Current Affairs Quiz - April, 2019

Notes:
Olympic silver medallist P.V. Sindhu and star javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra has been named as female and male sportsperson of the year in the ESPN India Multi-Sport Awards for their achievements in 2018. While Saina Nehwal won the award for the ‘Comeback of the Year’ after bagging the bronze at the 2018 Asian Games. Jaspal Rana, coach of the Indian shooting team, claimed the ‘Coach of the Year’ award after India picked up 16 medals in shooting at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. The Indian women’s table tennis team took home the award for ‘Team of the Year’ after it clinched its first-ever gold medal at the 2018 Commonwealth Games.

Notes:
The World Bank (WB) has recently released its latest edition of Migration and Development Brief. In it, India has retained its position as the world’s top recipient of remittances with its diaspora sending a whopping 79 billion back home in 2018. India was followed by China (67 billion), Mexico (36 billion), the Philippines (34 billion), and Egypt (29 billion). Over the last three years, India has registered a significant flow of remittances from 62.7 billion in 2016 to 65.3 billion 2017. According to the report, remittances to low-and middle-income countries reached a record high of 529 billion in 2018, an increase of 9.6% over the previous record high of 483 billion in 2017. Global remittances, which include flows to high-income countries, reached 689 billion in 2018, up from $633 billion in 2017.

Notes:
The International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Rwandan genocide is observed every year on 7th of April in memory of the victims of the genocide in Rwanda. The 1994 genocide is considered the hallmark example of violence that was ignored by the international community. In 994, around 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda in a hundred-day campaign. Hence, the United Nations established the day to remember members of the Tutsi community, an African ethnic group, which were killed or injured in the atrocities. The Day of Reflection offered an opportunity to consider the factors that had led to such mass atrocity and to renew the collective pledge of “never again”.

Notes:
Scientists from University of Michigan in the United States have found that dangerous airborne viruses can be rendered harmless on-the-fly when exposed to ‘cold plasma’ – a stream of energetic, charged fragments of air molecules. The researchers have measured the virus-killing speed and effectiveness of non thermal plasmas – the ionised, or charged, particles that form around electrical discharges such as sparks. A non thermal plasma reactor was able to inactivate or remove from the air stream 99.9% of a test virus. The researchers hope to one day harness this capability to replace the surgical mask.

Notes:
In a major boost for the Indian Army, the Government of India (GoI) has recently cleared the procurement of 464 T-90 tanks from Russia in a deal worth over Rs 13,500 crore. Under the new deal, the T-90 tanks would be provided to the Armoured Corps of the force which will use them for deployment along the border with Pakistan. The contract will also include a Make-in-India element for integration at the Heavy Vehicles Factory in Avadi near Chennai. The T-90 would be equipped with thermal imaging night sights to allow the tank commander to strike enemy locations during night battles. The new inductions will also strengthen the Army’s fire-power along the land border stretch with Pakistan — from Jammu in the north till the western flank in Gujarat. The new deal would increase the number of T-90s in the Army to close to 2,000 along with the remaining T-72 and T-55s.

Notes:
The scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US have developed a novel sensor that can be used in smartphone-sized devices to detect dangerous chemicals based on a unique fingerprint of absorbed and emitted light. Devices called spectrometers are light-splitting instruments that have long been both bulky and expensive, preventing their use outside the lab. However, researchers have now developed a spectrometer so small and simple that it could integrate with the camera of a typical cellphone without sacrificing accuracy. The device also has an advanced capability called hyperspectral imaging, which collects information about each individual pixel in an image to identify materials or detect specific objects amidst a complicated background. Hyperspectral sensing could be used to detect seams of valuable minerals within rock faces or to identify specific plants in a highly vegetated area.

Notes:
Justice Vikram Nath, seniormost judge of the Allahabad High Court, has been appointed Chief Justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court. He succeeded acting CJ Justice Chagari Praveen Kumar. A collegium of Supreme Court comprising Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi and judges S A Bobde and N V Ramana recommended the name of Justice Nath as the chief justice of the AP High Court. The new high court for Andhra Pradesh was created on 1st January 2019, following the bifurcation of a combined high court for AP and Telangana, which had been operating from Hyderabad since June 2, 2014, when the two Telugu states got separated.

Notes:
Astronomers have captured the first-ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy known as ‘Messier 87’ (M87), through a network of 8 linked radio telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration. The black hole in the centre of M87 has a mass of more than six billion solar masses. The picture shows an intensely bright ‘ring of fire’ surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. MIT Computer scientist Dr. Katie Bouman has been credited for developing an algorithm that allowed the world to see what a black hole actually looks like. The EHT is a consortium of more than 200 scientists that has been in the works for about two decades. The EHT telescope achieved the necessary firepower by combining data from 8 of the world’s leading radio observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (Alma) in Chile and the South Pole Telescope and created an effective telescope size of the Earth. Black holes were first predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity and now, the first black hole photo confirms his theory. A black hole is a region of space whose mass is so large and dense that not even light can escape its gravitational attraction.

Notes:
Google has introduced a new open platform called Anthos to run and manage apps from anywhere. It is based on the Cloud Services Platform and would let users run applications on existing on-premise hardware investments or in the Public Cloud. Anthos not only allows customers to deploy Google Cloud in their own data centres but also gives them the flexibility to build, run and manage their workloads within their data centre, on Google Cloud, or other cloud providers (Multi-Cloud), without making any changes. Anthos will also let users manage workloads running on third-party clouds like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Notes:
Bibhu Kalyan Nayak from Bhubaneswar has become the first Indian to be appointed Chair of International Hockey Federation (FIH) Health and Safety Committee by the world governing body. He will serve a two-year term lasting till the first executive board meeting after Congress 2020. He has extensively trained in Sports Traumatology and Sports and Exercise Physiology from National Institute of Sports Medicine at Havana, Cuba & National Sports Centre at Madrid, Spain. Nayak also served as a medical officer for the 2018 Men’s World Cup. He was commissioned in the Army Medical Corps of the Indian Army in 1995 and has worked in the Army Sports Institute, Pune for six years.