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National

First time home voting in coming 2024 election

• The Election Commission of India (ECI) has introduced home voting for the first time in a Lok Sabha Election.
• This initiative aims to make voting easier for elderly citizens and Persons with Disabilities (PwDs) during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
• Now, voters above 85 years of age and PwDs with 40% benchmark disability can choose to vote from home.

1^st homegrown CAR T-cell therapy centre

• President Droupadi Murmu inaugurated a CAR T-cell therapy centre at IIT Bombay; the first domestically developed one in the country.
• The treatment known as CAR T-cell therapy is a form of immunotherapy that uses a person’s immune system to fight off cancer cells.
• The therapy uses our body’s immune cells, called T-cells, a type of lymphocyte or white blood cell.

Metal-rich Indian Ocean seabed

• Indian delegates was visited the International Seabed Authority (ISA), Jamaica to strengthen efforts to explore two deep sea regions in the Indian Ocean for mining
• New Delhi is exploring obtaining rights to mine a metal-rich region, the Carlsberg Ridge, located away from India’s western shores, and a cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts in deep seabed region, Afanasy-Nikitin Seamount (ANS), located away from the eastern shores, both in the vast Indian Ocean.

Gopi Thotakura to be the first Indian space tourist

• Entrepreneur and pilot Gopi Thotakura is set to become the first Indian to venture into space as a tourist on the NS-25 mission of Blue Origin — a company founded by Jeff Bezos, who is also the founder of Amazon.
• Space tourism is essentially a section of the aviation sector which seeks to provide tourists with the opportunity to become astronauts and experience space travel for recreational, leisure, or business purposes.

International

Israel killed Iranian generals in Syria

• Israeli warjets attacked an Iranian consulate building in Damascus, Syria, killed at least 13 people including General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who was a senior leader of the Iranian Quds Force.
• The Quds Force is the paramilitary and intelligence wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG).
• The IRCG was set up by the leader of the Islamic Revolution and Iran’s first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1979.

World Central Kitchen

• World Central Kitchen, the food charity founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, called a halt to its work in the Gaza Strip after an apparent Israeli strike killed seven of its workers, mostly foreigners.
• Founded in 2010, World Central Kitchen delivers freshly prepared meals to people in need following natural disasters, like hurricanes or earthquakes, or to those enduring conflict.

Iran launches attacks on Israel

• Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles towards Israel, in retaliation for an Israeli attack on its consulate that occurred in Damascus,
• Iran and Israel have also been regional rivals for long. Iran has also blamed Israel for some other attacks that have taken place in the country.
• Israel, in turn, has not claimed responsibility but has been critical of Iran supporting regional groups such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas.

Economy

CDP-SURAKSHA

• The CDP-SURAKSHA is essentially a digital platform. SURAKSHA stands for “System for Unified Resource Allocation, Knowledge, and Secure Horticulture Assistance.”
• The platform will allow an instant disbursal of subsidies to farmers in their bank account by utilising the e-RUPI voucher (more on this later) from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
• The CDP is a component of the central sector scheme of NHB. It is aimed at leveraging the geographical specialisation of horticulture clusters.

Science & Technology

India's New Generation Ballistic Missile

• India successfully flight tested the new generation ballistic missile Agni-Prime from the APJ Abdul Kalam Island off the coast of
• Agni Prime is the Two-stage canisterised solid propellant ballistic missile, with a maximum range of 1000 to 2000 km.

 First ever energy transitions report

• A first of its kind report titled “Synchronizing energy transitions towards possible Net-Zero for India: Affordable and clean energy for All” launched on 3 April 2024.
• Coal is projected to continue until the next two decades as the backbone of the Indian energy system, the report said.
• Net-zero is not possible without substantial nuclear power and Renewable Energy (RE) generation by 2070.

World’s first orbiter to make direct satellite calls

• Chinese scientists have developed world’s first satellite series (Tiantong-1) capable of enabling Smartphone calls without the need for ground-based infrastructure such as Base Transceiver Station (BTSs) or cellular towers.

New map of universe

• An international team of researchers has released the most comprehensive “three-dimensional” map of the universe, which, scientists hope, could reveal some clues about dark energy.
• Dark energy is the mysterious force that is believed to be causing the universe to expand uncontrollably.
• The researchers have published its findings from the first year of observations by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or

A time standard for the Moon

• The White House has tasked NASA with creating a new time zone for the moon by the end of 2026.
• The new lunar standard, called "Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC)," is part of a broader effort to "establish time standards at and around celestial bodies other than Earth.

Open AI’s new Voice Engine clones human speech

• OpenAI, the company behind AI chatbot ChatGPT, introduced a new AI model that can replicate any voice in any language by simply using a brief audio sample.
• Known as Voice Engine, it lets users upload a 15-second audio sample and uses it to generate audio in the same voice and manner of speaking.

MISCELLANEOUS

Physicist Peter Higgs passes away

• Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence of a new particle that came to be named after him (as well as God) died on 9 April 2024. He was 94.
• He was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass.

 World’s 1^st conversational AI with emotional intelligence

• Hume, a New York-based research lab and technology company, has introduced what can be called the ‘first conversational AI with emotional intelligence’.
• The company claims that it is building empathic AI that could ‘serve human well-being’ through an application programming interface (API) that can interpret emotional expressions and come up with empathic responses.

Massive earthquake hits Taiwan

• Several people died and injured in Taiwan after the island was hit by its biggest earthquake in at least 25 years on 4 April 2024.
• Taiwan is prone to earthquakes as it lies along the Pacific “Ring of Fire” — where 90% of the world’s earthquakes take place.
• The Ring of Fire is essentially a string of hundreds of volcanoes and earthquake-sites which runs along the Pacific Ocean.
• It is a semicircle or horse shoe in shape and stretches nearly 40,250 kilometres.

Flood in Kerala’s coastal areas

• Hundreds of houses have been flooded in several coastal areas of Kerala due to high sea waves, also known as swell waves. Such flooding events are called swell surge or Kallakkadal in Malayalam.
• Kallakkadal is essentially coastal flooding during the pre-monsoon (April-May) season by swell waves on the southwest coast of India.
• The term Kallakkadal, used by local fishermen, is a combination of two Malayalam words, including Kallan and Kadal. “Kallan means thief and Kadal means sea.