Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 03 February 2021

::NATIONAL::

India to launch Hydrogen Energy Mission

The Centre will launch a Hydrogen Energy Mission in 2021-22 for generating hydrogen from green power sources.
According to a report titled “The Potential Role of Hydrogen in India – Harnessing the Hype” by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) released in December last year, demand for hydrogen could increase by at least 5-fold by 2050, continuing to grow in the second half of the century in India.

About:

Demand for hydrogen is at around 6 metric tonne (MT) per annum, mainly from industry sectors, such as fertilizers and refineries.
This can increase to around 28 MT by 2050 mainly due to cost reductions in key technologies and a push to reduce carbon footprint. Demand will mainly grow in steel and road transport, shipping and aviation sectors.
The report also projected that India would require 40 MT of green hydrogen to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2060.
Hydrogen from renewables can be produced through various methods, one of them is to use renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen in an electrolyser, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
Hydrogen from renewable sources can play a critical role in heavy-duty, long-distance transport. While battery operated electric vehicles (BEV) will become competitive for heavy-duty transport, hydrogen production will be needed.
It will also play a critical role in production of ammonia which is currently being produced from fossil-fuel based hydrogen.
The Hydrogen Energy Mission will be critical because hydrogen may be the only way to have zero carbon emissions from heavy industries like cement and steel -- provided that hydrogen is produced by electrolysis from renewable electricity.

Matuas

The Matua community in West Bengal are upset about the cancellation of a rally Union Home Minister Amit Shah was scheduled to address on Saturday.
The two-day visit to Bengal was called off in view of Friday’s blast outside the Israel Embassy in Delhi.

About:

The Matua community has members on either side of the Bengal border. It is associated with a religious movement begun in the 1870s by Harichand Thakur of a Namasudra (SC) family, who hailed from Safaldanga in East Bengal.
In the early 20th century, his son Guruchand organised the movement socially and politically.
In 1915, the Matua Federation was established; Guruchand’s grandson barrister Pramath Ranjan Thakur led it in the 1930s.

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::INTERNATIONAL::

SpaceX Starship explodes during landing

A prototype of SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded in a test flight just before landing on Tuesday. The explosion occurred minutes after the experimental launch at Boca Chica, Texas.
The SN9 rocket was a test model of the heavy-duty rocket being developed by Elon Musk's company to carry humans and cargo into space. SN8, the model before it, had also met a similar fate during a test launch in December. No injuries occurred in either incident.
SpaceX’s live stream covered a 16-story-tall SN9 taking a flawless liftoff from the Gulf Coast in South Texas. The spacecraft hovered in midair at an altitude of 10 km before shutting off its engines for planned “belly-flop” execution.
While landing, the Starship tried to reactivate two of its three Raptor thrusters but failed to ignite one. The rocket then fell, exploding into a ball of flames, smoke, and debris - 6 minutes and 26 seconds after launch.
There was no immediate comment from Musk, who also heads the electric carmaker Tesla Inc. Hours earlier, he tweeted about staying off social media platform “for a while.”

Raja Krishnamoorthi

Indian-American Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthihas been appointed as co-chair of the crucial Immigration Task Force of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, the 55-year-old first Indian-American woman to be elected to the House of Representatives, is the chair of the task force.
The aim of the immigration task force is to help in issues like support legislation to protect Dreamers and Temporary Protect Status (TPS) recipients, support comprehensive immigration reform, restore due process for immigrants, promote access to Citizenship and integration of AAPI immigrants among other things.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi represents Illinois’s 8th congressional district in the House of Representatives.

::ECONOMY::

Robinhood App

The online trading app Robinhood became a cultural phenomenon and a Silicon Valley darling with a promise to wrest the stock market away from Wall Street’s traditional gatekeepers and “let the people trade”. This making it as easy to put millions of dollars at risk as it is to summon an Uber.

About:

BaijuPrafulkumar Bhatt is the co-founder, along with Vladimir Tenev, of Robinhood, a US-based financial services company.
Robinhood Markets, Inc. is an American financial services company headquartered in Menlo Park, California.

Government proposes to decriminalise compoundable offences

The Government proposes to decriminalise the compoundable offences under the Limited Liability Partnership Act 2008.
This is expected to provide greater ease of doing business in India to law abiding LLPs. In India, more than 1.45 lakh LLPs are registered under the LLP Act and the majority of them are small and medium enterprises.

About:

LLP is basically an alternative corporate business vehicle that provides the benefits of limited liability but allows its members the flexibility of organising their internal structure as a partnership based on a mutually arrived agreement.
The Government plan is to decriminalise compoundable offences involving minor, procedural or technical violations, or offences which may not involve any harm to public interest.
The Corporate Affairs Ministry (MCA) has, for this purpose, invited public comments by July 4. While listing out 20 provisions of the LLP Act along with the current punishment prescribed for violation of those provisions, the MCA has sought suggestions for the same.
The exercise to identify and decriminalise the provisions of LLP Act is aimed at incentivising compliance, de-clogging of criminal justice system and promoting congenial business climate.
Criminalisation of minor violations acts as an avoidable deterrent and impinges upon the business sentiments.

The offences proposed to be decriminalised include non-compliance with norms regarding-

(i) eligibility and appointment of designated partners

(ii) registration of changes in partners

(iii) maintenance of books of account, other records and audit and

(iv) filing of annual return.

::SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY::

Researchers reveal important clues to understand the death of massive stars

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, in collaboration with researchers from Max Planck Institute for Physics, Munich, Germany, and Northwestern University, USA, have revealed important clues to understand the death of massive stars and have also revealed the problems with the existing models.
They found that all three species of the neutrinos from the supernovae are important contrary to the common treatments with only two flavors.
The results of this crucial work have been recently published in the journal, Physical Review Letters (PRL), and has garnered worldwide attention from the astrophysics community.

Supernovae:

The super explosions at the time of death of large massive stars are considered to be the cradle of birth for new stars and synthesis of the heavy elements in nature.
At the end of their life, the stars, especially massive ones, collapse resulting in an immense shock wave that causes the star to explode, briefly outshining any other star in its host galaxy.
The study of supernovae and the particles they release helps us understand the universe because almost all matter that makes up the universe is a result of these massive explosions.
During the core collapse supernova explosion, neutrinos are created in several particle processes. Due to their neutral nature and extremely weak interaction with stellar matter the neutrinos escape the dying star and carry 99% energy of the collapsing star.
Thus, the tiny neutrinos are the only messenger bringing information from the deepest interiors of the star.
Neutrinos on the other hand have their own complexities. In the last seven decades after the discovery of neutrinos physicists have come a long way in understanding these incredible particles.
However, there are still many open questions like understanding their flavor structure and the ordering of the masses of different neutrinos. In fact, supernovae are the only natural source where neutrinos and antineutrinos of all three species (electron, mu and tau ‘flavors’) are produced in substantial amounts. This creates additional complexities.
However, the existing supernovae models predicted that the mu & tau neutrinos & antineutrinos have very similar properties and are considered as a single species.
This simplified the supernova neutrino problem and most studies are done under the assumption that all types behave the same way when ejected from the star’s dying core.

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