Daily Current Affairs MCQ- February 29, 2024 - UPSC MCQ

Recently, the union Science and Technology Minister told that India has conducted the first human clinical trial of gene therapy for ‘haemophilia A’ at Christian Medical College – Vellore.

• It is a genetic disorder that affects the body’s ability to form blood clots.
• It is a rare disorder in which the blood doesn't clot in the typical way because it doesn't have enough blood-clotting proteins. 
• It is a sex linked disorder. The gene for hemophilia is carried on the X chromosome.
• Causes: It is caused by a mutation or change, in one of the genes, that provides instructions for making the clotting factor proteins needed to form a blood clot. This type is caused by a lack or decrease of clotting factor VIII.
• Symptoms: Signs and symptoms of hemophilia vary, depending on the level of clotting factors. 
• Males are much more likely to have hemophilia than are females.
• Treatment:
• It involves replacement therapy, which involves infusing clotting factor concentrates into the bloodstream to help the blood clot. 
• Other treatments may include medications to promote clotting or surgery to repair damage caused by bleeding.

What is Gene therapy?

• It is a technique that modifies a person’s genes to treat or cure disease.
• Gene therapies can work by several mechanisms:
• Replacing a disease-causing gene with a healthy copy of the gene
• Inactivating a disease-causing gene that is not functioning properly
• Introducing a new or modified gene into the body to help treat a disease
• Gene therapy products are being studied to treat diseases including cancer, genetic diseases, and infectious diseases.

Hence both statements are correct.

Two researchers in Goa have said that they synthesised gold nanoparticles from a wild mushroom species that is widely eaten as a delicacy in the coastal state.

• It is a mushroom of the Termitomyces species.
• It grows on termite hills and is locally known as ‘roen olmi’ in Goa.
• It is an edible wild mushroom popular among Goans and consumed during the monsoons.
• These mushrooms have no independent existence. They grow only in association with termites. 
• Habitat: It is endemic to the Western Ghats, where the thick forest cover and high humidity provides an ideal breeding ground.
• Ecological significance: It plays a very important role as a powerful biodegrading fungus in forest and grassland ecosystems converting 50% dead plant material on the ground into rich soil.
• In fact, all Termitomyces species are edible and have unique food value attributed to their texture, flavour, nutrient content, and beneficial mediational properties.
• Additionally, Termito-myces have been recognized for their ethno-medicinal importance in various indigenous communities throughout Asia and Africa.
• Termitomyces species possess various beneficial antioxidant and antimicrobial properties

Hence option b is the correct answer.

India's Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) is keeping a close eye on large cash deposits and withdrawals from cooperative banks ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

• It was set by the Government of India in November 2004.
• It is the central national agency responsible for receiving, processing, analyzing and disseminating information relating to suspect financial transactions.
• It is also responsible for coordinating and strengthening efforts of national and international intelligence, investigation and enforcement agencies in pursuing the global efforts against money laundering and financing of terrorism.
• It is an independent body reporting directly to the Economic Intelligence Council (EIC) headed by the union Finance Minister.
• Functions:
• Collection of Information: Act as the central reception point for receiving Cash Transaction reports (CTRs), Non-Profit Organisation Transaction Report (NTRs), Cross Border Wire Transfer Reports (CBWTRs), Reports on Purchase or Sale of Immovable Property (IPRs) and Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) from various reporting entities.
• Analysis of Information: Analyze received information in order to uncover patterns of transactions suggesting suspicion of money laundering and related crimes.
• Sharing of Information: Share information with national intelligence/law enforcement agencies, national regulatory authorities and foreign Financial Intelligence Units.
• Act as Central Repository: Establish and maintain national data base on the basis of reports received from reporting entities.
• Coordination: Coordinate and strengthen collection and sharing of financial intelligence through an effective national, regional and global network to combat money laundering and related crimes.
• Research and Analysis: Monitor and identify strategic key areas on money laundering trends, typologies and developments.

Hence only statement 1 is correct.

Recently, the Reserve Bank tweaked guidelines for Regulatory Sandbox (RS) scheme.

