the Pamir Mountains, the Karakoram, and the Himalayas.
- It divides the valley of the Amu Darya (the ancient Oxus) to the north from the Indus River valley to the south.
- It contains the world’s third-largest storage of frozen water after the Antarctica and Arctic.
- Over 240 million people live in the region’s mountains; 1.7 billion live in the river basins downstream, while food grown in these basins reaches three billion people.
Continuous warming
- HKH region continues to warm through 21st century even if the world was able to limit global warming at the agreed 1.5 degrees Celsius.
- Another study published in 2019 on the ice thickness of glaciers had estimated that glaciers in the HKH may contain 27 percent less ice than previously suggested.
- The HKH region lies downwind from some of the most heavily polluted places on Earth. This threatens agriculture, climate as well as monsoon patterns.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Sardar Sarovar Dam
Mains level: NA
The Sardar Sarovar Dam is providing irrigation water in summer for the first time in history.
Sardar Sarovar Dam
- The Sardar Sarovar Narmada Dam is a terminal dam built on the Narmada river at Kevadia in Gujarat’s Narmada district.
- Four Indian states, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, receive water and electricity supply from the dam.
- The foundation stone of the project was laid out by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on 5 April 1961.
- The project took form in 1979 as part of a development scheme funded by the World Bank through their International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to increase irrigation and produce hydroelectricity
- Called the ‘lifeline of Gujarat’, it usually has no water for irrigation during summers.
Answer this PYQ in the comment box:
Q.Which one of the following pairs is not correctly matched?
Dam/Lake River
(a) Govind Sagar: Satluj
(b) Kolleru Lake: Krishna
(c) Ukai Reservoir: Tapi
(d) Wular Lake: Jhelum
A successful model of river water sharing
- River Narmada is a classic case of Integrated River Basin Planning, Development, and Management, with water storage available in all major, medium, and minor dams on the main river and its tributaries.
- Its water is shared amongst four party states – Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra — in the ratio stipulated by the 1979 award of the Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal.
How has it saved water for summers?
- During the monsoon from July to October, the reservoir operation is well synchronized with the rain forecast in the catchment area.
- The strategic operation of River Bed Power House (RPBH) ensures that minimum water flows downstream into the sea and maximum water is used during the dam overflow period, which is not calculated in the annual water share.
- These measures help in maximizing the annual allocation of water share.
- Similarly, in non-monsoon months, the measures for efficient use of the allocated share typically include minimizing the conventional and operational losses.
- It includes: avoiding water wastage, restricting water-intensive perennial crops, adopting of Underground Pipelines (UGPL); proper maintenance and operation of canals on a rotational basis.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Election Commission
Mains level: Appointment in constitutional bodies
President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday appointed of Anup Chandra Pandey, a retired Uttar Pradesh cadre IAS officer, to the post of Election Commissioner.
Election Commission of India (ECI)
- The ECI is a constitutional body responsible for administering elections in India according to the rules and regulations mentioned in the Constitution of India.
- It was established on January 25, 1950.
- The major aim of the election commission of India is to define and control the process for elections conducted at various levels, Parliament, State Legislatures, and the offices of the President and Vice President of India.
- It can be said that the Election Commission of India ensures the smooth and successful operation of the democracy.
Functions
According to Article 324 of the Indian Constitution:
- the ECI has superintendence, direction, and control of the entire process for conduct of elections to Parliament and Legislature (state legislative assembly & state legislative council) of every State and to
- the offices of President and Vice-President of India
Answer this PYQ in the comment box:
Q.Consider the following statements:
- The Election Commission of India is a five-member body.
- Union Ministry of Home Affairs decides the election schedule for the conduct of both general elections and bye-elections.
- Election Commission resolves the disputes relating to splits/mergers of recognized political parties.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct? (CSP 2017)
(a) 1 and 2 only
(b) 2 only
(c) 2 and 3 only
(d) 3 only
Its composition
- Initially, the commission had only a Chief Election Commissioner. Presently, it consists of a Chief Election Commissioner and two Election Commissioners.
- For the first time, two additional Commissioners were appointed on 16th October 1989 but they had a very short term till 1st January 1990.
- Afterward, on 1st October 1993, two additional Election Commissioners were appointed.
- The concept of a multi-member Commission has been in operation since then, with decision-making power by majority vote.
Appointment & Tenure of Commissioners
- The President has the power to select Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners.
- They have a tenure of six years, or up to the age of 65 years, whichever is earlier.
