Current Affairs Quiz - August, 2020

Notes:
The United States has entered into an agreement with drugmaker Moderna to acquire 100 million doses of its potential COVID-19 vaccine.
The deal has been signed for a cost of around USD 1.5 billion. The United States, as part of its Operation Warp Speed program, has partnered with several companies to acquire millions of doses of potential COVID-19 vaccines, by the end of the year.

Notes:
The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, in association with the Armed Forces Medical College has released “Building Positive Health in Nine Simple Steps”.
It is a visual guide for reference by the people to know about the link between their lifestyle and mental health. The bilingual guide that has been issued in English and Hindi, which would be released in other regional languages also. The guide has been targeted at Urban audience.

Notes:
A Data Recovery Centre of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) named KRISHI MEGH has been launched at Hyderabad by the Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar. The objective of establishing the Recovery Centre is to protect the precious data of ICAR.
It is set up at National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM) in Hyderabad. This data center has been set up under National Agricultural Higher Education Project (NAHEP), which is funded by the Government of India and World Bank.

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:
As per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Indian Industrialist Mukesh Ambani is the 4th richest person in the world. According to the index, his personal wealth is USD 80.6 billion in 2020.
Mukesh Ambani, the CMD of Reliance Industries Ltd has surpassed Bernard Arnault, the Chairman and CEO of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. The top 3 richest positions are occupied by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Notes:
China has initiated a new campaign to reduce food waste, called the “Clean Plate Campaign 2.0”.
The campaign has been implemented after the Chinese President Xi Jinping highlighted that Covid-19 had created an alarming situation on food waste. The first version of Clean Plate Campaign was launched in 2013 which aimed at restricting excessive official feasts and receptions.

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:
“Atulya” – a new device that can disinfect any premise in 30 seconds was unveiled by the Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways and Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Nitin Gadkari.
The design of the device is certified by DRDO and is developed completely in India. It is portable and weighs about 3 kilograms. It can be used to disinfect any premise up to an area of 5 meters at a time. It can also be used to disinfect surfaces of home, office, boxes, furniture etc.

Notes:
NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission has partnered with NASSCOM to launch an Artificial Intelligence-based module for school students. This module aims to bring AI based technology to the classrooms of the country.
This module is launched as a successor to a similar module launched in February. It contains a set of self-learning attractive modules, which can be easily understood by both rural and urban students.

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.