10 PM Current Affairs Quiz: March 3, 2020

The Land Port Authority of India is a statutory body. It was established under Land Ports Authority of India Act, 2010. Under the act, it has powers to undertake joint ventures to discharge its functions. It functions under Ministry of Home Affairs.

The Land Port Authority of India is responsible for managing border infrastructure. It creates, upgrades and maintains the integrated check posts and also border infrastructure.

The Authority works to provide secure and efficient systems of cargo and passenger movements across international borders. It also works to reduce the dwell time and trade transaction time and costs. It promotes people-to-people contact.

The Inland Custom Ports and Kartarpur Sahib Corridor were also constructed by Land Port Authority of India.

World Wildlife Day: The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) proclaimed 3 March – the day of signature of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 1973 – as UN World Wildlife Day to celebrate and raise awareness of the world’s wild animals and plants.

The UNGA resolution also designated the CITES Secretariat as the facilitator for the global observance of this special day for wildlife on the UN calendar. World Wildlife Day has now become the most important global annual event dedicated to wildlife.

World Wildlife Day will be celebrated in 2020 under the theme “Sustaining all life on Earth”, encompassing all wild animal and plant species as key components of the world’s biodiversity. This aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goals 1, 12, 14 and 15, and their wide-ranging commitments on alleviating poverty, ensuring sustainable use of resources, and on conserving life both on land and below water to halt biodiversity loss.

Bern Convention: The Bern Convention is a binding international legal instrument in the field of nature conservation, which covers the whole of the natural heritage of the European continent and extends to some States of Africa. Its aims are to conserve wild flora and fauna and their natural habitats and to promote European co-operation in that field. The UK is a signatory to the Convention which was established at Bern, Switzerland in 1979.

Recently, at the National Workshop on Explosive Detection, a new Explosive Detection device called RalDer-X was launched. RalDer-X has the capacity to detect explosives that are in the pure form and also those that are added with contaminants. It is also capable of detecting explosives at a distance. The device is capable of detecting various applications such as narcotics and also other elements that are non-explosive in nature.

Explosive Detection is highly important to inspect whether a container contains explosives especially at ports, airports and at borders. There are two main categories of Explosive detection namely Bulk Detection and Trace Detection. Colorimetrics is the popular principle used in detecting both types of explosives.

Recently, snow around Ukraine’s Vernadsky Research Base, located off the coast of Antarctica’s northernmost peninsula, has started to take on a red tinge. The red tint in the snow is caused by the microscopic Chlamydomonas nivalis algae which produce the tinted sunscreen to keep themselves warm.

Concern: As the snow becomes darker from the tinge from the algae, it absorbs more heat, as a result of which it melts faster. Further, these algae change the snow’s albedo (the amount of light or radiation the snow surface is able to reflect back).

Urja Dakshata Information Tool (UDIT) (www.udit.beeindia.gov.in), a first ever initiative taken by BEE with World Resources Institute (WRI), to facilitate a database on energy e­fficiency was launched. UDIT is a user-friendly platform that explains the energy efficiency landscape of India across industry, appliances, building, transport, municipal and agriculture sectors. UDIT will also showcase the capacity building and new initiatives taken up by the Government across the sectors in the increase energy efficiency domain.