1) World’s oldest-known Fort Discovered: An international team of archaeologists has uncovered what is believed to be the world’s oldest-known fort in a remote region of Siberia.
- The fortified settlement, named Amnya, is located along the Amnya River in western Siberia.
- Radiocarbon dating of samples collected at the site places the fort’s construction around 8,000 years ago.
- The ground breaking discovery challenges conventional beliefs about early human societies.
- It is suggesting that complex defence structures existed among hunter-gatherers much earlier than previously thought.
2) Pong Dam Wildlife Sanctuary (PDWS): Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change issued draft notification declaring one-kilometre area around PDWS as an Eco-Sensitive Zone, where commercial activities will not be allowed.
- Located in Kangra district, Himachal Pradesh.
- Pong Dam Lake (Maharana Pratap Sagar) is a manmade reservoir created in 1975 with construction of Pong Dam on Beas River. It is also known as Pong reservoir or Pong Dam.
- In 1983, reservoir was declared as Wildlife Sanctuary.
- Pong Dam Lake was designated a Ramsar site in 2002.
- There is a Vulture café in Pong wherein cattle carcass is dumped for Vultures.
- Fauna: Leopard, Sambher, Wild Boar, Porcupine etc.
3) Card-on-File Tokenisation (CoFT): RBI has enabled CoFT directly through card issuing banks.
- This will provide cardholders with additional choice to tokenise their cards for multiple merchant sites through a single process.
- CoFT Tokenisation refers to replacement of actual credit and debit card details with an alternate code called the token.
- This token is unique for a specific combination of card, token requestor, and device.
- Card details when stored with a merchant are known as Card-on-File.
- To avoid any breach or leak of data, RBI introduced tokenisation.
4) Dengue: World Health Organization (WHO) has reported more than five million dengue infections and 5,000 deaths from Dengue in 2023.
- India, along with Indonesia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand rank among the world’s 30 most highly endemic countries.
- Dengue virus is transmitted to humans through bite of infected mosquitoes (Aedes Aegypti).
- Found in tropical and sub-tropical climates worldwide, mostly in urban and semi-urban areas.
- Factors for dengue spread: Changing distribution of mosquitoes owing to 2023 El Nino phenomena and climate change leading to increasing temperatures and high rainfall.
- There is no specific treatment for dengue