- They have the same status and receive pay and perks as available to Judges of the Supreme Court of India.
- The CEC can be removed from office only through accusation by Parliament.
- The election commissioner or a regional commissioner shall not be removed from office except on the recommendation of the CEC.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Operation Pangea XIV
Mains level: NA
More than 1.10 lakh web links, including websites and online marketplaces, have been taken down in the operation Pangea XIV.
Operation Pangea XIV
- Code-named “Operation Pangea XIV”, the exercise was coordinated by Interpol.
- It involved the police, customs, and health regulatory authorities of 92 countries against the sale of fake and illicit medicines and medical products.
- Indian agencies also participated in the operation, said an official of the Central Bureau of Investigation that is the nodal body for the Interpol in the country.
- It showed that criminals were continuing to cash in on the huge demand for personal protection and hygiene products due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Supersonic plane
Mains level: NA
The United Airlines of USA has announced it was ordering 15 Overture planes with the ability to travel at Mach 1.7, faster than the speed of sound, from the Denver-based startup Boom.
What is a Supersonic Plane?
- Supersonic aircraft are planes that can fly faster than the speed of sound.
- The technology for supersonic flights is actually over 70 years old, but only recently has been used for commercial flying.
- Before 1976, when the first commercial supersonic flight took off, the planes were used entirely for military purposes.
- Usually, supersonic planes can travel at the speed of around 900 kmph, twice the speed of normal aircraft.
What about the Overture supersonic plane?
- The Overture aircraft would travel at the speed of Mach 1.7 or 1,805 kmph with a range of 4,250 nautical miles. In a single flight, it could carry 65 to 88 passengers and reach an altitude of 60,000 ft.
- The company has expressed confidence in getting an “experimental” jet ready by 2022, start rolling out aircraft by 2025 and eventually open them for passengers by 2029.
- It claims to build on Concorde’s legacy through faster, more efficient and sustainable technology.
Challenges with supersonic planes
Flying passengers at a supersonic speed is accompanied by a whole set of challenges.
- Firstly, the costs of making “sustainable” supersonic planes are extremely high.
- The very nature of its flying — using excessive amounts of fuel and energy — is likely to have high environmental costs.
- Despite the use of sustainable fuels, greenhouse gas emissions are not nullified.
- Secondly, the very speed of the planes results in producing excessive amounts of noise pollution in the environment.
- The “Sonic Boom” created by these planes feels like an explosion to the human ear.
- This, thus, limits where and when the supersonic planes can fly. They can only reach their actual speed until they are far enough from people and completely over the ocean.
- Lastly, it would not be economically feasible for everyone. Only the very rich can afford supersonic planes, as a ticket is likely to be way costlier than a first-class ticket of a regular plane.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Boha Geoglyphs
Mains level: NA
Using satellite observations and field visits, two independent researchers from France have identified eight sites around Jaisalmer in the Thar Desert, that show linear features resembling geoglyphs.
What are geoglyphs?
- Geoglyphs are large, un-explained geometrical patterns on land usually proposed to be man-made features.
- The largest concentration of geoglyphs is reported from southern Peru, covering an area of about 1,000 square km.
- A new paper published notes that the identified geoglyphs in the Thar Desert cover an area of about 6 square km.
Boha Geoglyphs in Thar
- The authors’ main area of interest was Boha, a small village 40 km to the north of Jaisalmer where they noticed a series of concentric and linear features.
- They named these features Boha geoglyphs and suggested that the features could be at least 150 years old.
- It is however conceivable that they were built at the beginning of the British colonial period, in the middle of the 19th century.
How are they patterned?
- The Boha geoglyphs are clearly manmade as the main unit is a giant spiral, but they have been eroded due to the cars running over the lines lately.
- So, they are clearly not formed by weathering or another natural phenomenon.”
- The observed features might have been formed naturally, but degraded over time due to both natural and human-related causes.
Degraded over time
- The rocky terrain is home to a typical weathering feature, especially over the iron-rich sandstone and shale beds.
- Here, extreme aridity and high temperature lead to slow geochemical translocation of minerals for centuries, such that the heavier minerals like iron and manganese move away from the lighter minerals.
- This lead to the gradual formation of alternate bands of harder and softer mineral concentrations.
- With time the areas with softer materials get slowly eroded, while the harder ones stand out, producing the typical concentric or box-like geometric features.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Sea Snot, Marmara Sea
Mains level: Algal bloom
There has been growing environmental concern in Turkey over the accumulation of ‘sea snot’, a slimy layer of grey or green sludge in the country’s seas, which can cause considerable damage to the marine ecosystem.
