State signs deal with OECD to hold PISA test for govt school students

• It is an international organisation of 38 countries committed to democracy and the market economy.
• OECD members are typically democratic countries that support free-market economies.
• The OECD was established on Dec. 14, 1960, by 18 European nations, plus the United States and Canada.
• Headquarters: Paris, France.
• The stated goal of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity and well-being for all.
• The OECD publishes economic reports, statistical databases, analyses, and forecasts on the outlook for economic growth worldwide.
• The organization also seeks to eliminate bribery and other financial crime worldwide.
• The OECD maintains a so-called "black list" of nations that are considered uncooperative tax havens.
• India is one of the many non-member economies with which the OECD has working relationships in addition to its member countries.

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA):

• It is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students'' reading, mathematics, and science literacy every 3 years.
• First conducted in 2000, the major domain of study rotates between reading, mathematics, and science in each cycle.
• PISA also includes measures of general or cross-curricular competencies, such as collaborative problem solving.
• PISA is coordinated by the OECD.

Budget announces ''voluntary settlement scheme''

• The budget 2023-24 has proposed a scheme for settling contractual dispute named Vivad se Vishwas II (Settling Contractual Disputes).

Voluntary settlement scheme:

• It is introduced to settle contractual disputes of government and government undertakings; wherein arbitral award is under challenge in a court.
• This will be done by offering graded settlement terms depending on pendency level of the dispute.
• Under the scheme, voluntary option is given to the private sector to come into the scheme or not.

Vivad Se Vishwas Scheme:

• It is a direct tax scheme introduced by the Government of India in 2020 for settling disputes between taxpayers and the income tax department.
• It aims to minimize tax-related litigation.
• Under this scheme**, an individual taxpayer can claim full waiver on interest and penalty on the full** and final settlement of the disputed tax amount.
• There was a time limit set for the payment of taxes under the scheme.

China promotes rice bran as staple food amid food shortage in country

• Rice bran is one of the main byproducts in the process of the rice milling.
• It is the outer brown layer of brown rice and is separated during the milling process.
• The bran fraction contains 14-18% oil.
• Rice bran oil is a good source of unsaturated fats, vitamin E, and other important nutrients.
• It is currently mostly used as animal feed.
• The health effects of RB including antidiabetic, lipid-lowering, hypotensive, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory effects, while its consumption also improves bowel function.

Visva-Bharati to be World''s First Living Heritage University

• It is one of India''s major Central Government funded autonomous university located in Santiniketan, West Bengal.
• It is well-known as a distinguished centre for Visual Art practice and research in India.
• The university was established in 1921 by Nobel Prize Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.
• It was named after Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore until Visva-Bharati Society was registered as an organisation in May 1922.
• The institution was given the status of Central University in 1951 through a central Act.
• Its first vice-chancellor was Rathindranath Tagore, the son of Rabindranath Tagore, and the second vice-chancellor was grandfather of another Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen.
• The President of India appoints the Vice-chancellor of the University.
• Visva Bharati University is renowned for its cultural festivals called Poush Mela and the Basanta Utsab  which attracts a number of artisans from all across the country.

UN agency says seven Haitian migrants died while waiting to leave Peru, blames protests

• The Andes is the longest above-water mountain range in the world.
• The Andes Mountains extend over seven countries:Argentina (Mount Aconcagua), Bolivia (Huayna Potosi), Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela, known as Andean States.
• It is about 5,500 miles (8,900 km) long and second only to the Himalayas in average elevation.
• It consists of a succession of parallel and transverse mountain ranges, or cordilleras, and of intervening plateaus and depressions.
• The highest elevation in the Andes is Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, which is 22,841 feet (6,962 m) above sea level.
• The Andes are also home to the world’s highest volcano when measured above sea level, the Ojos del Salado on the Chile-Argentina border.
• The Andes Mountains are over 50 million years old, they were created when the South American and Pacific tectonic plates collided.

Peru:

• Peru is the third largest country in South America, after Brazil and Argentina.
• It is made up of a variety of landscapes, from mountains and beaches to deserts and rain forests.
• Capital: Lima
• The world''s largest rain forest, the Amazon, covers nearly half of Peru.
• Peru shares borders with Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador.

