Daily Current Affairs Quiz: December 13, 2025

Notes:
Rare migratory Pallas’s Gull (Great Black-headed Gull) was spotted again in Udhwa Bird Sanctuary, Jharkhand after nearly 10 years. It is the world’s largest black-headed gull and the third-largest gull species globally. It breeds in marshes and islands from southern Russia to Mongolia. It migrates in winter to the Mediterranean Sea, Arabian Peninsula, and India. It prefers wetlands, salt lakes, lagoons, and slow-flowing rivers as its habitat. It is classified as Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Notes:
The government informed Lok Sabha that 1,469 film titles, equal to 4.3 lakh minutes, have been digitized under the National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM). NFHM was launched by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to restore and preserve India’s film heritage. The National Film Archive of India in Pune implements the mission. The mission also conducts training workshops and uses a web-based IT system for smooth preservation processes.

Notes:
NASA has lost contact with its MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars since 2014. MAVEN stopped communicating after it went behind Mars, and NASA received only silence when it reappeared. The spacecraft was launched in 2013 as the first mission dedicated to studying the Martian upper atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. MAVEN helped show that the Sun stripped Mars of its atmosphere over time and also served as a relay for Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. NASA is currently conducting engineering investigations while its other orbiters, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey, remain operational.

Notes:
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released the report Right to Education: Past, Present and Future reviewing progress since the 1960 Convention against Discrimination in Education. The report highlights major gains, including free basic education in 82% of countries and primary school completion rising to 88%. Higher education enrolment grew from 100 million in 2000 to 264 million today. Despite progress, 272 million children still drop out early and 762 million adults remain illiterate, mostly women. UNESCO warns that climate shocks, conflicts and artificial intelligence demand urgent updates to global education laws. It stresses lifelong learning as essential for workers and older adults.

Notes:
Google’s CEO announced Project Suncatcher, a long-term research plan to set up solar-powered data centers in space. The project aims to build satellite constellations that can perform large-scale machine learning using Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). These space-based data centers avoid the environmental impact created by Earth-based data centers. They also reduce risks from power outages, undersea cable failures, and natural disasters. The project supports data sovereignty because outer space is not under national jurisdiction as per the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.