1) Gond Painting: Recently, the famous Gond painting of Madhya Pradesh has received the prestigious Geographical Indication (GI) tag.
- Themes: Gond tribes are highly interlinked with nature and this appears in their paintings too they include animals, mahua tree, mythological stories, Hindu gods, Local deities and folktales etc.
- The Gonds are the largest tribal Community in India and can be traced to the pre-Aryan era.
- They live in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Odisha.
2) JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer): The JUICE mission will be the first time that the European Space Agency (ESA) has sent a spacecraft beyond the asteroid belt.
- It is the first large-class mission in the ESA Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme.
- The spacecraft will launch on an Ariane 5 in April 2023 on an eight-year journey including gravity assist flybys of Earth and Venus before arriving in the Jupiter system in 2031.
- It will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the giant gaseous planet Jupiter and three of its largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
- Juice isn’t equipped to detect life but can find out whether there could be places around Jupiter, inside the icy moons, where the necessary conditions, such as water, biological essential elements, energy, and stability, to sustain life are present.
- NASA and JAXA both have contributed instruments to the mission
3) Puthandu: It is celebrated on the first day of Chithirai (Tamil month) and it also marks the beginning of the Tamil New Year. It is also commonly known as Varsha Pirappu.
- It marks the arrival of the spring season. It falls on the same day almost every year according to the Gregorian Calendar.
- Puthandu is celebrated elsewhere in India under different names commemorating the solar new year. Some examples include:
- Vishu in Kerala, Vaisakhi in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, NCT of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Pana Sankranti in Odisha, Pohela Boishakh in West Bengal and Tripura, Rongali Bihu in Assam
4) UTTARAMERUR INSCRIPTION: it lies in present-day Kanchipuram district in Tamil Nadu
- It is known for its historic temples built during Pallava and Chola rule.
- The famous inscription from Parantaka I’s reign is found on the walls of the Vaikunda Perumal Temple and describes processes of village self-governance.
- The inscription gives details of the functioning of the local sabha, i.e. the village assembly.
- A sabha was an assembly exclusively of brahmans and had specialised committees tasked with different things.
- There will be 30 wards. Everyone living in these 30 wards would assemble and select one representative for the village assembly.
- It mentions the qualifications and disqualifications and talks about 5 committees: Samvatsara-Variyam, Totta-Variyam, Eri-Variyam, Panchavara-Variyam, Pon-Variyam
5) Magnetoresistance: It is the result of the electrical resistance of a conductor affected by magnetic fields in adjacent materials.
- Applications: It is used in hard disk drives and magneto resistive RAM in computers, biosensors, automotive sensors, microelectromechanical systems, and medical imagers etc.
- Recently, researchers in the UK, have found that graphene displays an anomalous giant magnetoresistance (GMR) at room temperature.
- It is composed of monolayer of closely packed carbon atoms that form a hexagonal honeycomb lattice.
- It is the thinnest, most electrically and thermally conductive material in the world.
- It is also tremendously strong—about 200 times stronger than steel and flexible, as well as transparent. It is also known as a wonder material due to its vast potential in the energy and medical world.
