• Ruixiang Zhang, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA will be awarded with the 2023 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for his outstanding contributions in mathematics.
• Zhang is a young mathematician whose fundamental work spans from analytic number theory, combinatorics, Euclidean harmonic analysis to geometry.

ABOUT THE PRIZE

• The award was instituted by the Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy (SASTRA) in
• The annual cash prize of USD 10,000 will be given at an international conference in Number Theory during December 20 and December 22 at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s hometown.
• The age limit for the prize has been set at 32 influenced by Ramanujan’s achievements in his brief life of 32 years

• The Financial Stability Board published final recommendations, requested by the G20, on supervising firms that trade cryptoassets such as bitcoin.
• The watchdog also revised its existing recommendations for stablecoins in light of the demise of TerraUSD/Luna coins.

ABOUT FINANCIAL STABILITY BOARD

• It is an international body that monitors and makes recommendations about the global financial system.
• Established in April 2009 after the London G20 Summit in London
• It is the successor to the Financial Stability Forum.
• Mandate- It promotes international financial stability by coordinating,at the international level, the work of national financial authorities and international standard-setting bodies and to develop and promote the implementation of effective regulatory, supervisory, and other financial sector policies.
• HQ- Basel, Switzerland.
• The board includes all G20 major economies.
• The Financial Stability Board publishes the list of Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) by consulting the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.
• The FSB’s decisions are not legally binding on its members.

• Eighteen captive-bred pygmy hogs were released in western Assam’s Manas National Park and Tiger Reserve.
• It was the fourth such exercise undertaken under the Pygmy Hog Conservation Programme (PHCP) annually since 2020, helping up the total number released at the park to 54.
• The PHCP target is to reintroduce 60 pygmy hogs in Manas, its historical habitat, by 2025.

ABOUT PYGMY HOG (PORCULA SALVANIA)

• It is the smallest and rarest pig on earth.
• Once thriving across the alluvial grasslands along the southern edge of the Himalayas, the pygmy hog was thought to be extinct in the 1970s.
• Backed by the United Kingdom-based Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the PHCP was started near Guwahati in 1996 with two males and two females captured from the Bansbari Range of Manas National Park.
  • The reintroduction of the captive-bred hogs to the wild began in 2008.
• Standing about 25 cm from the ground and weighing 6-9 kg, it lives in small groups of up to eight individuals and builds thatch nests rather than farrow like other pigs.
  • It is one of the very few mammals that build its own home, or nest, complete with a ‘roof’.
• It is an indicator species as its presence reflects the health of its primary habitat, tall and wet grasslands.
• It prefers undisturbed patches of grassland
• Threats include habitat (grassland) loss and degradation, and illegal hunting.
• Protection status
  • IUCN red list : Critically Endangered
  • WPA 1972: Schedule I
  • CITES:Appendix I

ABOUT MANAS NATIONAL PARK

• It is located in Assam and is contiguous with the Royal Manas National Park in Bhutan.
• It is a national park, UNESCO Natural World Heritage site, a Project Tiger reserve, an elephant reserve and a biosphere reserve.
• Vegetation includes semi-evergreen forests, mixed moist and dry deciduous forests, and alluvial grasslands.
  • It contains some of the largest remaining grassland habitats in the sub-Himalayan grassland ecosystems.
• Fauna includes the Greater One-Horned Rhino, Swamp Deer, Pygmy Hog and Hispid Hare, Golden Langur, Endangered Bengal Florican etc.
• The Manas River is a major tributary of Brahmaputra River, which passes through the Manas National Park.

• Train service resumed completely after nearly three months on the UNESCO world heritage Shimla-Kalka railway line which was damaged due to torrential rains.
• The railway track was damaged at 20-25 points from Shimla to Kalka due to the rains in July and August.

ABOUT THE TRACK

• The 96-km-long Shimla-Kalka Railway track had been laid in tough hilly terrain with 103 tunnels (now 102 tunnels as tunnel no 46 had collapsed, four decades ago), 800 bridges, and 919 curves along with negotiable gradient.
• The track which gains altitude of about 1590 metre is a marvel of engineering and a tourist attraction.

• Lieutenant General Raghu Srinivasan assumed the role of the 28^th Director General (DG) of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO).
• He succeeds after Lt Gen Rajeev Chaudhry retired recently.

