Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 21 May 2021

::NATIONAL::

New AIIMS (All India Institutes of Medical Sciences) started under PMSSY are providing advanced COVID Care in States.

About:

PMSSY is a Central Sector Scheme, was announced in 2003 to address imbalances in availability of tertiary care hospitals and improve medical education in the country.
It is implemented by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

It has two components:

Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog in partnership with Innovation Center Denmark (ICDK) concluded the global finals of the Next Generation Water Action (NGWA) Water Innovation Challenge.

Innovative ideas were invited in following challenge areas:

A huge ice block has broken off from western Antarctica into the Weddell Sea, becoming the largest iceberg in the world and earning the name A-76.

About:

It is the latest in a series of large ice blocks to dislodge in a region acutely vulnerable to climate change, although scientists said in this case it appeared to be part of a natural polar cycle.
A-76 had been monitored by scientists since May 13 when it began to separate from the Ronne Ice Shelf.
The iceberg, measuring around 170 km long and 25 km wide, with an area of 4,320 sq km is now floating in the Weddell Sea.
It joins previous world’s largest title holder A-23A — approximately 3,880 sq. km. in size — which has remained in the same area since 1986.

China said, a US warship had illegally entered its territorial waters in the South China Sea, an assertion the United States denied.

About:

The Paracel Islands archipelago is a collection of 130 islands and coral reefs and is located in the South China Sea, almost equidistant from China and Vietnam.
Since 2012, China, Taiwan and Vietnam have attempted to reinforce their claims on the territory by engaging in construction of government administrative buildings, tourism, land reclamation initiatives and by establishing and expanding military presence on the archipelago.

The Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) has registered over 23% jump into subscriber base under its two flagship pension schemes at 42.7 mn by the end of April 2021.

About:

It was established in 2003 through a Union Government resolution (later PFRDA Act in 2013) to promote, develop and regulate pension sector in India.
The two flagship pension schemes run by it are National Pension Scheme and Atal Pension Yojana.

Scientists from the Indian Institute of Geomagnetism (IIG), an autonomous institute under the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India have recently developed a theory that helps understand the complicated nature of Sun-Earth interactions happening in the magnetosphere-- an area of space around Earth that is controlled by the Earth’s magnetic field.

About:

This new theory has opened up a plethora of opportunities to unlock the mysteries of the ion-hole structures (a localized plasma region where the ion density is lower than the surrounding plasma).
They have completely ruled out the necessity of the upper limit in the temperature ratio between ions and electrons for the generation of a special kind of wave called Bernstein Green Kruskal (BGK) waves, named after the scientists who predicted this wave. They revealed that the electrons that are not part of ion hole dynamics also play a vital role.
The new theory developed by the IIG team provides a better understanding of their characteristics and sheds light on the generation of these structures leading to the unraveling of nature's greatest mystery that causes phenomena ---plasma transport and heating of plasma -- the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas, which is the most natural and widely observed state of matter in the entire universe.