Current General Knowledge - March 2010

AWARDS
SAARC Environment Award, 2010
Environmentalist Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal has been selected for the award for setting new milestones in the field of environment, especially his initiative on cleaning the Kali Bein rivulet passing through Kapurthala, Punjab.

Saraswati Samman, 2009
“Lafzan Di Dargah”, a poetry collection in Punjabi by Surjit Patar, has been awarded the 19th Saraswati Samman for 2009.

The award, instituted by the K.K. Birla Foundation in 1991, carries an award of Rs 5 lakh, a citation and a plaque. It is recognised as the most prestigious and the highest literary honour in India and is given every year to an outstanding literary work written in an Indian language and published during the last 10 years.

The first recipient of the award was Harivansh Rai Bachchan in 1991 for his autobiography. Other awardees include Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar, Oriya writer Manoj Das, Malayalam poetess Balamaniamma, Tamil writer Indira Parthasarathy, Bengali novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay and Urdu literary critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi.

Oscar Awards, 2010
Best Movie: The Hurt Locker.
Best Director: Kathyrn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker). She has become the first woman director to win the honour.
Best Actor: Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart).
Best Actress: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side).
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique.
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz.
Best Animated Movie: Up
Best Foreign Film: The Secret in Their Eyes (Argentina).

Chameli Devi Jain Award, 2009
The award for an outstanding woman media-person has been shared by Shoma Chaudhary, executive editor of Tehelka, Delhi and Monalisa Changkija, Editor of Nagaland Page, Dimapur.

Mother Teresa Award, 2010
UGC chairman Sukhadeo Thorat has been given the prestigious Mother Teresa Lifetime Achievement Award for 2010. Thorat, who has authored 21 publications, has been instrumental in introducing several academic and administrative reforms in higher education during ongoing XIth plan.

CYBER SPACE
Browse at the speed of light
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a new infra-red laser made from germanium that operates at room temperature, which has made light-speed computing come one step closer to reality.

The research removes the cryogenic cooling systems previously needed for infrared lasers and could lead to powerful computer chips that operate at the speed of light.

"Using a germanium laser as a light source, you could communicate at very high data rates at very low power," said Jurgen Michel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who developed the new germanium laser. "Eventually, you could have the computing power of today's supercomputers inside a laptop," he said.

The creation of a new laser, even one based on germanium, is not newsworthy; more than 15,000 different lasers, some of which use germanium, have been created since the 1950s.

What makes this particular germanium laser unique is that it creates an infra-red beam at room temperature.

Until now, infra-red germanium lasers required expensive cryogenic cooling systems to operate. The new germanium laser operates at room temperature.

To create the germanium laser, the scientists take a six-inch, silvery-gray disk of silicon and spray it with a thin film of germanium. These same disks are actually used to produce chips in today's computers.

An electrically powered, room-temperature, infrared laser for laptop computers is still years away, however, cautioned Michel. If and when those laptops do arrive, they will be powerful—more powerful in fact than even today's super-computers.

DEFENCE
Super Cruiser BrahMos test-fired successfully
On March 21, 2010, India joined the league of select nations to have a ‘manoeuvrable’ supersonic cruise missile when it successfully test-fired the vertical-launch version of 290-km range BrahMos from a warship in the Bay of Bengal off the Orissa coast.

After the latest test, India has become the first and only country in the world to have a “manoeuvrable supersonic cruise missile in its inventory”.

The test-firing was part of the pre-induction tests by the Navy as moves are afoot to deploy the vertical-launch version of the missile in ships. The weapon system has been designed and developed by the Indo-Russian joint venture company.

All the three Indian Navy’s Talwar class ships, under construction in Russia, have been fitted with vertical launchers and many other ships will also be equipped with them. The Navy had earlier carried out several tests of the BrahMos but most of them had been done from inclined launchers abroad INS Rajput. The missile is already in service with the Navy and its Shivalik class frigates have been equipped with it. BrahMos has also been inducted into the Army.

PERSONS
Koirala, Girija Prasad
Veteran democratic leader of Nepal politics and former Prime Minister of Nepal, he died on March 20, 2010. He was 87. He had the distinction of becoming the Prime Minister of Nepal five times. He had led the peaceful April Uprising in 2006 and abolished the 239-year-old authoritarian royal regime of Nepal.

RESEARCH
World's smallest superconductor developed
Scientists have developed the world's smallest superconductor—less than one nanometre wide—which could be used for making miniature electronic devices. The superconductor, a sheet of four pairs of molecules, provides the first evidence that nano-scale molecular superconducting wires can be fabricated.

Superconducting materials have an electrical resistance of zero, and so can carry large electrical currents without power dissipation or heat generation.

Superconductivity was first discovered in 1911, and until recently, was considered a macroscopic phenomenon. The current finding suggests, however, that it exists at the molecular scale, which opens up a novel route for studying this phenomenon.

CERN scientists recreate how universe began
On March 30, 2010, scientists came a little closer to understanding the Big Bang—the event that created the universe—when they slammed together two streams of sub-atomic particles, moving at very high speed, at an energy level never before achieved in the laboratory.

The collision was orchestrated at around in the world’s largest particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva.

The collision sought to recreate—on a vastly reduced scale—the conditions that scientists believe came into being right after the Big Bang. Once analysed, the results could change the way physicists understand the origin and structure of the universe.

When sub-atomic particles slam together at very high speeds, they shatter, leaving behind new elements. Scientists are hoping one of the new elements created by the collision and shattering will be the fabled Higgs boson—popularly called ‘God Particle’—the particle that some theories claim is responsible for the mass of everything in the universe.

The LHC is a 26.6 km circular tube buried nearly 100 meter below the earth’s surface.

