• In a significant move towards green energy expansion, the Government of India, the Government of Himachal Pradesh, and the World Bank have signed a USD 200 million project aimed at advancing power sector reforms in Himachal Pradesh.
• The project will focus on increasing the share of renewable energy (RE) in the state’s electricity generation, aligning with Himachal Pradesh’s goal to add 10,000 megawatts of additional RE capacity.
• Himachal Pradesh is on a mission to become a ‘Green State’ by meeting all its energy needs through renewable and green energy sources by 2030.
• Currently, more than 80 per cent of the state’s energy demands are met through hydropower.
• The Himachal Pradesh Power Sector Development Program, backed by the World Bank, will aid the state in optimizing its existing RE resources, particularly hydropower, while diversifying its RE sources.

• India recently, successfully test-fired surface-to-surface short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) ‘Pralay’ from the Abdul Kalam Island off the Odisha coast.
• The missile has been developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in view of the country’s defence requirements along its borders with neighbouring China and Pakistan.
• ‘Pralay’ is a 350-500 km short-range, surface-to-surface missile with a payload capacity of 500-1,000 kg. The solid-fuel, battlefield missile is based on the Prithvi Defence Vehicle.
• ‘Pralay’ missile can be compared with China’s ‘Dong Feng 12’ and Russia’s ‘Iskander’.

• ‘Pauradhwani’, a programme organised by the Kerala State Literacy Mission (KSLM) in coastal and tribal-dominated areas in eight districts with the aim of shaping informed and independent citizens.
• The programme aims at instilling scientific aptitude, independent thinking, secularism, democratic spirit, constitutional values, and awareness about rights towards shaping independent citizens.
• ‘Pauradhwani’ has drawn up a six-point motto, which includes ensuring the rights of the marginalised sections, strengthening democracy and brotherhood, and building an egalitarian new Kerala society without any discrimination.

• NATO recently announced the formal suspension of the treaty of Conventional Armed Forces in Europe in response to Russia’s pullout from the treaty.
• NATO said that “a situation whereby Allied State Parties abide by the Treaty, while Russia does not, would be unsustainable”.
• Signed in 1990, just a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the CFE set constraints on conventional arms and equipment.
• Its purpose was to stop Cold War rivals from building up forces that could be used in a swift assault.
• It established limitations on conventional arms and equipment with the primary goal of preventing Cold War adversaries from amassing forces suitable for rapid attacks.
• It set equal limits on the number of tanks, armored combat vehicles, heavy artillery, etc. that NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organization could deploy between the Atlantic Ocean and Ural Mountains.

• A geoglyph in the form of a circle, said to be 3,000 years old, has been unearthed on the outskirts of Mudichu Thalapalli in the Medchal-Malkajgiri district of Telangana.

• It is a first-of-its-kind discovery in Telangana.
  • Etched on a low-lying granitoid hillock, the geoglyph spans 7.5 metres in diameter and has a perfect circular shape.
  • Surrounding the circle is a 30-centimetre-wide rim, and within the circle are two triangles.
• A prehistoric rock art expert has dated the geoglyph to the Iron Age, specifically around 1000 BCE.
• He suggested that this circle might have served as a model for megalithic communities in planning their circular burial sites.
• The geoglyph displays the artistic skills and etching techniques of Telangana’s Iron Age inhabitants.
• Earlier, archaeologists had discovered three prehistoric rock shelters located within a radius of 1 km from this site, where prehistoric rock art was found, with the images of bulls, deer, porcupine, and humans found on the rocks inside those rock shelters.
  • The rock art was found to have been from the Mesolithic and Megalithic periods (8500 BC- 1000 BC).

• The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid mission, released its first five science images.
• They include views of large clusters with thousands of distant galaxies, close-ups of two nearby galaxies, a nebula, and a gravitationally bound group of stars called a globular cluster.

