Current Affairs 28th & 29th June 2019
Important Current Affairs
Current Affairs 28th & 29th June 2019
Project 'SHE' to protect women in Odisha's Gajapati
‘SHE Team’ is the innovative pilot project launched by Odisha’s Gajapati district police in Paralakhemundi to ensure safety and security of young girls and women.
SHE stands for ‘Safety, Health and Environment’. This project is modeled on the lines of Hyderabad ‘SHE Team’. The ‘SHE Team’ of Paralakhemundi is headed by a lady sub-inspector and includes mobile patrolling teams. Four female and three male police personnel will assist her. They will patrol schools, colleges, other local institutions and public places, where young girls and women are allegedly subjected to eve-teasing, stalking and harassment. ‘SHE Team’ will also try to prevent harassment of working women at workplaces and public places where they move for their job. It will teach self-defense and cyberspace safety to young girls and children. It will visit child care institutions and make children aware of sexual abuse.
World Bank to support Kerala through climate resilience program
The Government of India, the Government of Kerala and the World Bank have signed a Loan Agreement of USD 250 million for the First Resilient Kerala Program to enhance the State's resilience against the impacts of natural disasters and climate change.
The 2018 floods and landslides in Kerala led to severe impact on property, infrastructure, and lives and livelihoods of people. One-sixth of the State’s population - about 5.4 million people - were affected while 1.4 million were displaced from their homes, especially the poor and vulnerable segments of the population.
About First Resilient Kerala Program:
The Resilient Kerala Program will focus on strengthening the State's institutional and financial capacity to protect the assets and livelihoods of poor and vulnerable groups through an inclusive and participatory approach.
The New Program is part of the Government of India’s support to Kerala’s ‘Rebuild Kerala Development Programme’ aimed at building a green and resilient Kerala. It will identify key areas of policy and institutional strengthening to maximize development impact.
It represents the First ‘State Partnership’ of the World Bank in India and is the First of two Development Policy Operations aiming to mainstream disaster and climate resilience into critical infrastructure and services.
The Program aims to support the State with:
·improved river basin planning and water infrastructure operations management, water supply and sanitation services
·resilient and sustainable agriculture, enhanced agriculture risk insurance
·improved resilience of the core road network
·unified and more up-to-date land records in high-risk areas
·risk-based urban planning and strengthened expenditure planning by urban local bodies
·strengthened fiscal and public financial management capacity of the state
Other Partnerships:
The World Bank has been supporting the State through engagements such as the Second Kerala State Transport Project, Dam Rehabilitation and Improvement Project, National Hydrology Project, National Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project Phase 2 and the Kerala Local Government and Service Delivery Project.
Dragonfly Mission: NASA
NASA is sending a drone helicopter to Saturn’s Titan in search of life. The Dragonfly mission is part of Nasa’s competitive New Frontiers Program and is aimed at understanding how chemistry gave way to biology.
About Titan:
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has a lot in common with Earth. It has a thick, nitrogen-dense atmosphere and features like rivers, lakes, mountains, and, potentially volcanoes. The atmosphere of Titan is four times as dense as the Earth’s and there’s less gravity which makes it a prime location in the solar system to deploy a drone. Titan’s landscape is dominated by “sand dunes” and “waterways” composed of hydrocarbons – liquid methane and ethane. Its surface is composed of water ice, frozen as hard as a rock. Beneath the crust hides a liquid-water reservoir that astrophysicists believe to be the same temperature as the shallows of the Pacific Ocean.
Titan’s organic chemistry is composed of complex molecules that may well be, at minimum, precursors for alien biology. It has long been an object of fascination of astrophysicists.
Dragonfly:
Dragonfly is planned to launch in 2026 and arrive at Titan in 2034. With its eight rotors, Dragonfly will be able to fly tens of miles in a given day. It is powered by a plutonium battery.
Two-year mission, Dragonfly will travel hundreds of miles across the surface. sampling the chemistry of the moon and studying its geology and atmosphere. It will also look out for signs of life.
The study on Titan’s methane cycle is interesting as Methane (the primary ingredient in natural gas) actually forms clouds and rains down on the surface of Titan, a lot like how water rains on Earth.
