10 PM Current Affairs Quiz : April 23, 2019

Lymph nodes are tiny round or oval organs found all over your body, and they are connected through a complex system of lymphatic channels. They function to help the body fight infection via white blood cells.

They act as filters for anything that should not be in the body,including cancer cells.Metastatic lymph nodes are those that have cancer cells within them which is spread from a primary tumor of somewhere else.

A team of researchers from the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics,West Bengal has found the Biomarkers for lymph node metastasis in oral cancer.

The activities on Earth Day are led and coordinated by Earth Day Network. It is a US based international environmental NGO and has presence in 195 countries.

The theme for Earth Day 2019 is ‘Protect Our Species’. It aims to draw attention to the rapid extinction of species across the world. The extinction of species is directly linked to human activity which causes climate change, deforestation and pollution.

The Earth Day celebrates the earth’s environment and raises public awareness about pollution. It was first celebrated in the year 1970. The idea of commemorating such a day was propounded by Gaylord Nelson, a US senator from Wisconsin.

The Visakhapatnam class (Project 15B) is a class of stealth guided missile destroyers currently under construction for the Indian Navy. The class comprises four ships – Visakhapatnam, Mormugao, Imphal and Porbandar all of which are being built by the Mazagon Dock Limited (MDL) in India, and will be the largest destroyers to be operated by the Indian Navy

The first Project 15-B ship, INS Vishakhapatnam, was launched in 2015. The second ship, INS Mormugao, was launched in 2016. All Project 15-B ships have been designed indigenously by the Indian Navy’s Directorate of Naval Design.

Imphal is the third ship to be launched under Project 15-B. It is a project which is aimed at adding state-of-the-art warships to the naval fleet. Under the project, ships are built to carry and operate two multiple role helicopters.

Zappey’s Flycatcher, a song bird that breeds in China and spends the winters in the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Java. The bird is listed as Near Threatened in the IUCN Red list.

COMCASA stands for Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement and is one of the four foundational agreements that the U.S. signs with allies and close partners to facilitate interoperability between militaries and sale of high end technology.

COMCASA allows India to procure transfer specialised equipment for encrypted communications for US origin military platforms like the C-17, C-130 and P-8Is. Currently, these platforms use commercially available communication systems.

This will enable greater communications interoperability between the militaries of India and the U.S.

CRISPR-Cas9 (‘Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats) is a tool used for gene editing. The technique involves a DNA cutting enzyme and a small tag which tells the enzyme where to cut. Cas9 stands for CRISPR-associated protein 9, and is the nuclease part that cuts the DNA.

Gene editing is the deliberate alteration of a selected DNA sequence in a living cell. It involves editing an organism’s DNA by altering, removing or adding nucleotides to the genome.