Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

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High Arctic temperatures break records

News

• Arctic region is seeing record high temperatures, with the North Pole recently registering 30 degrees Celsius above normal for this time of year.

Beyond News

• At the same time, sea ice is covering the smallest area in the dead of winter since records began more than half-a-century ago.
• A weather phenomenon called a “sudden stratospheric warming” has produced North Pole temperatures at or above freezing.
• There are no permanent sensors at the North Pole, but weather services in the U.S. and Scandinavian countries reported temperatures peaking on February 25.
• At the Longyearbyen weather station on the Island of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, temperatures were 10 C above average over the last 30 days, according to Zack Labe, a climate modeller at the University of California Irvine.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

Telangana moves to mobile governance

News

• The government is going to bring out a law to ensure that all its services are available through mobile and in the near future, citizens can expect land registrations, revenue records and the likes to be available in the format.

150 services

• Right from today by downloading the app, citizens can avail up to 150 services of the GHMC, RTA, Police and T-Wallet and within a year another 1000 services will be added to it, said Meeseva and Electronics Service Delivery (ESD) Commissioner G.T. Venkateswara Rao.
• The IT Secretary said the mobile apps of all government departments will be dovetailed into T App Folio and it was ready to accept apps developed by the private sector having public utility like those dealing with women’s safety and tourism.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

Cops Eye: New app to help police

News

• The Madurai police have come up with a new app “Cops Eye.” Based on face recognition feature, it would help them detect people with criminal backgrounds by clicking photographs with their mobile phones.

Beyond News

• It would take only few seconds to match the face of a person with the of data of 2,000 criminals from the city and Madurai rural police.
• The data of 2,000 criminals has their names, photographs and details of criminal cases.
• Taking photograph of any person whose data is available with the centralised criminal analysing system will give all particulars.
• It detects the criminal with 93% accuracy.
• The app comes with a password to protect the data.
• The rural police also launched six mobile two-wheeler patrol vehicles on the occasion.

Three astronauts back on Earth after months in space

News

• Three astronauts have landed safely in Kazakhstan after five-and-a-half-months of performing research and spacewalks in low-Earth orbit.

Beyond News

• The three were part of the Expedition 54 crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
• Vande Hei ventured outside the space station on four spacewalks to perform work that included replacing and lubricating the Latching End Effectors on both ends of the Canadarm2.
• Misurkin conducted one record-setting spacewalk with fellow cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov to replace an electronics box for a high-gain communications antenna on the Zvezda service module in February.
• The spacewalk timed out at eight hours and 13 minutes, the longest in Russian space programme history. Misurkin now has spent 334 days in space on two flights.

Waterbird species down by half in EGREE Region

News

• The number of water bird species has declined by half in most habitats across the East Godavari River Estuarine Ecosystem (EGREE) region.

Beyond News

• This was revealed during a census conducted in the region, including the Coringa Wildlife Sanctuary and parts of Mada forest and Papikondalu regions.
• It was found that the number of waterbird species has come down to half compared with the Asian Waterbird Census 2017.
• In the census, uncommon bird species such as Eurasian spoonbill or common spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia, Oyster catcher (Haematopus ostralegus) and Yellow bittern (Ixobrychus sinensis) were recorded.
• The Yellow bittern was not recorded in previous census.

Globally endangered

• According to Chief Executive Officer of EGREE and Chief Conservator of Forests, Rajamahendravaram region, a total of 23,779 birds of 85 waterbird species, including 34 migratory, 30 resident and breeding, five local migratory and 12 local or migratory species, were recorded.
• Of he 85 recorded species 57 are least concern, 17 were not evaluated, 10 of them were near threatened and one is globally endangered waterbird species.

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