Scientist team discovers new exoplanet with mass 13 times that of Jupiter

• A new Jupiter-size exoplanet with the highest density known till this date and mass 13 times than that of Jupiter, has been discovered
• An exoplanet is any planet beyond the solar system and the one discovered by scientists from India, Germany, Switzerland and the U.S. is with a density of ~14 g/cm3.
• Massive giant exoplanets are those having mass greater than four times that of Jupiter.
• The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said that the discovery of this massive exoplanet was made using the indigenously made PRL Advanced Radial-velocity Abu-sky Search spectrograph (PARAS) at the 1.2 m telescope of PRL at its Gurushikhar Observatory in Mt. Abu by measuring the mass of the planet precisely.
• The newly discovered exoplanet was found around the star called TOI4603 or HD 245134. NASA’s The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite initially declared TOI4603 as a possible candidate to host a secondary body of unknown nature.

Fresh excavation reveals pre-Mauryan era signs in Delhi’s Purana Qila site

• A fresh round of excavations at the site of Delhi’s Purana Qila (Old Fort) have uncovered evidence of the continuous history of the city since the pre-Mauryan era. The findings include shards of Painted Gray Ware pottery which are usually dated to around 1200 BC to 600 BC.
• Sources said that the site could host one of the accompanying events during the G-20 leadership summit in September. The Purana Qila, built by Sher Shah Suri and Mughal emperor Humayun, is believed by many to be the site of Indraprastha, as mentioned in the Mahabharat.
• The new excavations have also found remains of a 900-year-old Vaikuntha Vishnu from the Rajput period, a terracotta plaque of Goddess Gaja Lakshmi from the Gupta period, the structural remains of a 2,500-year-old terracotta ring well from the Mauryan period, and a well-defined four-room complex from the Sunga-Kushan period dating back to 2,300 years ago, besides beads, seals, copper coins and a bone needle.

India’s growth momentum likely to sustain in FY24: RBI

• India’s growth momentum is likely to sustain in 2023-24 in an atmosphere of easing inflationary pressures, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in its Annual Report 2022-23.
• The central bank noted that the economy will be supported by sound macroeconomic policies, softer commodity prices, a robust financial sector, and new growth opportunities stemming from global realignment of supply chains.
• However, it said that slowing global growth, protracted geopolitical tensions and a possible upsurge in financial market volatility following new stress events in the global financial system could pose downside risks to growth.
• “It is important, therefore, to sustain structural reforms to improve India’s medium-term growth potential,” the central bank said in the report.
• Amid strong global headwinds, the Indian economy is expected to have grown by 7% in real GDP in 2022-23, the RBI said. Agriculture and allied activities were resilient in FY23, with sectoral gross value added (GVA) seen posting growth of 3.3%, it said.

Testing breakthrough challenges ‘world’s worst wildlife disease’

For the past 40 years, a devastating fungal disease has been ravaging frog populations around the world, wiping out 90 species. Unlike the global COVID-19 pandemic, you may not even be aware of this “panzootic” – a pandemic in the animal world.

Recently published has now developed a method to detect all known strains of this disease, caused by the amphibian chytrid fungus.

An extreme mortality rate

• Chytridiomycosis, or “chytrid” for short, has driven severe declines in over 500 frog species and caused 90 extinctions, including seven in Australia.
• The extreme rate of mortality, and the high number of species affected, makes chytrid unequivocallythe deadliest animal disease known to date.
• Chytrid infects frogs by reproducing in their skin. The single-celled fungus enters a skin cell, multiplies, then breaks back out onto the surface of the animal.
• This damage to the skin affects the frog’s ability to balance water and salt levels, and eventually leads to death if infection levels are high enough.
• Chytridoriginatedin Asia. It’s believed that global travel and trade in amphibians led to the disease being unwittingly spread to other continents.
• Frogs in regions such as Australia and the Americas did not have the evolutionary history with chytrid that could grant them resistance.
• In the 1980s, amphibian biologists began to notice sharp population declines, and in 1998, the chytrid fungal pathogen was finally recognised.

An imperfect swab

• To find out if a frog is carrying chytrid, researchers swab the animal and run the same type of test you might recognise from COVID-19 testing – a qPCR.
• It stands for quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and simply put, is a way to measure the volume of DNA from a species of interest. The testwas developed at CSIRO in 2004; unlike a COVID test, however, scientists swab the frog’s skin, not the nose.
• Because this test was developed from chytrid in Australia, decades after the pathogen’s arrival in the country, a divergence between the Australian and Asian strains meant this test could not detect chytrid in its region of origin. This has been a major limitation to the past two decades of chytrid research.
• Over the past several years, a team led by researchers at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research – Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in India has been working on a new qPCR test that can detect strains of chytrid from Asia. In collaboration with researchers in Australia and Panama, we have now verified the new test also reliably detects chytrid in these countries.
• Furthermore, the test can detect another closely related species of chytrid that infects salamanders. The test is also more sensitive, meaning it can detect very low infection levels – thereby broadening the scope of species we can study.

Natural immunity

• The most puzzling thing about chytrid is that some amphibian species – even those that have not evolved with the pathogen – don’t become sick when they carry the fungus. These species have some form of natural immune resistance.
• However, frog immunity is extremely complex. Immunity might come from anti-microbial chemicals within the skin, symbiotic bacteria on the skin, white blood cells and antibodies in the blood, or combinations of these mechanisms.