The Earth''s ozone layer is slowly recovering, UN report finds

• The successful phasing out of banned substances as envisioned by the Montreal Protocol has set the stage for a complete recovery of the ozone layer by the 2060s, a United Nations-backed panel of experts said at the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting on January 8, 2023.

Ozone

• Ozone is a gas composed of three atoms of oxygen. It is both a natural and a man-made product that occurs in the Earth''s upper atmosphere (Stratospheric ozone) and lower atmosphere (the troposphere).
• Stratospheric ozone is formed naturally through the interaction of solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation with molecular oxygen (O2).
• The "ozone layer," approximately 6 to 30 miles above the Earth''s surface, reduces the amount of harmful UV radiation reaching the Earth''s surface.

UK Envoy Alex Ellis holds meeting with Gujarat CM Bhupendra Patel

• It was conceived as part of an India-U.K. Migration and Mobility MoU signed in May 2021 and was announced in November at the G20 summit in Bali.
• It will permit up to 3,000 of their degree-holding citizens aged between 18 and 30 to live and work in each other’s countries for two years.
• The programme will be reciprocal, also allowing UK professionals in the same position to participate in a professional exchange by living and working in India.
• This scheme makes India the first visa-national country to benefit from the scheme.

Centre adopts new standards for making digital TVs, security systems and chargers

• The Bureau of Indian Standards has published three significant Indian Standards in the area of Electronics.
• The first standard is Indian Standard for digital television receivers with built-in satellite tuners.
• The technical Committee has published an Indian Standard IS 18112:2022 Specification for television with built-in satellite tuners.
• The TVs manufactured as per this Indian standard would enable reception of Free-To-Air TV and Radio channels just by connecting a dish antenna with LNB mounted on a suitable place, at the rooftop/side wall of the building.
• This would facilitate the transmission of knowledge about government initiatives, schemes, the educational content of Doordarshan and the repository of Indian cultural programs to reach and benefit a wide segment of the population in the country at large.

Digital television receivers

• In this television in which the signals are transmitted in digital form and decoded by the television receiver.

Union Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh releases theme of National Science Day 2023 in New Delhi

• The theme of National Science Day 2023 will be Global Science for Global Wellbeing.
• The government of India designated 28 February as National Science Day (NSD) in 1986.
• On this day Sir C.V. Raman announced the discovery of the ''Raman Effect'' for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930.

Raman Effect

• Raman Effect is a change in the wavelength of light that occurs when a light beam is deflected by molecules.
• When a beam of light traverses a dust-free, transparent sample of a chemical compound, a small fraction of the light emerges in directions other than that of the incident (incoming) beam.

Most of this scattered light is of unchanged wavelength. A small part, however, has wavelengths different from that of the incident light; its presence is a result of the Raman Effect.

Rise In Seasonal Bird Count In Bhitarkanika National Park

• The report highlighted that the number of bird counts increased but the diversity of species has decreased compared to last year. This year the Bhitarkanika National Park saw 140 species of birds compared to 144 last year

Bhitarkanika National Park

• Bhitarkanika National Park is located in the Kendrapara district of Odisha.
• It is India’s second-largest mangrove ecosystem after the Sunderbans.
• This National Park is a network of creeks and canals which are inundated with waters from rivers Brahmani, Baitarani, Dhamra and Patasala forming a unique ecosystem.
• It is home to the largest congregation of endangered Salt Water Crocodiles in the country.
• The Gahirmatha Beach which forms the boundary of the sanctuary in the east is the largest colony of the Olive Ridley Sea Turtles.
• Bhitarkanika is also home to eight varieties of Kingfisher birds which is also a rarity.

Less than 1% of voters downloaded e-EPIC, two years after the digital voter ID was announced

• Along with e-PAN and e-Aadhaar, the e-EPIC is one of the few generally accepted identity documents that can be downloaded as a legally valid PDF file.
• About 9.8 crore voters are currently eligible to download an E-EPIC, the ECI said in its RTI response, that is, 6.8% of voters who are eligible to download an e-EPIC as a PDF document have done so — this is equivalent to less than 1% of all registered voters in India.

