Current Affairs Quiz - January 2022

Notes:
Facebook parent company Meta has announced that its new Artificial intelligence supercomputer will be the fastest in the world by the middle of next year.
Meta has introduced AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), which is among the fastest AI supercomputers running at present and will be the fastest in the world once fully built out in mid-2022.

Notes:
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in association with ICEA, released a five-year roadmap and vision document for the electronics sector.
Titled “USD 300 bn Sustainable Electronics Manufacturing & Exports by 2026”, this is the second volume of a two-part Vision Document. The first part titled, ‘Increasing India’s Electronics Exports and Share in GVCs,’ was released in November 2021.

Notes:
A Decacorn is a company whose valuation crosses the milestone of USD 10 billion. Food-Delivery Giant Swiggy has raised USD 700 million in Invesco-led new funding, which has made it a decacorn, doubling its valuation to USD 10.7 billion.
Another Food Delivery Leader Zomato was valued at $5.4 billion before its recent IPO. Budget hospitality company Oyo’s valuation is at USD 9 billion in 2021. The Top 3 positions are held by Flipkart, Byju’s and Paytm.

Notes:
According to lawsuits by Washington, D.C., and three other states, Alphabet Inc.’s Google deceived consumers by recording their location even after users tried to turn off the company’s tracking on their smartphones and web browsers.
The suit alleges that Google tracks people’s movements using information from its search engine, Maps app, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth services. While Google said that it has  built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data.

Notes:
Andhra Pradesh has notified Andhra Pradesh has 13 new districts under AP Districts Formation Act, Section 3(5). The total number of districts in Andhra Pradesh is now 26.
The state has 25 Lok Sabha constituencies and each is supposed to be made a revenue district. Only Araku constituency is split into two new districts. Manyam and Alluri Sitarama Raju, named after the legendary Telugu freedom fighter, are the two new tribal districts

Notes:
James Webb Space Telescope reached its final destination, at around 15 lakh km from Earth. The telescope will orbit in an area of space known as a Lagrange point, where the gravitational pull from the Sun and Earth will be balanced by the centrifugal force of the rotating system.
The points were first theorized by Italian French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange. Webb will go around it in a halo at a distance similar to that between the Earth and Moon

Notes:
India hosted first India-Central Asia Summit in a virtual format. Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressed on the need for India and Central Asian countries to define an ambitious vision, as the relations completed 30 years.
The event that saw a participation of the Presidents of five countries, including Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Notes:
The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day or International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
It is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is an annual day of commemoration of six million Jewish Holocaust victims and millions of other victims of Nazism. On this day, the UN urges every member state to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.

Notes:
Objects that turn on and off in the Universe are called as transients. Slow transients like supernovae appear over few days and disappear after a few months. Fast transients like neutron star (pulsar) flash on and off within milliseconds or seconds.
Recently, Astronomers using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope have discovered a spinning object that pulses every 18.18 minutes. They suggest that it could be an ‘Ultra-long-period magnetar’. It is located at just an ultra-long-period magnetar from the Earth.

Notes:
The Government has appointed V Anantha Nageswaran as its Chief Economic Advisor (CEA). He was Dean of IFMR Graduate School of Business.
He was also a part-time member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister from 2019 to 2021.The upcoming Survey has been drafted by a team led by Principal Economic Advisor Sanjeev Sanyal.