Tardigrade, the water bear
Category: Ecology
- In April, the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet attempted to land on the Moon, but crashed on the surface.
- It was carrying a number of items — including thousands of specimens of a living organism called tardigrade.
- The tardigrade, also known as water bear, is among the toughest and most resilient creatures on Earth.
- The tardigrade can only be seen under a microscope.
- Half a millimetre long, it is essentially a water-dweller but also inhabits land and can survive in the cold vacuum of outer space.
- If all other life were to be wiped out by a cataclysmic event — a large asteroid impact, a supernova or a gamma-ray bursts — the tardigrade would be the likeliest to survive.
- The tardigrade can endure extreme hot and cold temperature levels.
- Although the tardigrades on the spacecraft were dehydrated, the organism is known to “come back to life” on rehydration. I
- However, there is no evidence of liquid water on the Moon, although there is ice. Without liquid water, it is possible that the tardigrades will remain in their current state, unless future astronauts find them and revive them in water.
- The tardigrade derives its name from the fact that it looks like an eight-legged bear, with a mouth that can project out like a tongue.
- A tardigrade typically eats fluids, using its claws and mouth to tear open plant and animal cells, so that it can suck nutrients out of them.
- It is also known to feast on bacteria and, in some cases, to kill and eat other tardigrades.
- Although they are famed for their resilience, they are destructible too. Should a human being swallow a tardigrade with her food, her stomach acid will cause the flesh of the tardigrade to disintegrate.
India biggest emitter of sulphur dioxide
Category: Environment
- Air pollutant emissions from power plants and other industries continue to increase in India, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
- India is the largest emitter of sulphur dioxide in the world, with more than 15% of all the anthropogenic sulphur dioxide hotspots.
- Almost all of these emissions in India are because of coal-burning.
- The vast majority of coal-based power plants in India lack flue-gas desulphurisation technology to reduce air pollution.
- In a first step to combat pollution levels, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change introduced, for the first time, sulphur dioxide emission limits for coal-fired power plants in December 2015. But the deadline for the installation of flue-gas desulphurisation (FGD) in power plants has been extended from 2017 to 2022. A
- The largest sulphur dioxide emission hotspots have been found in Russia, South Africa, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Serbia.
Milestone for ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2
Category : Sc/tech
- India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission crossed a major milestone on its journey towards the Moon, having entered a lunar orbit, almost exactly 30 days after being launched on July 22.
- After being launched, Chandrayaan-2 had been put in an elliptical orbit around the Earth.
- Until August 14, it had been going around the Earth, incrementally raising its orbit by firing boosters on five occasions. Eventually, it reached an orbit that was 276 km from the Earth’s surface at its closest and 142,975 km at the farthest.
- It spent nearly a week in that orbit, before firing a booster once again to break free from the Earth orbit and begin its journey towards the Moon. This transit from orbit to orbit happened on August 14.
- After five days of this journey, Chandrayaan-2 came sufficiently close to the Moon to experience its gravity. And then, it entered into an orbit around the Moon.
- What is meant by ‘insertion into lunar orbit’?
- Just like it was going around the Earth at the start of its journey, Chandrayaan-2 is now orbiting the Moon.
- It was placed into an elliptical orbit that was 114 km from the Moon’s surface at its nearest, and 18,072 km at the farthest.
- The spacecraft will carry out a few more manoeuvres to eventually place itself in a circular orbit of 100 km × 100 km around the Moon.
- The Lander and Rover modules will detach themselves from here and descend into lower orbits before finally making a landing on September 7.
- The main spacecraft, however, will continue to orbit the Moon in the 100 km circular orbit for at least one year, making observations through the several instruments it has on board.
Kutch desert was once a forest
Category: Geography
- The hot arid desert of Kutch was once a humid sub-tropical forest with a variety of birds, freshwater fish and possibly giraffes and rhinos, a team of Indian and French researchers has said.
- Their conclusions are based on the discovery of a tranche of vertebrate fossils from nearly 14 million years ago in a geological period known as the Miocene.
- The bulk of fossils unearthed in Kutch have so far been mainly marine organisms, due to their proximity to the Arabian Sea.
- Geological changes eventually closed off the salt-flats’ connection to the sea and the region turned into a large lake, eventually becoming salty wetlands.
- The findings point to clues on how mammals dispersed between Africa and the Indian subcontinent when part of India was in the Gondwanaland supercontinent that existed nearly 300 million years ago.
SEBI simplifies norms for foreign investors
Category: Economy
- At a time when foreign investors have been selling Indian shares in huge quantum, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has simplified the compliance and operational requirements for foreign portfolio investors (FPIs), to make the regulatory framework more investor friendly.
- The SEBI decided to do away with the requirement that every FPI should have at least 20 investors — known as broad-based in regulatory parlance — while simplifying the KYC (or Know-Your-Customer) document requirement for overseas investors.
- The regulator has amended the Prohibition of Insider Trading Regulations to include a clause to reward whistle-blowers up to ₹1 crore if the information leads to a disgorgement order of at least ₹1 crore.
Direct tax revenue growth slows
Category: Economy
- The government’s net revenue growth from direct taxes has decelerated sharply to 4.7 per cent for April 1-August 15 this year as against a required annual growth rate of 17.3 per cent, reflecting lower buoyancy in the wake of an overall slowdown in the economy.
- With the sharply slower revenue growth, the government’s direct tax targets are looking out of reach for the second consecutive year.
- The government had missed its direct tax targets in the previous financial year by Rs 63,000 crore.
- In 2018-19, the government had initially estimated direct tax revenue at Rs 11.5 lakh crore, which was revised up to Rs 12 lakh crore. However, the actual direct tax revenue for 2018-19 was then recorded at Rs 11.37 lakh crore.
- Following the shortfall in direct tax revenue target for 2018-19, the government had then reduced the tax targets for this financial year. Direct tax revenue target has now been pegged at Rs 13.35 lakh crore for the current financial year, Rs 45,000 crore lower than the initial estimate of Rs 13.8 lakh crore in the interim Budget presented in February.