By studying the weather pattern on Titan, a better picture about the greater reaches of the cosmos, and help scientists understand what makes a planet or moon habitable or not.
NASA’s TESS Mission Discovers Its Smallest Planet to Date
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discovered three planets in the L98-59 system, including tiny L 98-59b.
It is between the sizes of Mars and Earth and orbits a bright, cool, nearby star.
It is 35 light-years from our solar system in the southern constellation Volans.
It is around 80% of Earth’s size and about 10% smaller than the previous smallest planet discovered by TESS.
Apart from L 98-59b, two other worlds orbit the same star.
The two other worlds in the system, L 98-59c and L 98-59d.
About TESS:
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a space telescope for NASA's Explorers program, designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method in an area 400 times larger than that covered by the Kepler mission. It was launched on April 18, 2018 atop a Falcon 9 rocket. During its 2-year primary mission, it is expected to find more than 20,000 exoplanets, compared to about 3,800 exoplanets known when it launched. The primary mission objective for TESS is to survey the brightest stars near the Earth for transiting exoplanets over a two-year period. The TESS satellite uses an array of wide-field cameras to perform a survey of 85% of the sky. With TESS, it is possible to study the mass, size, density and orbit of a large cohort of small planets, including a sample of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars. TESS will provide prime targets for further characterization by the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as other large ground-based and space-based telescopes of the future
OSAKA Track:
Why in news: World leaders from 19 countries – and the European Union – are meeting in Osaka, Japan for the latest edition of G20 summit.
The Osaka Track is a process for promoting “international policy discussions, inter alia, international rule-making on trade-related aspects of electronic commerce at the WTO."
India, South Africa, Indonesia opposed the plurilateral negotiations on digital trade saying they strike at the very roots of multilateral negotiating process based on arriving at decisions by consensus. The large majority of developing countries also repeatedly expressed their fears that they will be denied “policy space" for their digital-industrialization through the proposed plurilateral agreement on digital trade.
Against this backdrop, India, South Africa, and Indonesia among others chose not to sign the declaration on Osaka Track because it would fundamentally undermine the core WTO principles for arriving at consensus-based decisions.
G20:
The G20 is an annual meeting of leaders from the countries with the largest and fastest-growing economies. Its members account for 85% of the world’s GDP, and two-thirds of its population.
The G20 Summit is formally known as the “Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy”.
Establishment:
After the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997-1998, it was acknowledged that the participation of major emerging market countries is needed on discussions on the international financial system, and G7 finance ministers agreed to establish the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in 1999.
Who attends these meetings?
At first, the G20 was mostly attended by finance ministers and central bank governors.
That changed after the global financial crisis in 2008. With banks collapsing, unemployment rising and wages stagnating, the organization turned into an emergency council for presidents and prime ministers.
G20 members:
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union.
National Mission on Natural Language Translation
The Ministry of Electronics and IT will soon place before the Union Cabinet a proposal for Natural Language.
National Mission on Natural Language Translation:
It aims to make science and technology accessible to all by facilitating access to teaching and researching material bilingually — in English and in one’s native Indian language.
It is one of the key missions identified by the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC).
To overcome the language barrier, the government planned to set up an ecosystem which involved the Central and State agencies and start-ups.
To achieve this, the government plans to leverage a combination of machine translation and human translation.
The govt. is looking at speech-to-speech machine translation as well as text-to-text machine translation for this additional to human translation.
Implementation:
The IT ministry is the lead agency for implementation of the mission along with the Ministry of HRD and the Department of Science and Technology.
Two-pronged strategy:
Translation activities can also help generate employment for the educated unemployed.
The mission would help not just students but also teachers, authors, publishers, translation software developers and general readers.
About PM-STIAC:
The PM-STIAC is an overarching body that identifies challenges in certain areas of science and technology.
It then creates a road map to deal with these challenges and presents the recommendations to the Prime Minister.
Besides natural language translation, other missions identified by the body includes Quantum Frontier, AI, National Bio-diversity mission, electric vehicles, BioScience for Human Health and deep ocean exploration.