UPSC Quiz – 2024 : IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs Quiz 21st September 2024

·       The programme focuses on four key areas:

·       Empowering women farmers

·       Enhancing local milk production

·       Strengthening dairy infrastructure

·       Boosting dairy exports.

·       The plan involves setting up and strengthening 100,000 new and existing district cooperative societies, multi-purpose district cooperative societies, and multi-purpose Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (M-PACS), which will be linked to milk routes with necessary infrastructure.

·       Providing enabling infrastructure e.g. AMCU (Automatic Milk Collection Unit), DPMCU (Data Processing Milk Collection Units), testing equipment, Bulk Milk Coolers, etc., will be the key component of the initiative for carrying out dairy activities.

·       Initially, the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) will fund the initiative from its own resources, providing Rs 40,000 per M-PACS to 1,000 M-PACS.

·       Future funding is expected from the proposed National Programme for Dairy Development 2.0scheme of the department animal husbandry and dairying (DAHD).

Origin:

·       It was established in 1989 during the G7 Summit in Paris to develop policies against money laundering.

·       In 2001, its mandate expanded to include terrorism financing.

·       Headquarters: Paris, France.

·       FATF members include 39 countries, including the United States, India, China, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Germany, France, and the EU as such.

·       India became a member of FATF in 2010.

·       Black List: Countries known as Non-Cooperative Countries or Territories (NCCTs) are put on the blacklist. These countries support terror funding and money laundering activities. The FATF revises the blacklist regularly, adding or deleting entries.

·       Grey List: Countries that are considered a safe haven for supporting terror funding and money laundering are put on the FATF grey list. This inclusion serves as a warning to the country that it may enter the blacklist.

·       Three countries-North Korea, Iran, and Myanmar are currently in FATF’s blacklist.

Objectives

·       It is engineered to deliver high spatial and temporal resolution observations of Earth’s surface temperature, vegetation health, and water cycle dynamics.

·       It will also help in a comprehensive assessment of urban heat islands, detection of thermal anomalies linked to volcanic activity and geothermal resources, and precise monitoring of snow-melt runoff and glacier dynamics.

·       The mission will also provide valuable data on aerosol optical depth, atmospheric water vapor, and cloud cover.

·       The Thermal Infra-Red (TIR) Payload: It is provided by CNES, features a four-channel long-wave infrared imaging sensor capable of high-resolution surface temperature and emissivity mapping.

·       The Visible – Near Infra-Red – ShortWave Infra-Red (VNIR-SWIR) payload: It is developed by ISRO, includes seven spectral bands designed for detailed mapping of surface reflectance of VSWIR bands for generating important biophysical and radiation budget variables.

·       The variables retrieved from the combination of payload data would help in solving surface energy balance to estimate surface heat fluxes.

·       The satellite will operate in a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 761 km, with a local time of 12:30 PM at the equator.

·       They are usually very small and hard to detect — only four mini-moons of Earth have ever been discovered, and none are still orbiting Earth.

·       These events are relatively frequent, with similar occurrences happening every few decades.

·       Mini moons are captured from the Near-Earth Object (NEO) population, which consists of asteroids and other celestial bodies that pass close to Earth.

·       NASA classifies any space object that comes within 120 million miles (190 million kilometers) of our planet as a near-Earth object, while objects within 4.7 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) are considered potentially hazardous.

Key facts about 2024 PT5

·       It is an Apollo-class NEO, which follows an orbit similar to that of previous mini moons like 2022 NX1.

·       The asteroid was discovered with the help of the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS).

·       It is estimated to be just 33 feet long and is too small to be visible to the naked eye or through typical amateur telescopes.

·       It is within the brightness range of telescopes used by professional astronomers.

·       Pheromones are chemical substances which are secreted on the outside by an individual, and received by another individual of the same species.

·       These are present in all bodily secretions, and especially in the axillary sweat — can be detected by the olfactory system.

·       Pheromones are ecto-hormones, meaning they are secreted outside the body.

Types of Pheromones

·       Releaser pheromones: They work right away and elicit a specific response from the other person.

·       Signaler pheromones: They give information about the person who releases them. For example, they help a mother tell her own baby apart from other babies.

·       Modulator pheromones: They affect mood and emotions.

·       Primer pheromones affect hormones, for example during pregnancy or menstrual cycles.

·       Animals, with their heightened senses and vomeronasal organ are known to secrete pheromones to trigger many kinds of behaviours like raising an alarm, signalling a food trail, warning another animal to back off, and bonding with an offspring.

·       Pheromones are also used by some fungi, slime molds, and algae as attractants in reproduction; organisms of complementary reproductive cell types grow or move toward each other.