Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

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Bronze Age ruins found in China

News

• A team of archaeologists have unearthed Bronze Age ruins including the remains of ancient houses and ash pits along with animal bones, bronze ware and stone tools in China’s Jilin province.

Beyond News

• The finds were discovered on a sand dune near Dajinshan village in Shuangliao city.
• Researchers speculate that the ruins might serve as evidence of a living and fishing place for ancient people near the Eastern Liaohe river based on large quantities of unearthed life utensils, animal bones, fishbones, mussels and shellfish.
• The ruins are around 150 metres long and 100 metres wide.
• Jointly launched by researchers from countries including China, France and the US, the ongoing excavation started in July and is covering around 1,000 square metres.
• After the excavation is completed, the archaeologists will send 20 carbon samples to the University of Oxford for more precise age testing.
• The new discovery will shed some light on the living and working conditions of ancient people along the Eastern Liaohe river basin, and enrich people’s understanding of ancient life in the region.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

India moves up to 77th rank in Ease of Doing Business Index

News

• India jumped 23 ranks in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index 2018 to 77. It ranked 100 in the 2017 report.

Beyond News

• The Index ranks 190 countries across 10 indicators ranged across the lifecycle of a business from ‘starting a business’ to ‘resolving insolvency’.
• During the past year, India made Starting a Business easier by fully integrating multiple application forms into a general incorporation form.
• India also replaced the value added tax with the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for which the registration process is faster in both Delhi and Mumbai, the two cities measured by the Doing Business report.
• In addition, Mumbai abolished the practice of site inspections for registering companies under the Shops and Establishments Act. As a result, the time to start a business has been halved to 16 days, from 30 days.
• India moved from rank 184 in 2014 to 52 in 2018 in the construction permits category, 137 to 24 in getting electricity, 126 to 80 in trading across borders, 156 to 121 in paying taxes, 137 to 108 in resolving Insolvency, 186 to 163 in enforcing contracts, 158 to 137 in starting a business, and 36 to 22 in getting credit.

Statue of Unity: Salient features of the world’s ‘tallest statue’

• Height: 182 metres. This makes the statue almost twice the height of the iconic Statue of Liberty in New York.
• Location: Around 3.5 km downstream from the Sardar Sarovar Dam, on islet Sadhu Bet on the bed of the river Narmada.
• Cost: ₹2,989 crore (approx)
• Sculptor: Padma Bhushan Ram V. Suthar, a 93-year-old acclaimed sculptor who graduated from the prestigious J.J School of Art in Bombay. He has sculpted masterpieces including that of Mother Chambal at Gandhi Sagar Dam in Madhya Pradesh, equestrian statue of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Amritsar, and numerous statues of Mahatma Gandhi.
• Construction period: 34 months. Work began on December 19, 2015.
• Materials consumed: 70,000 tonnes of cement, 18,500 tonnes of reinforcement steel, 6,000 tonnes of structural steel and 1,700 metric tonnes of bronze, which was used for the outer cladding of the structure, according to a government statement.
• Specialities: The statue is slender most at the base, which goes against the norms of what other tall statues have followed. The walking pose also opened up a gap of 6.4 metres between the two feet which then had to be tested to withstand wind velocity, says L&T.
• Engineered to withstand wind speeds of up to 50 m per second (almost 180 km per hour wind speed)
• Other challenges included doing justice to a legend’s statue, as opposed to that of an imaginary figure.
• The statue is divided into five zones – Up to its shin is the first zone, comprising three levels, including an exhibit floor, mezzanine and roof. This zone will contain a Memorial Garden and a large museum. Zone 2 extends up to the statue’s thighs at 149 metres, while Zone 3 goes up to the viewing gallery at 153 metres. Zone 4 comprises the maintenance area and Zone 5 the head and shoulders.
• The viewing gallery at the height of 135 metres can accommodate up to 200 people at a time.

States other than Delhi-NCR can use existing stocks of firecrackers for Diwali this year: SC

News

• The Supreme Court allowed States other than Delhi to use their existing stocks of crackers for Diwali next month.