• It refers to live testing of new products or services in a controlled regulatory environment.
• It acts as a "safe space" for business as the regulators may or may not permit certain relaxations for the limited purpose of testing. 
• It can provide a structured avenue for the regulator to engage with the ecosystem and to develop innovation-enabling or innovation-responsive regulations that facilitate delivery of relevant, low-cost financial products.
• It is potentially an important tool which enables more dynamic, evidence-based regulatory environments which learn from, and evolve with, emerging technologies.
• Objectives
• It provides an environment to innovative technology-led entities for limited-scale testing of a new product or service that may or may not involve some relaxation in a regulatory requirement before a wider-scale launch.
• The RS is, at its core, a formal regulatory programme for market participants to test new products, services or business models with customers in a live environment, subject to certain safeguards and oversight.
• The proposed financial service to be launched under the RS should include new or emerging technology, or use of existing technology in an innovative way and should address a problem, or bring benefits to consumers.
• To foster responsible innovation in financial services, promote efficiency and bring benefit to consumers.
• The RBI had issued the 'Enabling Framework for Regulatory Sandbox' in August 2019, after wide ranging consultations with stakeholders.
• The recently updated framework requires
• The sandbox entities to ensure compliance with provisions of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
• The timelines of the various stages of the Regulatory Sandbox process have been revised from seven months to nine months
• The target applicants for entry to the RS are fintech companies, including startups, banks, financial institutions, any other company, Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) and partnership firms, partnering with or providing support to financial services businesses.

Hence option a is the correct answer.

The Prime Minister recently laid the foundation stone for a new spaceport at Kulasekarapattinam in southern Tamil Nadu.

About Kulasekarapattinam Spaceport:

• It is a new spaceport coming up at Kulasekarapattinam, a coastal hamlet near the temple town of Tiruchendur in Thoothukudi district in southern Tamil Nadu.
• It will be second after the space agency’s existing Satish Dhawan Space Centre, founded in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota in 1971, with two launch pads.
• It will focus on the launch of Small Satellite Launch Vehicles (SSLVs) on a commercial basis.
• It will house 35 facilities, including a launch pad, rocket integration facilities, ground range and checkout facilities, and a mobile launch structure (MLS) with checkout computers.
• It would have the capacity to launch 24 satellites per year using a mobile launch structure.
• Spread over 2,350 acres, the spaceport will help save fuel for small rocket launches as the port can launch rockets directly south over the Indian Ocean without requiring crossing landmasses. 
• This is unlike the existing launch site at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, which adds more fuel requirements for launching into a polar orbit as rockets need to follow a curved path to the south to avoid Sri Lanka’s landmass.
• It is estimated to cost Rs. 986 crore.

Hence option c is the correct answer.

The Ministry of Minority Affairs recently ordered the closure of the Maulana Azad Education Foundation (MAEF).

About Maulana Azad Education Foundation (MAEF):

• MAEF was established on the occasion of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad's birth centenary celebrations. 
• The Foundation is a voluntary, non-political, non-profit making social service organization.
• It was registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, on 6th July 1989.
• The Foundation was established to promote education amongst the educationally backward minorities in particular and other weaker sections in general.
• It is fully funded by the Ministry of Minority Affairs, Govt. of India.
• Structure:
• The Hon'ble Minister of Minority Affairs is Ex-Officio President of the Foundation.
• The General Body of the Foundation consists of 15 members, of which six are ex-officio, including the President, MAEF, and rest nine are nominated by the President, MAEF.
• The management of the Foundation is entrusted with its Governing Body, which consists of six members (including the President, MAEF) selected from amongst the members of the General Body.
• Through programmes like the Begum Hazrat Mahal National Scholarship Scheme and the Khwaja Gharib Nawaz Skill Development Training Scheme, the Foundation worked to improve employment opportunities for minorities and awarded scholarships to deserving girls from religious minorities.

Hence only statement 1 is correct.

Recently, the Google DeepMind has just introduced Genie, a new model that can generate interactive video games from just a text or image prompt.