Shendurney''s faunal diversity on the rise

• Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary is a protected area located in the Western Ghats of India, in the Kollam district of
• This Sanctuary derives its name from Chenkurinji (Gluta travancorica), a species endemic to this region.
• It comes under the control of Agasthyamalai Biosphere Reserve.
• Flora: Tropical evergreen and semi-evergreen forests cover a major area of the sanctuary.
• Fauna: Includes tigers, gaurs, elephants, sambar deers, sloth bears, Malabar Raven, Malabar banded swallowtail, Red-disc Bushbrown, etc

Mass Determination of Single White Dwarf

• The Hubble Space Telescope measured the mass of a white dwarf designated LAWD 37, which burned out over 1 billion years ago.
• In the work, scientists used a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

Gravitational lensing

• It was first predicted in 1915 by Albert Einsteinwhich involves the bending of light by objects of great mass.
• A gravitational lens can occur when a huge amount of matter, like a cluster of galaxies, creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from distant galaxies that are behind it but in the same line of sight.
• The effect allows researchers to study the details of early galaxies too far away to be seen otherwise with even the most powerful space telescopes.

Hubble telescope

• It is named in honour of the trailblazing astronomer Edwin Hubble which was launched by the
• It is a large, space-based observatory, which has revolutionized astronomy since its launch and deployment by the space shuttle Discovery in 1990.
• Hubble’s domain extends from the ultraviolet through the visible (which our eyes see) and into the near infrared.
• It is one of NASA''s Great Observatories Programs. The other missions in the program include the visible-light Spitzer Space Telescope, Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO), and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (CXO).

With frigid innovation, scientists make a new form of ice

• The researchers employed a process called ball milling to vigorously shake ordinary ice together with steel balls in a container cooled to minus-328 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-200 degrees Celsius).
• This yielded what they called “medium-density amorphous ice,” or MDA, which looked like a fine white powder.

Amorphous ice

• Amorphous ice consists of water molecules arranged in a disordered state, with no large-scale regularity to their orientations or positions.
• This kind of ice is most often found in space.
• Scientists have identified 20 different forms of crystalline ice and three forms of amorphous ice – one low density (discovered in the 1930s), one high density (discovered in the 1980s), and the new one in between.

Scientists use outer space particles to examine the fortress wall of Xi’an city

• To analyse 14 kilometres long rampart, researchers deployed a technique called muon tomography or muography, which uses muons to generate three-dimensional images of such large structures.

Muons

• Muons are subatomic particles raining from space.
• The muon was discovered as a constituent of cosmic-ray particle “showers” in 1936 by the American physicists Carl D. Andersonand Seth Neddermeyer.
• They are created when the particles in Earth’s atmosphere collide with cosmic rays — clusters of high-energy particles that move through space at just below the speed of light.
• It has two forms, the negatively charged muon and its positively charged antiparticle.
• These particles resemble electrons but are 207 times as massive. Therefore, they are sometimes called “fat electrons”.
• Muons are so heavy, they can travel through hundreds of metres of rock or other matter before getting absorbed or decaying into electrons and neutrinos
• They are highly unstable and exist for just 2.2 microseconds.

muon tomography

• Although muon tomography was first used in the 1960s, it has only recently gained widespread use among researchers, particularly in archaeology.
• It is conceptually similar to X-ray but capable of scanning much larger and wider structures, owing to the penetration power of muons.
• All that is required is to place a muon detector underneath, within, or near the object of interest.
• The detector then tracks the number of muons going through the object from different directions, to form a three-dimensional image.
• The image is then compared with a muon image of the “free sky.” This indicates how many muons have been blocked. The final picture is essentially a shadow of the object, in the light of cosmic muons.”

President''s greetings on the eve of birthday of sant guru ravidas

• Guru Ravidas Jayanthi is commemorated on Magh Purnima, the day of the full moon in the month of Magh, according to the Hindu Lunar calendar.
• Guru Ravidas was a 14th-century famous Bhakti Movement saint.
• He abandoned saguna (with attributes, image) forms of supreme beings, and focussed on the nirguna (without attributes, abstract) form of supreme beings.
• Ravidas was a disciple of Sant Kabir and the founder of the Ravidassia religion.
• The Sikh scripture, Guru Granth Sahib, contains forty-one of his devotional songs and poems.
• The famous saint poetess, Mirabai was a disciple of Guru Ravidas.