Current Affairs Quiz - May, 2021

Notes:
A piece of the Winchcombe meteorite that touched down in the town of Winchcombe, UK in February 2021 will be displayed at the National History Museum.
In February, a fireball was spotted blazing across the sky in western UK for about six seconds. A 103-gram fragment of black rock was then found by a team of Glasgow University. The meteorite dates back to the birth of the solar system nearly 4.5 billion years ago.

Notes:
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted the Paris summit for African, European and financial leaders. They agreed on a plan to help Africa overcome the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, called the ‘New Deal for Africa and by Africa’.
French president calls for waiving of COVID vaccine patents so that Africa could begin to produce its own vaccines. The leaders have also urged WHO, WTP and Medicines Patent Pool to remove all constraints in terms of intellectual property.

Notes:
Google has recently introduced its latest AI-driven technique, that will allow people to have conversations on various topics, open-endedly.
Named as LaMDA (“Language Model for Dialogue Applications”), it is a machine learning technique that enables a conversational interaction between itself and users. This is said to be the next step to chatbots which are limited to pre-fixed responses.

Notes:
The principal rainy season for the Indian subcontinent, June to September, is referred to as the ‘Southwest Monsoon’ period.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) announced that the Southwest Monsoon has arrived over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which is an indication that it will reach the mainland soon.

Notes:
Every year, the World Metrology Day is observed on 20th of May, which is annually celebrated to commemorate the Metre Convention on 20th May 1875.
The theme for this year is “Metrology for Health”, which has been chosen to make people aware of the role of measurements in health.

Notes:
In the year 2020, India had made 40,300 requests to the social media giant Facebook, to provide user data. India has ranked second after the USA in making the most data request from Facebook.
Also, in response to the directions from the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Facebook has restricted the access to 878 items in the year 2020, since these were violating Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Notes:
Pune based company Mylab has developed the country’s first self-use kit for testing COVID 19 infection. The rapid antigen test (RAT) kit is named CoviSelf, and has been approved by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for commercial production.
The company has proposed to manufacture 40-60 million kits per month in the next few weeks.

Notes:
Veteran environmentalist and Padma Vibhushan awardee Sunderlal Bahuguna, recently passed away at the age of 94.
He was regarded as the pioneer of the Chipko movement which was a Gandhian form of protest against deforestation by locals in the Himalayan region. The first action of the movement took place in April 1973 in a village in Uttarakhand.

Notes:
Tea is a beverage made from the Camellia sinesis plant. It is also the world’s most consumed drink, after water.
International Tea Day is celebrated by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on May 21. This is because the season of tea production begins in May in most of the tea producing countries.

Notes:
Marker regulator SEBI has increased the overall limit for overseas investments in India by alternative investment funds and venture capital to 1,500 million. This is double the earlier investment limit, as the earlier cap was 750 million.
SEBI has stated that apart from AIF and VC, all other investment limits remain the same.