Current Affairs - Terms In-Vogue

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry has initiated a project on Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). The task has been assigned to Quality Council of India (QCI).

• ONDC aims at promoting open networks developed on open sourced methodology, using open specifications and open network protocols independent of any specific platform. ONDC is expected to digitize the entire value chain, standardize operations, promote inclusion of suppliers, derive efficiencies in logistics and enhance value for consumers.

Track One Diplomacy or Official Diplomacy is an instrument of foreign policy for the establishment and development of contacts between the governments of different states through the use of intermediaries mutually recognized by the respective parties.

Traditional diplomacy or Track One Diplomacy has for a long time been complemented by another form of diplomacy called Track Two Diplomacy. Montville coined the phrase ‘Track Two Diplomacy’. According to him, Track Two Diplomacy is an “unofficial, informal interaction between members of adversary groups or nations that aim to develop strategies, to influence public opinion, organize human and material resources in ways that might help resolve their conflict”.

It is a twelve digit Unique Identification Number provided by the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, Government of India for small and medium enterprises, beginning in September 2015. It is also known as Aadhaar for Business.

It is a sub-sea cable network proposed by Google - that will connect the East Coast of the U.S. and Las Toninas, Argentina — with additional landings in Brazil and Uruguay. The idea here is to provide users in South America with improved low-latency access to Google’s portfolio of consumer and cloud services.

The New Zealand government has announced to celebrate 'Matariki' as a public holiday beginning on June 24, 2022.

• Matariki signals the Māori New Year. It is a time of renewal and celebration in New Zealand that begins with the rising of the Matariki star cluster.

• According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of US department of commerce, a heat dome occurs when the atmosphere traps hot ocean air like a lid or cap.
• The phenomenon begins when there is a strong change (or gradient) in ocean temperatures. In the process known as convection, the gradient causes more warm air, heated by the ocean surface, to rise over the ocean surface.
• As prevailing winds move the hot air east, the northern shifts of the jet stream trap the air and move it toward land, where it sinks, resulting in heat waves.

• The Japanese rock garden or "dry landscape" garden, often called a zen garden, creates a miniature stylized landscape through carefully composed arrangements of rocks, water features, moss, pruned trees and bushes, and uses gravel or sand that is raked to represent ripples in water.
• Zen is a Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism emphasizing the value of meditation and intuition rather than ritual worship or study of scriptures. Zen in Japan is meditation in India.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was said to have conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. In virology, gain-of-function research involves deliberately altering an organism in the lab, altering a gene, or introducing a mutation in a pathogen to study its transmissibility, virulence and immunogenicity.

The Yerrapalli Formation is a Triassic rock formation consisting primarily of mudstones that outcrops in the Pranhita–Godavari Basin in southeastern India. The Yerrapalli Formation preserves fossils of freshwater and terrestrial vertebrates as well as trace fossils of invertebrates. Recently, an international team of paleontologists has thrown light on a carnivorous reptile in this region that lived 240 million years ago named as Bharitalasuchus tapani.