E-EPIC:

• e-EPIC is a portable document format(PDF) version of the EPIC which can be downloaded on mobile or in a self-printable form on the computer.
• A voter can thus store the card on his/her mobile, upload it on Digi locker or print it and self-laminate it.
• It can be used as a valid proof of age and address to avail various government services and schemes. It is equally valid as a proof of document for voter participation.
• In the first phase, new electors who were registered during the Special Summary Revision 2021 and had a unique mobile number in the e-roll were eligible for the e-EPIC. In the second phase, all eligible voters who have a valid EPIC number were made eligible for the e-EPIC.

ChatGPT can be used to write phishing emails, malicious code, warn security experts

• ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI''s GPT-3 family of large language models.
• It is a type of artificial intelligence that can understand and generate natural language text.
• It is trained on large amounts of text data and uses an algorithm called a transformer to learn how to generate text that is similar to human conversation.
• The application is beneficial for presenting information and responding to queries in a way similar to what would occur in a normal conversation because it has been educated by artificial intelligence and machine learning.

GPT-3:

• GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) is a state-of-the-art language processing AI model developed by OpenAI.
• It is capable of generating human-like text and has a wide range of applications, including language translation, language modeling, and generating text for applications such as chatbots.
• It is one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models to date, with 175 billion parameters.

ONGC Videsh Ltd Retakes 20% Stake In Sakhalin-1 Oil, Gas Fields

• The Sakhalin-1 oil and gas development project is located in the Okhotsk Sea, off the north-eastern coast of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East.
• It comprises three offshore fields namely Chayvo, Odoptu, and Arkutun-Dagi.
• The Sakhalin-1 project is operated by Exxon Neftegas (ENL), a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil which holds a 30% participating interest. The other partners of the project are the Japanese consortium Sakhalin Oil and Gas Development Company (SODECO, 30%), India’s state-owned ONGC Videsh (20%), and Russian oil company Rosneft (20%).
• The Sakhalin 1 project is estimated to hold approximately 2.3 billion barrels of oil and 17.1 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) in recoverable reserves.

ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL):

• OVL is a Miniratna Schedule “A” Central Public Sector Enterprise (CPSE) of the Government of India and is the wholly owned subsidiary and overseas arm of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC).
• OVL comes under the administrative control of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.
• The primary business of ONGC Videsh is to prospect for oil and gas acreages outside India, including exploration, development and production of oil and gas.
• ONGC Videsh is the second largest petroleum company of India, next only to its parent ONGC.ONGC Videsh produced about 27.3% of oil and 19.4% of oil and natural gas of India’s domestic production in 2021-22.

e-Sanjeevani crosses another milestone by touching 9 crore teleconsultations mark

• It is a web-based comprehensive telemedicine solution, launched by the then Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India, in 2009.
• Created by: Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Mohali, is the creator of eSanjeevani.
• Two modules of eSanjeevani:
  • **eSanjeevani AB-HWC:**The doctor-to-doctor telemedicine platform, being implemented at all the Health and Wellness Centres (HWCs) in the country under Ayushman Bharat (AB) Scheme of Government of India.
    • It was rolled out in 2019.
  • **eSanjeevani OPD:**It is the Patient-to-Doctor remote consultation services rolled out in 2020 amid the first lockdown imposed to fight Covid-19 pandemic, while the Outpatient Departments (OPDs) in the country were closed.
    • The initiative is a contactless and risk-free modality that enables delivery of health services to the citizens in the confines of their homes free of cost.
    • The C-DAC is working towards adding another innovative feature in eSanjeevani OPD that will enable roll out of National OPDs on eSanjeevani OPD, to offer remote health services to patients in any part of the country.