Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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India’s 1st pod taxi on the way, to follow U.S. safety norms

News

• India’s first pod taxi project has moved a step closer to reality after a high-level panel recommended inviting fresh bids for the same conforming to the strictest safety standards on the lines of those prescribed by an American body.

Personal Rapid Transit

• PRT is an advanced public transport using automated electric pod cars to provide a taxi-like demand responsive feeder and shuttle services for small groups of travellers and is a green mode of uninterrupted journey.

Beyond News

• The projected ₹4,000-crore pod taxi scheme also known as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT)  is a dream project of Road Transport and Highways Minister , and the NHAI has been mandated to execute it on Delhi-Gurgaon pilot corridor (12.3 km) from Delhi-Haryana border to Rajiv Chowk in Gurgaon on a PPP (public-private partnership) basis.
• The ambitious project has been plagued by delays as government think-tank Niti Aayog raised some red flags, asking the highways ministry to direct initial bidders to prepare a 1-km pilot stretch as all the technologies were unproven.

Subsequent delays were caused due to formation of the high- powered committee to lay down safety and other specifications.

Dalits hold rally, demand their rights

News

• Chairman of the All India Confederation of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Organisations, Udit Raj, addressed a rally at Ramlila Maidan , demanding reservation in promotion and private sector.

Beyond News

• The rally was also attended by leaders and members of the Dalit, SC/ST and tribal communities from across the country.
• Chairman had moved a private member Bill in Parliament for reservation to Dalits in private sector, but there were no serious developments made by the government.

 He also said that as long as there is discrimination and prejudices against the underprivileged communities, his demand for reservation will be steadfast.

Major demands

• Among the major demands made by the leader are reservation in promotion and jobs in private sector for Dalits, tribals and backward classes, ending of contract system and outsourcing, reservation in higher judiciary and Armed forces, increase in educational scholarships for the backward community students and law for implementation of Special Component Plan (SCP) and Tribal Sub Plan (TSP).

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

Now, a big bubble theory

News

• Scientists have said that the solar system could have formed in the bubbles produced by a giant, long-dead star, which was 40 to 50 times the size of the sun.

Beyond News

• The prevailing theory is that the solar system formed billions of years ago near a supernova.
• But the new scenario begins with a giant type of star called a Wolf-Rayet star.

They burn the hottest of all stars, producing tonnes of elements which are flung off the surface in an intense stellar wind.

As the Wolf-Rayet star sheds its mass, the stellar wind ploughs through the material around it, forming a bubble structure with a dense shell.

• Meteorites left over from the early solar system suggests there was a lot of aluminium-26. In addition, studies increasingly suggest the solar system had less of the isotope iron-60.
• This brings scientists up short, because supernovae produce both isotopes.

This brought the scientists to Wolf-Rayet stars, which release lots of aluminium-26, but no iron-60.

As for the fate of the giant Wolf-Rayet star, the researchers believe that its life ended long ago, likely in a supernova explosion or a direct collapse to a black hole.

‘India to become fifth largest economy in 2018’

News

• India is set to overtake the United Kingdom and France to become the world’s fifth largest economy next year, a report said Tuesday.

Beyond News

• Currently ranked seventh, India will move up to fifth place in 2018 and vault to third spot by 2032, the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a London-based consultancy, said in its annual rankings.

Growth slumped to 5.7% for the three months ending June but recovered slightly to 6.3% for the quarter ending September.

 India’s economy has still caught up with that of France and the U.K. and in 2018 will have overtaken them both to become the world’s fifth largest economy in dollar terms.

New system uses Twitter, AI to predict floods

News

• Scientists are combining Twitter, citizen science and cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to develop an early-warning system for flood-prone communities.

Beyond News

• Researchers have shown how AI can be used to extract data from Twitter and crowd-sourced information from mobile phone apps to build hyper-resolution monitoring of urban flooding.
• MyCoast is a system used by a number of environmental agencies to collect ‘citizen science’ data about various coastal hazards or incidents.
• The system contains over 6,000 flood photographs, all of which were collected through the mobile app.
• The information extracted by AI tools was validated against precipitation data and road closure reports to examine the quality of the data.

Flood-related tweets were shown to correlate to precipitation levels, while the crowd-sourced data matched strongly with the road closure reports.

Taken together, these tools can be used to monitor the water penetration of urban flooding over a city.

This can be then used to improve forecasting models and early warning systems to help residents and authorities prepare for an upcoming flood.

First-ever hybrid bird species from the Amazon discovered

News

• Scientists have discovered the first-known hybrid bird species to be found in the Amazon rainforest – a golden-crowned manakin with yellow feathers.

Beyond News

• Through a series of genetic and other tests, researchers found that the golden-crowned manakin – first discovered in Brazil in 1957 but not seen again until 2002 – is in fact a hybrid species.
• A hybrid species forms when two parental species mate to produce a hybrid population.In this case, the two parents are the snow-capped manakin, named for its bright snowy-white crown feathers, and the opal-crowned manakin, named for its brilliant iridescent crown feathers.

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