Indian scientists have contributed to the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the ultra-sensitive detectors that scientists at CERN used to monitor and photograph the collision. The TIFR, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, Punjab University and Delhi University have all been involved in the project.

Breakthrough in Malaria study
Scientists from India and the US have found what they call an internal “switch” that controls mosquitoes’ immunity to malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites. If scientists can find a way to flip this switch, they could block the spread of malaria from mosquitoes to humans, according to Sanjeev Kumar, lead author of the study and a researcher in the biological sciences group at the Birla Institute of Technology (BITS) in Pilani. 

A natural reaction inside the mosquito’s body after it sucks human blood might be responsible for protecting Plasmodium parasites from the natural germ-fighting agents in its stomach, found the scientists. Because of this reaction, the parasites can multiply and spread to humans.

As soon as a mosquito ingests a meal, the blood heads for the gut. Normally, a mosquito has strong anti-germ agents that hunt down and kill any invasive bacteria and parasites. But, the scientists found that, this germ-fighting ability was blocked by a reaction in the mosquito’s body. Once blood reaches the gut, it triggers two proteins, an Immuno-Modulatory Peroxidase (IMPer) and dual oxidase (Duox). These proteins form a protective net-like bag around the blood meal.

The blood—and any parasites it contains—passes through the digestive system unscathed. The parasites multiply and move into the mosquito’s salivary glands, from where they pass into their next human victim.

When the scientists switched off the functioning of the two proteins, the bag didn’t form and all the Plasmodium parasites were killed.

The findings have implications for the study of human immunity. It has been long suspected that a similar reaction is what allows the good bacteria to survive in the stomach.

SPACE RESEARCH
Chandrayaan-I finds deepest crater on moon
Scientists have discovered moon's biggest and deepest crater, some 2,400 km-long and 9 km deep, using data from a NASA instrument that flew aboard India's maiden unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan-I.

The US space agency's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) detected the enormous crater, the South Pole-Aitken basin, that was created when an asteroid smacked into moon's southern hemisphere shortly after the formation of earth's only natural satellite.

Chandrayaan-I finds ice on moon
The success story of Chandrayaan-I, the maiden Indian moon mission, turned a new chapter with the discovery of ice deposits on the moon by an American payload aboard the spacecraft.

Analysis of data obtained by the Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (Mini-SAR) aboard Chandrayaan-I spacecraft has provided evidence for the presence of ice deposits near the moon’s North Pole. The Mini-SAR instrument found more than 40 small craters (two to 15 km in diameter) with sub-surface water ice located at their base.

The interior of these craters are permanently shadowed and thus, oblivious to the extreme solar heat found on the moon.

Earlier, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, another NASA instrument aboard the Indian mission, discovered water molecules in the moon’s polar region. The two pioneering discoveries made by payloads aboard the Chandrayaan-I have arguably made the Indian mission the most successful lunar expedition after the Apollo-11 manned mission to the moon in 1969.

MISCELLANEOUS
Census 2010
The 15th national census exercise, the biggest census ever to be attempted in human history to cover India's 1.2 billion population, began on April 1, 2010 with President Pratibha Patil being the first to be enumerated in the decennial exercise.

The census is the most credible source of information on demography (population characteristics), economic activity, literacy and education, housing and household amenities, urbanisation, fertility and mortality, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, language, religion, migration, disability and many other socio-cultural and demographic data since 1872.

Census is the only source of primary data at village, town and ward level. It provides valuable information for planning and formulation of polices for Central and State governments and is widely used by national and international agencies, scholars, business people, industrialists, and many more.

The delimitation/reservation of constituencies -- parliamentary/assembly/panchayats and other local bodies is also done on the basis of the demographic data thrown up by the census. The census is the basis for reviewing the country's progress in the past decade, monitoring the on-going schemes of the government and most importantly, plan for the future.

The slogan of Census 2011 is 'Our Census, Our Future'.

National Population Register
The Union government has given a go-ahead to the creation of National Population Register (NPR), a unique mechanism to record biometric particulars of the entire populace of India. The work on the project will start in April 2010 and is expected to complete by September 2010.

The project would cover an estimated population of 1.2 billion and the total cost of the scheme is Rs 3,539.24 crore. The creation of a digital database with identity details of all individuals, along with their photographs and finger biometrics, will result in the creation of a biometrics based identity system in the country. Once finalised, the NPR database will be sent to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for biometric de-duplication and assigning of a unique identification number. This UID number will be added to the NPR database.

Such a database will enhance the efficacy of providing services to the residents under government schemes and programmes, improve the security scenario and check identity frauds in the country.

Cloud Computing
Most of us who use web-based email services, watch a video online, share snaps using photo-hosting services, read news online or watch TV shows on the internet may not realise that we use ‘cloud computing’ services.

A metaphor for the internet, cloud computing stores data and applications on the internet. Users do not have to invest in hardware (reducing costs considerably) and maintenance experts. They can simply pull up applications when needed and use them like we use utilities, for example electricity. Most players provide these services for free for individual users. For enterprise users, it’s generally a paid subscription-based model.

Major Indian players like Wipro, HCL Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Patni offer cloud computing solutions as “software as a service” or SaaS or on-demand computing.

Cloud computing, however, still faces questions within IT about security and the guarantee of uptime for companies which rely on the cloud.

Civil Services (Prelims) Exam to change
The first big reform in the way India selects its civil servants is around the corner. The Union government has decided to replace the Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination with the Civil Service Aptitude Test (CSAT), which will test candidates on their aptitude and analytical abilities rather than their ability to memorise. The CSAT is expected to come into effect from 2011.
The UPSC is further expected to push for changes in the Civil Service (Mains) Examination also.