Current Affairs Quiz - August, 2020

Notes:
Congress Leader and national Spokesperson Rajiv Tyagi has recently passed away at the age of 53 after suffering a cardiac arrest.
He was also serving as the party’s General Secretary and spokesperson for its Uttar Pradesh unit. He was known for his fiery speeches in Television debates. He had been participating in a TV debate on Bengaluru violence and after that he had had a cardiac arrest.

Notes:
The Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs has released the ‘Report of the Committee on Business Responsibility Reporting (BRR)’.
The report has proposed a new Reporting Framework for companies to reporting of Non-Financial Parameters. The framework is called ‘Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR)’. The BRSR is to be integrated with the MCA 21 portal. Also, the information captured through the framework would be used to develop “Business Responsibility-Sustainability Index”.

Notes:
The construction work of the Katra (Jammu and Kashmir) – Delhi Express Road Corridor is proposed to be completed in 3 years and will be operational by 2023. The express corridor would bring down the travel time from Katra to Delhi to around six and half hours.
One key feature of this road is that it will connect the holy cities of Katra and Amritsar, and other major religious shrines between the two destinations.

Notes:
The state of Assam has proposed to launch a Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme named “Arunodoi”.
This scheme will be launched in lines with the flagship DBT scheme Jan Dhan Yojana. This is claimed as the largest DBT scheme of Assam till date. The scheme also called as Orunodoi, seeks to transfer Rs 830 per month to around 19.7 lakh families. The main beneficiaries of the scheme will be women.

Notes:
E-commerce major Amazon announced that it will launch its online pharmacy in India. The first online platform will be set up in Bengaluru.
The new service named ‘Amazon Pharmacy’ will offer both prescription-based drugs and over-the-counter medicines. It will also sell health devices and traditional Indian medicines. Amazon is witnessing severe competition with Flipkart and JioMart.

Notes:
An application called the ‘Interactive Neural Machine Translation (INMT) tool’, has been developed by the Microsoft Research Lab.
Microsoft Lab has collaborated with CGNet Swara, an Indian voice-based online portal and IIIT Naya Raipur for developing this tool. It translates sentences from Hindi to South-Central Dravidian language Gondi and vice-versa. The application aims to motivate youth from the Gond tribal community to learn the language.

Notes:
As per the findings published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology, a new low-cost nasal swab test named ‘N1-STOP-LAMP’ has been developed.
As per the researchers, the test can accurately diagnose the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19, in just 20 minutes. It is also 100 per cent accurate in diagnosing the samples at high loads. It uses a single tube and involves only one step and so it is very efficient and affordable.

Notes:
Research team from Indian Institute of Science, IISc and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have developed a process for making “Brick like structure” on lunar surface.
The researchers suggest that these bricks could be used for assembling structures in lunar surface. The raw material used is urea and lunar soil. It is developed by using bacteria and guar beans to consolidate the land into load bearing brick like structures.

Notes:
The 4th Session of the BRICS Anti-Drug Working Group was conducted recently through video conferencing.
Representatives from all 5 member countries: Brazil, Russia, China, South Africa and India participated in the session, which was chaired by Russia. Indian delegation was led by Shri Rakesh Asthana, DG of Narcotics Control Bureau. Misuse of Darknet and advanced technologies for drug trafficking was the theme of the session.

Notes:
IPS officer Rakesh Asthana has been appointed as the Director General of Border Security Force (BSF). The incumbent head RK Shukla is set to retire in February 2020.
Prior to this appointment, he was the head of the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security since January 2019. SS Deswal is set to replace him in the said post. Asthana was a 1984-batch IPS Officer and a former official of the Central Bureau of Investigation.