What is ‘Sea Snot’?
- ‘Sea snot’ is marine mucilage that is formed when algae are overloaded with nutrients as a result of water pollution combined with the effects of climate change.
- A ‘sea snot’ outbreak was first recorded in the country in 2007. Back then, it was also spotted in the Aegean Sea near Greece.
- But the current outbreak in the Sea of Marmara is by far the biggest in the country’s history.
- The nutrient overload occurs when algae feast on warm weather caused by global warming. Water pollution adds to the problem.
- Environmental experts have said that the overproduction of phytoplankton caused by climate change and the uncontrolled dumping of household and industrial waste into the seas has led to the present crisis.
Where has it been found?
- Turkey’s Sea of Marmara, which connects the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea, has witnessed the largest outbreak of ‘sea snot’.
- The sludge has also been spotted in the adjoining Black and Aegean seas.
How badly can the crisis affect the marine ecosystem?
- The growth of the mucilage, which floats upon the surface of the sea like brown phlegm, is posing a severe threat to the marine ecosystem of the country.
- Divers have said that it has caused mass deaths among the fish population, and also killed other aquatic organisms such as corals and sponges.
- The mucilage is now covering the surface of the sea and has also spread to 80-100 feet below the surface.
- If unchecked, this can collapse to the bottom and cover the sea floor, causing major damage to the marine ecosystem.
- Over a period of time, it could end up poisoning all aquatic life, including fishes, crabs, oysters, mussels and sea stars.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Echolocation
Mains level: NA
A technique used by animals such as dolphins, whales, and bats to navigate their surroundings can also be used by blind people to get around better and have greater independence and well-being, researchers at Durham University in the UK have shown.
What is Echolocation?
- Echolocation, also called biosonar, is a biological sonar used by several animal species.
- Echolocating animals emit calls out to the environment and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects near them.
- They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects.
What has the new study found?
- The same technique can help blind people locate still objects by producing clicking sounds from their mouth and hands.
- The researchers organized a 10-week training programme, in which 12 blind and 14 sighted volunteers aged between 21 and 79 were taught click-based echolocation.
- The volunteers were trained in distinguishing between the size of objects, orientation perception and virtual navigation.
- At the end of the training, the participants had been able to improve their ability to navigate using clicking noises either from one’s mouth, walking cane taps or footsteps.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: CIBER 2 Mission
Mains level: NA
A NASA-funded rocket’s launch window will open at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, USA. The aim of this mission is to count the number of stars that exist in the Universe.
Answer this PYQ from CSP 2020 in the comment box:
Q.“The experiment will employ a trio of spacecraft flying in formation in the shape of an equilateral triangle that has sides one million kilometers long, with lasers shining between the craft.” The experiment in question refers to
(a) Voyager-2
(b) New horizons
(c) Lisa Pathfinder
(d) Evolved LISA
What is CIBER-2?
- In order to roughly estimate the number of stars in the Universe, scientists have estimated that on average each galaxy consists of about 100 million stars, but this figure is not exact.
- The figure of 100 million could easily be an underestimation, probably by a factor of 10 or more.
- To put this into perspective, an average of 100 million stars in each galaxy (there an estimated 2 trillion of them as per NASA), would give a total figure of one hundred quintillion stars or 1 with 21 zeroes after it.
- NASA notes that if this figure is accurate, it would mean that for every grain of sand on Earth, there are more than ten stars.
- But this calculation assumes that all stars are inside galaxies, which might not be true and this is what the CIBER-2 instrument will try to find out.
How will CIBER-2 count stars?
- NASA notes that the instrument will not actually count individual stars but it will instead detect the extragalactic background light
- It is all of the light that has been emitted throughout the history of the Universe.
- From all of this extragalactic background light, the CIBER-2 will focus on a portion of this called cosmic infrared background, which is emitted by some of the most common stars.
- Essentially, this approach is aiming to look at how bright this light is to give scientists an estimate of how many of these stars are out there.
- The ESA infrared space observatory Herschel also counted the number of galaxies in infrared and measured their luminosity previously.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: SPAG9
Mains level: NA
The National Institute of Immunology (NII) has received a trademark for India’s First Indigenous Tumor Antigen SPAG9.
