10 PM Current Affairs Quiz : May 7, 2018

Seven Indian engineers working in Afghanistan have been abducted. The engineers were working on a power plant in Baghlan province, located in north Afghanistan. They were mistaken to be government employees.

Thalassemia disorder ‘reduces the production of functional haemoglobin, causing a shortage of red blood cells and low levels of oxygen in the bloodstream’. Patients require lifelong blood transfusion, iron chelation therapies and other treatment. There is still no cure other than a bone marrow transplant. As this has to be done in early childhood, it is not a workable cure as yet for adults. Thalassaemia causes a significant economic burden on the country due to rising health care and drug expenses

Rubidium atomic clocks, the simplest and most compact of all, use a glass cell of rubidium gas that changes its absorption of light at the optical rubidium frequency when the surrounding microwave frequency is just right.They are usually used in global positioning systems.The rubidium atomic clocks from Europe started failing on the first navigation satellite, IRNSS-1A, around 2016, soon after ISRO put the last and seventh satellite in orbit.

Indus river dolphins are one of only four river dolphin species and subspecies in the world that spend all of their lives in freshwater. Only 1,816 exist today in the lower parts of the Indus River in Pakistan. Numbers declined dramatically after the construction of an irrigation system. Most dolphins are confined to a 750 mile stretch of the river and divided into isolated populations by six barrages. They have adapted to life in the muddy river and are functionally blind. They rely on echolocation to navigate, communicate and hunt prey including prawns, catfish and carp.They are classified as endangered according to IUCN.

SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active–Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) is a programme initiated by Government of India and designed to achieve the three cardinal principles of Education Policy viz., access, equity and quality. The objective of this effort is to take the best teaching learning resources to all, including the most disadvantaged. SWAYAM seeks to bridge the digital divide for students who have hitherto remained untouched by the digital revolution and have not been able to join the mainstream of the knowledge economy. This is done through an indigenous developed IT platform that facilitates hosting of all the courses taught in classrooms to be accessed by anyone, anywhere at any time. All the courses are interactive, prepared by the best teachers in the country and are available, free of cost to the residents in India.

According to Maharashtra cybercrime officials,GravityRAT, a malware allegedly designed by Pakistani hackers, has recently been updated further and equipped with anti-malware evasion capabilities. It was first detected by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT-In, on various computers in 2017.It is designed to infiltrate computers, steal the data of users, and relay it to command and control centres in other countries. The ‘RAT’ in its name stands for Remote Access Trojan, which is a program capable of being controlled remotely and thus difficult to trace.