• MIT-World Peace University researchers in Pune have found a damselfly of the ‘Armageddon Reedtail – Protosticta Armageddonia’ species in in Kerala’s southern Western Ghats.
• This newfound species has been officially documented in the International Journal of Odonatology
  • It is a publication affiliated with the Worldwide Dragonfly Association based in the United States.
  • The discovery has also been meticulously recorded and registered with the Zoological Survey of India, Pune.
• The newly-found species exhibits a captivating dark brown to black body with vibrant greenish-blue eyes and it features delicate pale blue markings on half of its eight abdominal segments.
• Its exclusive habitat choice is primary montane streams, where it thrives beneath a dense canopy cover.
• The name, Armageddon Reedtail, is a direct reference to the concept of “Ecological Armageddon”, a term used to describe the devastating decline of insect populations around the world.
  • This phenomenon, often referred to as the “Insect Apocalypse,” has far-reaching consequences for the entire ecosystem, as insects play crucial roles in pollination, nutrient cycling and as a food source for other animals.

• The Pink Bollworm (PBW)is causing significant damage in northern states
• The Pink Bollworm (PBW) infestation has been common in the cotton belt of northern Rajasthan, Haryana and Southwestern Punjab since 2021.

ABOUT PINK BOLLWORM (PECTINOPHORA GOSSYPIELLA)

• Originally native to India, it is now recordedin nearly all the cotton-growing countries of the world.
• It is considered possibly the most destructive pest on cotton worldwide.
• The female moth lays eggs in a cotton boll, and when the larvae emerge from the eggs, they inflict damage through feeding.
  • The PBW larvae burrow into the developing fruits (bolls) of cotton plants, and the damage affects both the weight and quality of the harvested bolls containing the lint fibre and seeds inside.
  • Since cotton is used for both fiber and seed oil, the damage is twofold.
• As per experts, Bt cotton – which incorporates genes from a soil bacteria that code for proteins toxic to the American bollworm – has lost its efficacy against PBW.

• With the eight core industries’ output having grown at a 14-month high of 12.1% in August, and other high frequency indicators showing upbeat performance, economists anticipate the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) growth in the month to come in at around 10%.

ABOUT IIP

• IIP is a ratio which measures the growth of various sectors in the economy.
• It is released every month by Central Statistics Office (CSO), under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI).
• Base year 2011-12
• The IIP comprises 3 broad sectors: Manufacturing, Mining and Electricity.
• The weightage of all 8 core industries in IIP is 40.27 %.

ABOUT INDEX OF EIGHT CORE INDUSTRIES

• In IIP, the decreasing order of core industries among them is as
  • Refinery Products (weight: 28.04%) > Electricity (19.85%)> Steel (17.92%) > Coal (10.33%) > Crude Oil (8.98%) > Natural gas(6.88%)> Cement (5.37%)> Fertilizers (2.63%).
• The Index is compiled and released by the Office of the Economic Adviser (OEA),Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP), Ministry of Commerce & Industry.
• Objective- to provide an advance indication of production performance of industries of ‘core’ naturebefore the release of IIP by the Central Statistics Office. 

• Project Mariana has successfully tested the cross-border settlement capabilities of wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs) between three major global markets.
• The project was launched in November 2022 through a collaboration between the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Banque de France, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Swiss National Bank, as a means to establish how tokenisation and automated market makers (AMM) could be applied to the global foreign exchange (FX) market, which currently trades $7.5 trillion every day.
• More specifically, it sought to determine how wCBDCs could be leveraged in tandem with decentralised finance (DeFi) to improve the effectiveness and transparency of FX trade and settlements.
• The project is purely experimental and does not indicate that any of the involved central banks intend to issue CBDC or endorse DeFi or a particular technological solution.

ABOUT BIS

• An international financial organisation owned by 60 member central banks, representing countries from around the world (including India).
  • These countries together account for about 95% of world GDP.
• Established-
• HQ- Basel, Switzerland.
• It fosters international monetary and financial cooperation and serves as a bank for central banks.
• It carries out its work through its meetings, programmes and through the Basel Process – hosting international groups pursuing global financial stability and facilitating their interaction.

• The CALIPSO mission that analysed climate, weather, and air quality ended on August 1, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced recently.
• The CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation) mission recorded more than 10 billion LIDAR measurements and helped create thousands of scientific reports over its 17 years of operation.
• It was launched jointly by NASA and France’s CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), along with the cloud-profiling radar system on the CloudSat satellite.
• Working
  • The Lidar and radar instruments on the satellite direct beams of energy at Earth and measure how they reflect off the clouds and the aerosols in the atmosphere.
  • Other orbiting science experiments typically use passive sensors that measure the sunlight or other radiation reflected by the Earth or clouds.
• The two satellites were launched on April 28, 2006, and they circled the planet in a Sun-synchronous orbit from the North to the South poles.
  • This meant that they crossed the equator in the early afternoon every day.
  • They measured the altitude of clouds and layers of airborne particles like dust, sea salt, ash and soot while probing the “vertical structure” of the atmosphere.
• The observations from the two satellites allowed scientists to build more sophisticated models to understand complex atmospheric processes like cloud formation, atmospheric convection, precipitation and particle transport.

This was especially useful in situations like during the massive wildfires in Australia in 2020.