MALAYAN GIANT SQUIRREL
A first-of-its-kind study by the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) under the Union Ministry of Environment has projected that numbers of the Malayan Giant Squirrel (Ratufa bicolor) could decline by 90 per cent in India by 2050.
About:
- The Malayan Giant Squirrel, one of the world’s largest squirrel species that has a dark upper body, pale under parts, and a long, bushy tail.
- The species is listed as Near Threatened on IUCN’s 2016 list, and it is protected under India’s Wildlife Protection Act.
- It is currently found in parts of West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and Nagaland. It is also distributed through Southern China, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Burma, the Malayan Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java.
- It is found mostly in evergreen and semi-evergreen forests, from plains to hills at elevations of 50 m to 1,500 m above sea level.
Recent study:
- Destruction of its habitat could restrict the squirrel to only southern Sikkim and North Bengal by 2050, according to the ZSI.
- Only 43.38 per cent of the squirrel’s original habitat in India is now favourable to it, says the study; by 2050, the favourable zone could shrink to 2.94 per cent of the area the species was meant to inhabit.
- UN DECIDES CANNABIS NOT A DANGEROUS NARCOTICThe UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) took a number of decisions, leading to changes in the way cannabis is internationally regulated, including its reclassification out of the most dangerous category of drugs.
About:
- In reviewing a series of World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations on marijuana and its derivatives, the CND zeroed-in on the decision to remove cannabis from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs — where it was listed alongside deadly, addictive opioids, including heroin.
- The CND’s 53 Member States voted to removed cannabis – where it had been placed for 59 years – from the strictest control schedules, that even discouraged its use for medical purposes.
- With an historic vote, the CND has opened the door to recognizing the medicinal and therapeutic potential of the commonly-used but still largely illegal recreational drug.
- The decision could also drive additional scientific research into the plant’s long-heralded medicinal properties and act as catalyst for countries to legalize the drug for medicinal use, and reconsider laws on its recreational use.
- OXIDATIVE POTENTIALAs per a study recently published in the journal Nature, the harmful nature of atmospheric particulate matter is potentially due to its oxidative potential.
About:
- Exposure to the fine particle matter with diameters generally below 10 micrometres pose the greatest health risk. It is because they can get deep into lungs and even into bloodstream.
- The capability of these tiny airborne particulate matter (PM) to react with oxygen to form highly reactive chemical molecules is known as reactive oxygen species (ROS) or oxidative potential (OP).
- A reactive oxygen species build-up in cells may cause damage to DNA, RNA, proteins, and may cause cell death.
DHARAMPAL GULATIThe founder of MDH Spices, Mahashay Dharampal Gulati — the grand old man of spices — suffered a cardiac arrest and died at a Delhi hospital at the age of 98.
About:
- Dharampal Gulati (1923 – 2020), also known as Mahashay Dharampal Gulati, was an Indian businessman, and founder and CEO of MDH (Mahashian Di Hatti), an Indian spice company.
- He was referred to as 'spice-king' in reference to his pioneering of ready-to-use ground spices.
- He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian award, in 2019.
- MDH is the second largest leader in the Indian market with 12% market share, following Everest Spices.
INDIA’S FIRST HOMES FOR TRANSGENDER CHILDRENIndia’s first homes for transgender children in need of care and protection will soon be established in Bengaluru. Two government-run homes for transgender children will be established in Bengaluru Urban.
About:
- The Ministry of Women and Child Development gave its nod for the project last week.
- Many transgender children in State-run children’s homes for girls or boys were not comfortable.
- It is essential that a home is established for transgender children as they face a lot of stigma and abuse. Establishing a separate home and giving them attention and care at a young age will help address some of their concerns.”
ARECIBO TELESCOPEPuerto Rico’s massive Arecibo telescope, famous for its stellar contributions to astronomy, collapsed, leaving many among the scientific community in shock and anguish.
About:
- The second-largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, Arecibo was first built in 1963. The US National Science Foundation owned the telescope.
