Current Affairs Quiz - April, 2019

Notes:
Ace cricketer Mithali Raj has been named as the goodwill ambassador of the Indian team for the Street Child Cricket World Cup (SCCWC-2019. She joined former captain Saurav Ganguly and IPL franchise Rajasthan Royals in supporting the team. The Street Child Cricket World Cup (SCCWC-2019) is the first cricket world cup for street-connected children. The tournament is being organised by Street Child United (SCU), a UK based organisation, which has a legacy of holding street child tournaments around major sporting festivals like FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Olympics in Brazil, FIFA World Cup Russia and more.

Notes:
The researchers at Tel Aviv University have successfully “printed” the world’s first three dimensional (3D) vascularised engineered heart using a patient’s own cells and biological materials to completely match the immunological, cellular, biochemical, and anatomical properties of the patient. Their findings were published in a study in Advanced Science. Until now, scientists in regenerative medicine have been successful in printing only simple tissues without blood vessels. But the latest feat is the first time scientists have created a complex organ with biological materials. The process of creating the 3D printed heart started with a biopsy of fatty tissue taken from patients. The cellular material from the tissues was used as the ” bionic ink” for the print job. That allowed researchers to create complex tissue models including cardiac patches and eventually an entire heart. The proof-of-concept feat could pave the way for a new type of organ transplant.

Notes:
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) have jointly launched a project called “Learning Coin”. It is a private blockchain-based coin and only accessible within IMF and the World Bank to help both multinational agencies learn about the merits of blockchain. The coin project has been launched in order to conduct research and learn more about the core technologies that have been used to implement cryptographic assets such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

Notes:
Richard Powers has been honoured with the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in fiction category for his innovative novel ‘The Overstory’, which shows us the world through the perspective of nature.

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A global provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, ACI Worldwide has recently announced that Canara Bank has successfully rolled out major new functionality to support EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) card acquiring across its ATM network and Aadhaar Authentication and leverage ACI’s UP Retail Payments solution to achieve market firsts. With this, Canara Bank has become the first public sector bank in India to meet RBI’s EMV mandate. The EMV shift is aimed at reducing lost and stolen card fraud and making counterfeit card fraud more difficult. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had set a deadline of December 31, 2018 for the switch, mandating use of an embedded chip to replace the traditional magnetic stripe card. ACI’s UP Retail Payments solution is based on the Universal Payments (UP) Framework and built on open service-oriented architecture for robust payments orchestration. It supports core payment processing with 24×7 secure payment capabilities.

Notes:
India and France will conduct their largest ever naval exercise ‘Varuna-2019’ off Goa coast and Karwar with an objective of expanding their strategic partnership in the Indian Ocean region (IOR). The exercise will be conducted early May 2019 and will witness the participation of aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines and fighters. India will deploy its aircraft carrier – INS Vikramaditya with its MiG-29K fighters and French side would be represented by its aircraft carrier FNS Charles de Gaulle with its Rafale-M naval jets.

Notes:
The National Civil Services Day (NCSD) is organized every year on April 21 in India by civil servants to rededicate themselves to the cause of citizen and renew their commitment to public service and excellence in work. This date is chosen to commemorate the day when the first Home Minister of Independent India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, addressed the probationers of Administrative Services Officers on April 21, 1947 at Metcalf House, Delhi. He referred to civil servants as the ‘steel frame of India.

Notes:
In Football, the Services lifted the 2019 Santosh Trophy by defeating Punjab 1-nil in the final at the Guru Nanak Stadium in Ludhiana on 21st April. In the first half, both the teams were goal-less. In the second half, Services scored the lone goal and held on till the final whistle. With this victory, the side has ended the campaign without losing a single match.

Notes:
Amar Paul (97), the legendary Bengali folk singer, has passed away in Kolkata on April 20, 2019. Born on May 19, 1922, at Brahmanbaria in undivided Bengal in an area now in Bangladesh, Paul had started taking music lessons from his mother Durgasundari Paul. Afterwards, he learnt classical music from Ayat Ali Khan and folk music from Mani Chakraborty and Suren Chakraborty. He surfaced as a folk singer for the All India Radio in the early 1950s. Paul lent his voice in a number of films including Satyajit Ray’s “Hirak Rajar Deshe”. He has penned several books on folk songs of Bengal and received accolades from various academies around the world.

Notes:
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has recently released the report titled ‘The Safety and Health at the Heart of the Future of Work – Building on 100 years of experience’. In it, the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy which killed thousands of people is among the world’s “major industrial accidents” of the 20th century (after 1919). In December 1984, at least 30 tons of methyl isocyanate gas was released from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in the Madhya Pradesh capital and it affected more than 600,000 workers and nearby inhabitants. Apart from the Bhopal gas tragedy, its list included the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in the erstwhile Soviet Union, the 2011 Fukushima disaster and the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013, which killed 1,132 people.