ABOUT EUCLID

• Euclid was designed to investigate how dark matter and dark energy made the cosmos what it is.
  • It was launched in July 2023.
• About 95% of the universe seems to be made of these units that we have no idea about as these dark entities cannot be directly detected.
• Over the next 6 years, Euclid will observe the shapes, distance and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years.
• Euclid’s view of the cosmos special is because of its ability to create a remarkably sharp visible and infrared image across a huge part of the sky in just one sitting.
• It will orbit Lagrange point 2 (L2).
• In the process, it will create the largest cosmic 3D map ever made.

• November 7^th, 2023, marks the 135^th birth anniversary of the renowned Indian physicist, Sir Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman, popularly known as C.V. Raman.

ABOUT C V RAMAN

• Born on November 7th, 1888, in Tiruchirappalli.
• His journey in academia began at Presidency College, Madras, where he passed his B.A. examination in 1904 with flying colors, securing the first place and the gold medal in physics.
• Raman’s pioneering research focused on the scattering of light, a phenomenon that occurs when a beam of light is deflected by molecules.
• His discovery, known as the Raman Effect, revealed that a small fraction of the scattered light acquires different wavelengths than that of the original light.
• The Raman Effect has since been applied with great success in various fields of molecular physics and has effectively helped to check the symmetry properties of molecules, thus addressing problems concerning nuclear spin in atomic physics.
• He was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his groundbreaking work on the scattering of light and the discovery of the effect named after him, the Raman Effect.
  • Raman became the first Asian to receive a Nobel Prize in any branch of science.
  • C.V. Raman was awarded the Bharat Ratna by the Government of India in 1954.
• He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society early in his career in 1924, and was knighted in 1929.
• He sponsored the establishment of the Indian Academy of Sciences and served as its President since its inception.
• After retiring from IISc in 1948, CV Raman established the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru in 1949.
  • He served as the director and remained active in the institute until his passing in 1970.

• Climate Policy Initiative’s (CPI) has released a new report Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2023.

• Climate finance is one of the key agenda items up for discussion at the much-awaited 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in Dubai

MAJOR FINDINGS

• Average annual flow of climate finance in 2021 and 2022 was $1.3 trillion, twice the $653 billion of 2019 and 2020.
  • Climate finance flows have doubled compared to previous years but have been unevenly distributed across geographies and sources.
• China, the US, Europe, Brazil, Japan, and India received 90% of increased climate finance.
• 98% of all adaptation finance tracked for the report stemmed from public actors.
• Private actors contributed 49% of total climate finance, to the tune of $625 billion.

• The Indian Space Researcher Organisation’s (ISRO) Aditya L1 solar probe mission has captured its first high-energy solar flare in X-ray.

• The High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer (HEL1OS) on board Aditya-L1 has recorded the impulsive phase of solar flares.
• The recorded data is consistent with the X-ray light curves provided by NOAA’s GOES.
• The High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer is the hard X-ray spectrometer on the mission.
  • It operates in the wide X-ray energy band between 10 and 150 keV.
  • It helps study solar flare activities on the Sun.
• Other payloads on board the Aditya L1 include–
  • Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT), Aditya Solar Wind Particle Experiment (ASPEX), Plasma Analyser Package for Aditya (PAPA), SoLEXS-Solar Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer (SoLEXS) and

ABOUT SOLAR FLARES

• A solar flare is an intense burst of radiation coming from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots.
• They tend to originate from regions of solar surface that contain sunspots — darker, cooler portions of solar surface where magnetic fields are particularly strong.
• Flares are our solar system’s largest explosive events.
• They are seen as bright areas on the sun, and they can last from minutes to hours.
• Studying solar flares and other space weather phenomena is important because they can affect life here on Earth.
  • They can affect power systems, satellite communication systems and radio communications.
  • During worst-case scenarios, they can cause blackouts that affect large parts of the Earth for hours.

• Three-time champion Max Verstappen led from the start and won the Brazilian Grand Prix.
• Verstappen earned his record-breaking 17^th
• Lando Norris came in second while Fernando Alonso finished third.