Current Affairs Quiz - September, 2023

Notes:
The President of India, Droupadi Murmu released a postage stamp in memory of Dadi Prakashmani, former chief of Brahma Kumaris at Rashtrapati Bhavan Cultural Centre.
This stamp was released under the ‘My Stamp’ initiative of the Department of Posts, Ministry of Communications to mark the 16th death anniversary of Dadi Prakashmani.

Notes:
Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari unveiled the prototype of the world’s first Bharat Stage (BS)-VI-compliant electrified flex-fuel car, developed by Toyota Kirloskar Motor.
The car, which runs on 100 per cent ethanol (E100), is based on the Toyota Innova HyCross. It can cover 40 per cent of its distance on ethanol and the remaining 60 per cent on electric, with the petrol engine shut off.

Notes:
Odisha’s javelin star Kishore Jena became the first from the state to represent India at the finals of the World Athletics Championship.
At the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, he finished fifth with a personal best of 84.77 metres.

Notes:
In a new study published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, researchers have successfully extracted ancient DNA from a 2,900-year-old clay brick, uncovering a wealth of information about the plant life cultivated during that era.
The brick analyzed in this study was found in the palace of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, located in the ancient city of Kalhu, in modern day Iraq.

Notes:
PhonePe has entered into stock broking business with the launch of a new mobile application called ‘Share(dot)Market’, under its subsidiary PhonePe Wealth Broking.
It provides market intelligence and quantitative research-based WealthBaskets, a scalable technology platform. It will be available as a mobile app and a dedicated web platform, enabling retail investors to buy stocks, engage in intra-day trades, buy curated WealthBaskets and mutual funds.

Notes:
A team of technology experts of BITS Hyderabad, IIT Mumbai and IIT Kharagpur, has won Asian Development Bank’s grant of USD 3.99 lakh (₹3.32 crore) to develop TUTEM.
TUTEM stands for Technologies for Urban Transit to Enhance Mobility and Safe Accessibility. It aims for safe public transport travel in Hyderabad.

Notes:
The Goods and Services Tax (GST) revenues for August 2023 have shown a growth of 11 per cent year-on-year as it stands at Rs 1.59 lakh crore.
The increase is due to increased compliance and reduced evasion. In August 2022, the collection from GST was Rs 1,43,612 crore. Out of the Rs 1.59 lakh crore GST collected, CGST accounted for Rs 28,328 crore, SGST for Rs 35,794 crore, IGST for Rs 83,251 crore, and cess for Rs 11,695 crore.

Notes:
Inception, a unit of Abu Dhabi AI company G42, has released ‘Jais’, the world’s most advanced Arabic large language model.
Jais is a bilingual Arabic-English model that has been trained on a massive dataset of text and code. It can be used for a variety of tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, and question answering. It was trained on the Condor Galaxy, the world’s largest AI supercomputer, using 116 billion Arabic tokens and 279 billion English tokens.

Notes:
United Nations Biodiversity has urged people globally to use the word ‘funga’ whenever they say ‘flora and fauna’, in order to highlight the importance of fungi.
Fungi, along with Animalia (animals), Plantae (plants), Protista, Archaea/Archaebacteria, and Bacteria or Eubacteria form the six ‘kingdoms’ of biology.

Notes:
Union Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya M Scindia inaugurated Utkela Airport and a direct flight between Utkela and Bhubaneshwar.
Utkela airport is owned by the Government of Odisha. It has been developed as a regional airport under the UDAN scheme of the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Government of India at a cost of Rs. 31.07 Crores.