1) Aragalaya: It is a Sinhalese word for “struggle”. It is being used widely to describe the daily gathering of people at Colombo that began with the demand that Gotabaya resign as President and make way for a new dispensation, even “a new system”.
- aragalaya also captures the struggle of individual Sri Lankans to find food, fuel and medicines on a daily basis, bringing them all together in a “janatha aragalaya” — a people’s struggle.
- It has been mostly leaderless, though some individuals have spoken for the group.
2) Waterfall mechanism for distribution of net proceeds: IBC puts creditors into different categories based on the nature of debt. Banks, bond issuers, and lenders are classified as financial creditors.
- Trade creditors & vendors are classified as operational creditors.
- Financial creditors are further categorised as secured and unsecured creditors, based on the security furnished by the borrower company.
- Secured financial creditors rank the highest in the order of priority followed by unsecured financial creditors, government dues and, finally, operational creditors.
- The creditors receive proceeds (even if in surplus over the liquidation value) under the resolution plan in order of the mentioned priority.
- As a result, proceeds may be extinguished at the level of financial creditors itself, leaving almost nothing for other creditors in the waterfall mechanism.
3) 6G technology: 6G networks will be able to use higher frequencies than 5G networks and provide substantially higher capacity and much lower latency.
- One of the goals of 6G internet will be to support one microsecond-latency communication.
- This is 1,000 times faster — or 1/1000th the latency — than one millisecond throughput.
- Working in conjunction with artificial intelligence (AI), the computational infrastructure of 6G will autonomously determine the best location for computing to occur; this includes decisions about data storage, processing and sharing.
- 6G is expected to support data rates of 1 terabyte per second.
- t seeks to utilize the terahertz band of frequency which is currently unutilized. Terahertz waves fall between infrared waves and microwaves on the electromagnetic spectrum.
4) South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA): It is a region at the Earth’s surface where the intensity of the magnetic field is particularly low. It stretches out between South America and southwest Africa.
- Earth’s magnetic field acts like a protective shield around the planet, repelling and trapping charged particles from the Sun.
- SAA exists because the Earth’s inner Van Allen radiation belt comes closest to the planet’s surface, causing an increased flux of energetic particles. This leads to the penetration of solar energetic particles deep into Earth’s atmosphere, posing severe problems for airplanes and ships’ positioning systems as well as spacecraft electronic systems.
5) Van Allen radiation belts: it is a zone of energetic charged particles, most of which originate from the solar wind. The particles are captured by and held around a planet by that planet’s magnetic field. It surrounds Earth, containing a nearly impenetrable barrier that prevents the fastest, most energetic electrons from reaching Earth.
- The outer belt is made up of billions of high-energy particles that originate from the Sun and become trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, an area known as the magnetosphere.
- The inner belt results from interactions of cosmic rays with Earth’s atmosphere.