Beyond News

• However, the Bench checked the enthusiasm by directing that only green crackers can be manufactured henceforth across the country. That means once the existing stocks are used up, no new polluting crackers can be made in the cracker factories.
• The court has allowed Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and the adjoining southern States, which celebrate Diwali in the morning, to burst crackers for two hours in the day.
• The time-slots for bursting crackers can be staggered through the festival days, for instance like one hour in the morning and an hour in the night. The decision to finalise the time slots has been left to the respective State authorities.
• The court refused to lift the pan-India ban on sale of crackers online through e-commerce websites. Any violation of this direction would lead to contempt of the apex court.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

NASA’s Kepler space telescope to retire

News

• The Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel and will be retired after a 9-1/2-year mission in which it detected thousands of planets beyond our solar system and boosted the search for worlds that might harbour alien life.

Beyond News

• Currently orbiting the sun 156 million km from the earth, the spacecraft will drift further from our planet when mission engineers turn off its radio transmitters.
• The telescope laid bare the diversity of planets that reside in our Milky Way galaxy, with findings indicating that distant star systems are populated with billions of planets, and even helped pinpoint the first moon known outside our solar system.
• The Kepler telescope discovered more than 2,600 of the roughly 3,800 exoplanets the term for planets outside our solar system that have been documented in the past two decades.
• The telescope has now run out of the fuel needed for further operations.

Smartphones may help predict flash floods better

News

• Data from smartphones could be harnessed to forecast weather patterns that lead to flash floods and other natural disasters, according to a study.

Findings

• Smartphones measure raw data, such as atmospheric pressure, temperatures and humidity, to assess atmospheric conditions,
• To understand how the smartphone sensors work, they placed four smartphones around TAU campus under controlled conditions.
• The study, analysed the data to detect phenomena such as “atmospheric tides,” which are similar to ocean tides.
• The researchers also analysed data from a UK-based app called WeatherSignal.
• The sensors in our smartphones are constantly monitoring our environment, including gravity, the earth’s magnetic field, atmospheric pressure, light levels, humidity, temperatures, sound levels and more.
• Vital atmospheric data exists today on some 3 to 4 billion smartphones worldwide. This data can improve our ability to accurately forecast the weather and other natural disasters that are taking so many lives every year.
• The same smartphones may be used to provide real-time weather alerts through a feedback loop.
• The public can provide atmospheric data to the “cloud” via a smartphone application. This data would then be processed into real-time forecasts and returned to the users with a forecast or a warning to those in danger zones.

The study may lead to better monitoring and predictions of hard-to-predict flash floods.

Just six sub-species of tigers remain

News

• Six different sub-species of tigers exist today, scientists confirmed last week, amid hopes the findings will boost efforts to save the fewer than 4,000 free-range big cats that remain in the world.

Findings

• The six include the Bengal tiger, Amur tiger, South China tiger, Sumatran tiger, Indochinese tiger and Malayan tiger.
• Three other tiger subspecies have already gone extinct: the Caspian, Javan and Bali tigers.
• Key threats to tigers’ survival include habitat loss and poaching.
• How to best conserve the species and encourage both captive and wild breeding has been a matter of debate among scientists, in part because of divisions over how many tiger sub-species exist. Some say there are two types, and others believe there are five or six.
• Researchers analyzed the complete genomes of 32 tiger specimens in order to confirm they fall into six genetically distinct groups.
• Researchers found very little evidence of breeding among different tiger populations.
• This low genetic diversity indicates that each subspecies has a unique evolutionary history.
• It also sets tigers apart from other big cats like jaguars, which more commonly intermix across entire continents.

Towards the path of extinction

News

A meticulous re-creation of a 3-decade-old study of birds on a mountainside in Peru has given scientists a rare chance to prove how the changing climate is pushing species out of the places they are best adapted to.

Findings

• Surveys of more than 400 species of birds in 1985 and then in 2017 have found that populations of almost all had declined, as many as eight had disappeared completely, and nearly all had moved to higher elevations in what scientists call “an escalator to extinction.”
• It’s not certain whether the birds shifted ranges because of temperature changes, or indirect impacts, such as shifts in the ranges of insects or seeds that they feed on.
• These findings, confirm what biologists had long suspected, but had few opportunities to confirm. The existence of a 1985 survey of birds on the same mountain gave scientists a rare and useful baseline.
• Birds adapted to live within narrow temperature bands – in regions without wide seasonal variations – may be particularly vulnerable to climate change.

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