• It is a foundation world model that is trained on videos sourced from the Internet.
• The model can “generate an endless variety of playable (action-controllable) worlds from synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches.”
• It is the first generative interactive environment that has been trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled internet videos.
• Specifications: When it comes to size, Genie stands at 11B parameters and consists of a spatiotemporal video tokenizer, an autoregressive dynamics model, and a simple and scalable latent action model.
• These technical specifications let Genie act in generated environments on a frame-by-frame basis even in the absence of training, labels, or any other domain-specific requirements.
• Genie can be prompted to generate a diverse set of interactive and controllable environments although it is trained on video-only data.
• It makes playable environments from a single image prompt.
• It can be prompted with images it has never seen. This includes real world photographs, sketches, allowing people to interact with their imagined virtual worlds.
• It is trained more on videos of 2D platformer games and robotics.
• Genie is trained on a general method, allowing it to function on any type of domain, and it is scalable to even larger Internet datasets.
• The standout aspect of Genie is its ability to learn and reproduce controls for in-game characters exclusively from internet videos.
• This is noteworthy because internet videos do not have labels about the action that is performed in the video, or even which part of the image should be controlled.
• It allows you to create an entire new interactive environment from a single image.

Hence option d is the correct answer.

Recently scientists have discovered that North Atlantic right whales are getting smaller, which is impacting their ability to breed.

• These whales are migratory animals, spending the winter in warmer waters and migrating to the poles for cooler waters in late summer.
• These whales inhabit the temperate and subpolar waters of the north Atlantic and north Pacific oceans.
• Habitat: Depending on the time of year and which hemisphere they're found, right whales will spend much of their time near bays and peninsulas and in shallow, coastal waters.
• Distribution: These are generally restricted to the coastal waters of the East coast of the United States and Canada.
• There are three recognized species of right whales that occur in different parts of the world. These are Southern right whales (Eubalaena australis), North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) and North Pacific right whales.
• These whales often skim feed at or just below the water surface, slowly swimming through clouds of plankton with their mouths half open and then straining the plankton through their long baleen plates.
• Conservation status
• IUCN: Critically endangered
• CITES: Appendix I

Hence both statements are correct.

Recently, the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs announced the first Pey Jal Survekshan Awards.

• A distinguished array of 130 awards is set to be bestowed, reflecting the remarkable accomplishments of cities and states.
• The award consists of various categories;
• Pey Jal Gold, Silver, and Bronze City Awards, where Gold signifies top performers in their respective population categories (1 to 10 Lakh, 10 to 40 Lakh, and More than 40 Lakh),
• Silver denotes the 2nd position, and Bronze the 3rd.
• The awards extend to commendations for Best Water Body, Sustainability Champion, Reuse Champion, Water Quality, City Saturation, and AMRUT 2.0 Rotating Trophy of the Year.
• Parameters: It encompassed diverse parameters, including access, coverage, water quality at treatment plants and households, and sustainability regarding the health of water bodies, availability of SCADA/ flowmeters, and reuse of treated used water.
• Cities will be graded on a star rating scale, ranging from 5 stars to No star, encapsulating their performance across these critical criteria.
• Pey Jal Survekshan ensured clean water through independent NABL lab testing at source and citizen-end.
• Using a GIS-enabled web portal, geo-tagging, and infrastructure mapping, the survey collected accurate and transparent data.

Hence option b is the correct answer.

Recently, at the 37th African Union Summit member countries took an initiative of forming Africa Club.

• What it is? It is the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions (which are African owned and controlled) launched at the African Union summit.
• The initiative aims to amplify Africa's influence in the global financial system by aligning its functions with the SDGs and the African Union's Agenda 2063.
• It seeks to introduce innovative financial instruments, provide a venue for debt management discussions and foster collaborative effort to address the specific needs of African countries.
• Its members include African Export Import Bank, Trade and Development Bank, Africa Finance Corporation, African Reinsurance Corporation, African Trade and Investment Development Insurance, Shelter Afrique Development Bank and ZEP – RE (PTA Reinsurance Co). 

Hence only statement 1 is correct.