- Being the most powerful radar, scientists employed Arecibo to observe planets, asteroids and the ionosphere, making several discoveries over the decades, including finding prebiotic molecules in distant galaxies, the first exoplanets, and the first millisecond pulsar.
- In 1967, Arecibo was able to discover that the planet Mercury rotates in 59 days and not 88 days as had been originally thought.
- In 1993, scientists Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the observatory in monitoring a binary pulsar, providing a strict test of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and the first evidence for the existence of gravitational waves.\
DEPUTY CHIEF OF STRATEGY POSTA Major restructure at the Army Headquarters has finally been approved by the government.
About:
- In an order issued on December 2, the government has given its nod to create the position of a third Deputy Chief of Army, who will act as a “single-point advice” person to the Vice Chief of Army on operational issues.
- The new Deputy Chief (Strategy) will head operations, intelligence, perspective and information warfare.
- The Directorate General of Military Operations and the Directorate General of Military Intelligence, both headed by Lieutenant General-rank officers, will be under him. Two new offices, for Perspective Planning and Strategic Communications, which will also be headed by director generals of Lt Gen-rank, will also come under the new Deputy Chief.
- Current DGMO Lt Gen Paramjit Singh is likely to be appointed the first Deputy Chief (Strategy).
PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE FOR HISTORY 2020British Indian journalist and author Anita Anand's book that tells the story of a young man caught up in the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar has won a prestigious history-literary prize in the UK.
About:
- 'The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj' beat six other titles for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2020, awarded annually for a non-fiction book of specifically historical content.
- English PEN, which stands for Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists, is one of the world's oldest human rights organisations championing the freedom to write and read.
- It is the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers' association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries.
- Marjorie Hessell-Tiltman was a member of PEN during the 1960s and 1970s and on her death in 1999, she bequeathed 100,000 pounds to the PEN Literary Foundation to found a prize in her name.
- Entries are required to be works of high literary merit - that is, not primarily written for the academic market - and can cover all historical periods.
AUSTRALIAN SQUARE KILOMETRE ARRAY PATHFINDER (ASKAP)The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a powerful telescope developed and operated by the country’s science agency CSIRO, has mapped over three million galaxies in a record 300 hours during its first all-sky survey.
About:
- ASKAP is a telescope designed over a decade ago and located about 800 km north of Perth. It became fully operational in February 2019 and is currently conducting pilot surveys of the sky before it can begin large-scale projects from 2021 onward.
- ASKAP surveys are designed to map the structure and evolution of the Universe, which it does by observing galaxies and the hydrogen gas that they contain.
- One of its most important features is its wide field of view, because of which it has been able to take panoramic pictures of the sky in great detail.
- The telescope uses novel technology developed by CSIRO, which is a kind of a “radio camera” to achieve high survey speeds and consists of 36 dish antennas, which are each 12m in diameter.
- The present Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) taken by the ASKAP telescope is like a “Google map” of the Universe where most of the millions of star-like points are distant galaxies, about a million of which have not been seen before.
2020 SONASA has confirmed that the Near-Earth Object called 2020 SO is the rocket booster that helped lift the space agency’s Surveyor spacecraft toward the Moon in 1966.
About:
- The Surveyor-2 spacecraft was supposed to make a soft landing on the Moon’s surface in September 1966, during which time one of the three thrusters failed to ignite as a result of which the spacecraft started spinning and crashed on the surface.
- The aim of the mission was to reconnoiter the lunar surface ahead of the Apollo missions that led to the first lunar landing in 1969.
- While the spacecraft crashed into the Moon’s surface, the rocket booster disappeared into an unknown orbit around the Sun.
- Exposure to the fine particle matter with diameters generally below 10 micrometres pose the greatest health risk. It is because they can get deep into lungs and even into bloodstream.
- In reviewing a series of World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations on marijuana and its derivatives, the CND zeroed-in on the decision to remove cannabis from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs — where it was listed alongside deadly, addictive opioids, including heroin.
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