About SPAG9
- India’s first indigenous tumor antigen SPAG9 was discovered by Dr Anil Suri in 1998 who is heading the Cancer Research Program at NII.
- In a recent development, the SPAG9 antigen has received the trademark ASPAGNII-TM.
- Currently, ASPAGNIITM is being used in dendritic cell (DC) based immunotherapy in cervical, ovarian cancer and will also be used in breast cancer.
What is immunotherapy?
- Immunotherapy is a new approach that exploits the body’s inner capability to put up a fight against cancer.
- With this approach, either the immune system is given a boost, or the T cells are “trained’’ to identify recalcitrant cancer cells and kill them.
- In this personalized intervention, those patients expressing SPAG9 protein can be treated with DC-based vaccine approach.
- In DC-based vaccine, patient’s cells called monocytes from their blood are collected and modified into what are called dendritic cells.
- These dendritic cells are primed with ASPAGNIITM and are injected back to the patient to help the ‘fighter’ cells, or T-cells, in the body to kill the cancer cells.
Why need such therapy?
- DC-based immunotherapy is safe, affordable and can promote antitumor immune responses and prolonged survival of cancer patients.
- The ASPAGNIITM is a true example of translational cancer research and the Atmanirbhar Bharat spirit.
- This will be a real morale boost in affordable, personalized, and indigenous products for cancer treatment.
Answer this PYQ in the comment box:
Q.‘RNA Interference (RNAi)’ technology has gained popularity in the last few years. why?
- It is used in developing gene silencing therapies
- It can be used in developing therapies for the treatment of cancer
- It can be used to developer hormone replacement therapies
- It can be used to produce crop plants that are resistant to viral pathogens
Select the correct answer using the code given below.
a) 1, 2 and 4
b) 2 and 3
c) 1 and 3
d) 1 and 4 only
The burden of cancer in India
- Cancer kills 8.51 lakh people in India every year (International Agency for Research on Cancer, 2020).
- As per World Health Organization (WHO), one in 10 Indians will develop cancer during their lifetime, and one in 15 will die of cancer.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Digital Services Taxes
Mains level: Read the attached story
The US government has announced the further suspension of punitive tariffs for six months on India, Austria, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and the UK while it continues to resolve the DST investigation amid the ongoing multilateral negotiations at the OECD and the G20.
Do you remember?
GAFA tax—named after Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—is a proposed digital tax to be levied on large technology and internet companies.
What are the Digital Services Taxes in India?
- The NDA government had moved an amendment in the Finance Bill 2020-21 imposing a 2 percent digital service tax on trade and services by non-resident e-commerce operators with a turnover of over Rs 2 crore.
- The new levy has expanded the ambit of the equalization levy for non-resident e-commerce operators involved in the supply of services, including the online sale of goods and provision of services.
- E-commerce operators are obligated to pay the tax at the end of each quarter.
- Estimates by the USTR indicate that the value of the DST payable by US-based company groups to India will be up to approximately $55 million per year.
Also read:
What are Digital Services Taxes?
What is the story?
- The US is focused on finding a multilateral solution to a range of key issues related to international taxation, including our concerns with digital services taxes.
- It is trying to reaching a consensus on international tax issues through the OECD and G20 processes.
Investigation regarding DST
- The US has conducted a year-long investigation into digital services taxes imposed by countries, stating that they are against tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
- It had determined that the digital services taxes adopted by Austria, India, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and the UK has discriminated against US digital companies and were inconsistent with principles of international taxation, and burdened US companies.
What’s the case against India?
- In the case of India, the USTR’s proposed course of action includes additional tariffs of up to 25 percent ad valorem on an aggregate level of trade.
- Around 26 categories of goods are in the preliminary list of products that would be subject to the additional tariffs.
- This includes shrimps, basmati rice, cigarette paper, cultured pearls, semi-precious stones, silver powder and silver articles of jewelry, gold mixed link necklaces, and neck chains, and certain furniture of bentwood.
Why does India need DST?
- The agenda to reform international tax law so that digital companies are taxed where economic activities are carried is still a work in progress.
- Due to this, countries are worried that they might cede their right to tax incomes. Therefore, many countries have either proposed or implemented a digital services tax.
- The proliferation of digital service taxes (DSTs) is a symptom of the changing international economic order.
- Countries such as India which provides large markets for digital corporations seek a greater right to tax incomes.
- The taxation of the digitalized economy turned out to be a relatively contentious issue because there is a huge asymmetry in digital service providers and consumers.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now