Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 07 October 2021

::NATIONAL::

While the gross enrolment ratio (GER) for elementary schools has increased from 81.6 in 2001 to 93.03 in 2018-19 and stands at 102.1 in 2019-2020, overall retention is 74.6 per cent for elementary education and 59.6 per cent for secondary education in 2019-20, states the UNESCO 2021 State of the Education Report for India: No Teachers, No Class.

Key highlights of the report:

The use of technology in education for the purpose of teaching and learning has emerged as important.
But this has also exposed a range of issues –

According to Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE+) data for the 2018-19 school year, a total of 9.4 million teachers were employed across 1.6 million primary and secondary schools (class 1-12) in India.
The figures for 2019-20 were nearly 9.7 million and 1.5 million, respectively.
Lack of digital infrastructure and internet connectivity
The overall availability of computing devices (desktops or laptops) in school is 22 per cent for all India, with rural areas seeing much lower provisioning (18 per cent) than urban areas (43 per cent).
Access to the internet in schools is 19 per cent all over India – only 14 per cent in rural areas compared to 42 per cent in urban areas.

Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has released the Multilingual Dementia Research and Assessment (MUDRA) Toolbox.
Initially it is released in five Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
The toolbox includes various cognitive tests to assess different domains of cognition such as attention and executive function, memory, language, and visuospatial functions.
MUDRA Toolbox is a comprehensive tool specifically to diagnose dementia in the Indian population.
MUDRA Toolbox is an initiative undertaken by ICMR Neuro-Cognitive Tool Box (ICMR -NCTB) consortium to transform India’s dementia and mild cognitive impairment research and clinical practices.
It is a collective effort by seven leading centres in India NIMHANS (Bengaluru), AIIMS (New Delhi), SCTIMST (Thiruvananthapuram), NIMS (Hyderabad), Apollo Hospital (Kolkata), Manipal Hospital (Bengaluru) and Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College.

Two scientists have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on building molecules that are mirror images of one another.
German-born Benjamin List and Briton David MacMillan (Born in Bellshill, United Kingdom and Professor at Princeton University, USA) were announced today as the winners at an event in Stockholm.

About:

Their chemical toolkit has been used for discovering new drugs and making molecules that can capture light in solar cells.
The technique, called asymmetric organocatalysis, has made it much easier to produce asymmetric molecules - chemicals that exist in two versions, where one is a mirror image of the other.
Chemists often just want one of these mirror images - particularly when producing medicines - but it has been difficult to find efficient methods for doing this.

The Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to scientists from Japan, Germany and Italy.

About:

Syukuro Manabe (90) and Klaus Hasselmann (89) were cited for their work in “the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”.
The second half of the prize was awarded to Giorgio Parisi (73) for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”
The panel said Mr. Manabe and Mr. Hasselmann“laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it”.
Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Manabe demonstrated how increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures, laying the foundations for current climate models.
About a decade later, Mr. Hasselmann created a model that linked weather and climate, helping explain why climate models can be reliable despite the seemingly chaotic nature of the weather.
He also developed ways to look for specific signs of human influence on the climate.

Ministry of Road Transport & Highways has notified constitution of the National Road Safety Board.

About:

The Rules specify provisions regarding its composition, eligibility for Chairman and Members of the Board, selection process, term of office, procedure for resignation and removal, powers and functions of the Board, meetings of the Board etc.
The Head Office of the Board shall be in the National Capital Region and the Board may establish offices at other places in India.
It shall consist of the Chairman and not less than three, but not exceeding seven Members, to be appointed by the Central Government.
The Board shall be responsible for promoting road safety, innovation and adoption of new technology and for regulating traffic and motor vehicles.

A team of Indian scientists have developed an environmentally friendly, non-toxic, biodegradable polymer using guar gum and chitosan.

About:

Both guar gum and chitosan are polysaccharides extracted from guar beans and shells of crab and shrimps.
Due to some drawbacks of polysaccharides, such as low mechanical properties, highwater-solubility etc, they are not preferred as packaging material.
Researchers now fabricated a guar gum-chitosan film which is a cross-linked polysaccharide.
Guar gum-chitosan film having high water stability, high mechanical strength, and excellent resistance to harsh environmental conditions can potentially be used in packaging applications.