Current Affairs Quiz - April, 2019

Notes:
Dr. Benny Antony, co-founder of Kochi-based Arjuna Natural Ltd, has been conferred with the National Intellectual Property Award for 2019 in the category of Top Individual for Patents and Commercialization. Along with the National IP Award, the Intellectual Property Office India and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) have jointly conferred the ‘WIPO Medal for Inventors’ also to Antony. The Indian Intellectual Property Office bestows National Intellectual Property (IP) awards to outstanding innovators, organisations and companies in the field of patents, designs, trademarks and geographical indications on the occasion of World IP Day every year. Antony is the inventor of the world’s leading patented turmeric extract formulation “BCM-95” and also has over 80 international patents to his credit.

Notes:
The 5th Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) Media Summit on Climate Action and Disaster Preparedness has started in Kathmandu, Nepal on April 26, 2019. The theme of the two-day summit is “Media Solutions for Sustainable Future: Saving Lives, Building Resilient Communities”. The basic aim of the summit is to address the issue of fully utilizing media’s potential of accelerating climate action and disaster preparedness and connect stakeholders to media professionals for collaboration and joint practical projects. Over 200 participants including political leaders, representatives of UN agencies and NGOs, climate change and disaster management experts, scientists and media persons are attending the event.

Notes:
The World Intellectual Property Day (WIPD) is observed every year on April 26 across the globe to spread awareness about the role that intellectual property rights like patents, trademarks, industrial designs and copyright play in encouraging innovation and creativity. It aims to increase people’s awareness and understanding of the intellectual property. The main purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage the creation of a large variety of intellectual goods for consumers. The 2019 theme is ‘Reach for Gold: IP and Sports’. Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind, inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names and images used in commercial activities.

Notes:
On 26th April, Divyansh Singh Panwar bagged silver in 10m Air Rifle event with 249.0 points in the 2019 ISSF World Cup for pistol and rifle shooters in Beijing. He also secured a quota for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In the ongoing tournament, Divyansh had bagged a gold in 10m Air Rifle Mixed Team event along with Anjum Moudgil. This is India’s fourth 2020 Tokyo Olympic quota after Anjum Moudgil and Apurvi Chandela (10m air rifle women) and Saurabh Choudhary (10m Air Pistol men) had secured berths in the earlier World Cups and last year’s World Championship.

Notes:
The Japanese scientists have successfully created the first-ever artificial crater on an asteroid ‘Ryugu’. It’s a step towards shedding light on how the solar system evolved. The announcement comes after the Hayabusa2 probe fired an explosive device at the Ryugu asteroid early this month to blast a crater in the surface and scoop up material. The aim of blasting the crater on Ryugu is to throw up “fresh” material from under the asteroid’s surface that could shed light on the early stages of the solar system. The asteroid is thought to contain relatively large amounts of organic matter and water from some 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system was born. The Ryugu asteroid is around 340 million kilometers from Earth.

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has recently announced that it will shortly issue Rs 20 denomination banknotes in the Mahatma Gandhi (New) Series. The new denomination has motif of Ellora Caves on the reverse that depicts the country’s cultural heritage. It also contains a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi at the centre, with micro letters ‘RBI’, ‘Bharat’, ‘India’ and ’20’, along with a guarantee clause, Governor’s signature with Promise Clause and RBI emblem towards the right of Gandhi’s portrait. On the right side of the portrait are — an Ashoka Pillar emblem and electrotype (20) watermarks. The base colour of the note is Greenish Yellow. It will bear the signature of RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das. The dimension of the new Rs 20 note will be 63 mm x 129 mm. All the banknotes in the denomination of Rs 20 issued by the RBI in the earlier series will continue to be legal tender.

Notes:
The Modern Slavery Innovation Fund (MSIF) supports international projects to trial innovative ways of stopping modern slavery, It is in news recently because Britain has pledged £4 million to support global anti-slavery projects. Six organizations – Anti-Slavery International and the United Nations University, Stronger Together, The Freedom Fund , Retrak and Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) – will share the aid money from MSIF. The funding will also be used to run workshops on modern slavery in South Africa, improve support for survivors in India, and develop an online data hub to boost anti-slavery policies. The MSIF was announced in 2016 and previously gave £6 million to schemes such as awareness-raising campaigns in Nigeria, the Philippines and Vietnam. The Freedom Fund will work in India and Nepal to enhance victim care of frontline workers.

Notes:
Dr. Srinivasa Chakravathy and his team at IIT Madras has developed a unified script for nine Indian languages, named the Bharati script. The team has developed a method for reading documents in Bharati script using a multi-lingual Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scheme. The team has also created a finger-spelling method that can be used to generate a sign language for hearing-impaired persons. In collaboration with TCS Mumbai, the researchers have found a way for persons with hearing disability to generate signatures using this finger-spelling technique. The scripts that have been integrated include Devnagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil. Here, it must be noted that Urdu and English alphabet systems have a very different phonetic organisation. But that does not mean a mapping is not possible. It is quite possible and can be done.

Notes:
The researchers at Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi) have developed an ultrasensitive quantum thermometer using graphene quantum dots. The thermometer can precisely measure a wide range of temperature: 27 degree C to –196 degree C. It has high sensitivity when measuring different temperatures and can measure very minute (micro Kelvin) changes in temperature. It showed extremely quick response time of just about 300 milliseconds to register a change in temperature from 27 degree C to –196 degree C. And, the time taken to return to its initial temperature value was as little as about 800 milliseconds. It also showed excellent repeatability with negligible variation in sensing response when tested for over 50 cycles during a one-year period. The thermometer is developed by a team led by Prof. Saikh S. Islam, Director of the Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. The results of the study were published in the journal Nanoscale Advances.

Notes:
The six-member expert committee led by former RBI governor Bimal Jalan was appointed on December 26, 2018 to review the Economic Capital Framework (ECF) for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). It is in news recently because the Jalan panel is likely to submit its report by June 2019. The panel is expected to spell out details regarding how the RBI should handle its reserves and whether it can transfer its surplus to the government. The report is also expected to detail the amount the central bank should transfer to the government. The terms of reference of the committee would be to review status, need and justification of various provisions, reserves and buffers presently provided for by the RBI. The committee will also review best practices followed by the central banks globally in making assessment and provisions for risks, to which central bank balance sheets are subjected.