GK and Current Affairs Updates

Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK today clearly headed to retain power in Tamil Nadu by winning 134 seats as arch rival DMK gave a strong fight bagging 89 segments.
•    Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, set to create history by becoming the first ever leader to retain power in the state since 1989, as she retains R K Nagar constituency defeating DMK rival by 39,545 votes. 
•    Jayalalithaa secured 97,218 votes against Shimla Muthuchozhan who polled 57,673 votes.
•    Addressing jubilant party workers, Jayalalithaa called the victory a historic one and vowed to strive for the people with renewed vigour.
•    The bad news for the AIADMK came from Chennai, which was battered by flash floods in December and whose voters appeared to have overwhelmingly turned against the ruling party.
•    AIADMK candidates trailed behind the DMK in 10 of the 16 constituencies in the capital.
•    For the first time, the elections saw several alternatives to AIADMK and DMK. But all drew blank at the polls.
•    A total of 2,873 voters in the high profile Dr. Radhakrishnan Nagar constituency, where Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa was a contestant, preferred NOTA.
•    Tamil Nadu, with over 5.79 crore registered voters, had recorded 74.26 percent polling in the assembly polls held on May 16.
•    Tamil Nadu is the eleventh-largest state in India by area and the sixth-most populous. 
•    The state was ranked sixth among states in India according to the Human Development Index in 2011, with the second-largest state economy.
•    Its official language is Tamil, which is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world.

A team of six Indian Army mountaineers led by Lieutenant Colonel Ranveer Jamwal has successfully summitted Mount Everest (8848 metres) at dawn on 19th May 2016. 
•    Concurrently, the Lhotse Summit Team under Major Nooruddin Ahmed is attempting to summit Mount Lhotse, the fourth highest peak in the world at 8501 metres. 
•    The Indian Army climbers were amongst the initial lot of mountaineers to successfully climb Everest after a hiatus of two years as the peak was closed due to the devastation caused by the earthquake in Nepal last year.
•    The 30-member Indian Army’s Everest Massif Expedition 2016 was flagged off by Lt Gen MMS Rai, Vice Chief of the Army Staff, on 30th March, 2016. 

•    Five members of the team will also be participating in the tough and intensive ‘Tenzing Hillary Everest Marathon’ on 29th May 2016, considered to be one of the toughest trail marathons in the world.

•    A two-hour flight from Sydney to London is a step closer to reality after the latest successful test Wednesday of hypersonic technology in the Australian desert.
•    A joint US-Australian military research team is running a series of 10 trials at the world's largest land testing range, Woomera in South Australia, and at Norway's Andoya Rocket Range.
•    Scientists have said hypersonic technology could cut travelling time from Sydney to London to as little as two hours for the 17,000-kilometre (19,540-mile) flight.
•    Hypersonic flight involves travelling at more than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5).
•    Scientists involved in the programme -- called Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HIFRE) -- are developing an engine that can fly at Mach 7
•    Each test builds on previous ones, with the latest used to measure heat on the outside of a vehicle in hypersonic flight, Smart said.
•    The next test, scheduled for 2017, would involve the scramjet engine separating from the rocket booster and flying on its own, he added.
•    The first test was conducted in 2009 with the project expected to be completed in 2018.

Pinarayi Vijayan is set to be the chief minister of Kerala as Left Democratic Front (LDF) has won 91 seats out 140 assembly seats.
•    Compared to 2011 assembly elections when it had won 68 seats, LDF increased its tally by 24 seats in 2016 assembly elections.
•    On the other hand, Congress Party led United Democratic Front (UDF), like in other states, is in for a huge setback. 
•    It is leading only in 47 seats, a big 23 seats drop compared to 2011 assembly elections.
•    The account for BJP was opened by 86-year-old former Union minister O Rajagopal, who won by over 8000 votes. He will go down in history as the first BJP MLA in Kerala’s 140-member assembly.
•    It was the image of Rajagopal, popularly known as ‘Rajettan’, apart from the BJP’s organizational strength that helped the party to create history. He is considered a noble and well meaning person.
•    Anti-incumbency factor against the Congress chief Minister Oommen Chandy is responsible for such a massive setback to the grand old party in the state. 
•    The government had been hit by a series of corruption scandals involving some of his top aides and ministers.
•    There also has been a barrage of criticism following a spate of crime against women, especially the horrific rape, torture and murder of a Dalit student.
•    Kerala has the lowest positive population growth rate in India, 3.44%; highest Human Development Index (HDI), 0.790 in 2011; the highest literacy rate, 93.91% in the 2011 according to the census data. 
•    The state has witnessed significant emigration, especially to Arab states of the Persian Gulf during the Gulf Boom of the 1970s and early 1980s, and its economy depends significantly on remittances from a large Malayalam expatriate community. 
•    Hinduism is practiced by more than half of the population, followed by Islam and Christianity. 

Apple Inc. on 19 May 2016 opened a new Development Office in Hyderabad, Telangana. 
•    The office was formally opened by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook.
•    The facility will focus on development of Maps for Apple products, including iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. 
•    This investment will accelerate Maps development and create up to 4000 jobs.
•    With iOS 9 Apple added Transit, offering a combination of trains, subways, buses and walking, which is already available for more than 300 cities around the world.
•    Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984.
•    At present, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV.
•    Across India, Apple supports over 640000 iOS app developer jobs and other positions related to the iOS ecosystem.

Election Commission on 19 May 2016 announced results of 2016 Legislative Assembly Election of West Bengal. 
•    The elections were held in six phases between 4 April 2016 and 5 May 2016 for 294 assembly seats.
•    In the elections, ruling All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) of Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee crossed the two-third mark by winning 211 seats. 
•    Congress-Left combine has taken 76 seats while BJP has bagged three seats. Independents and others have won four seats.
•    West Bengal Chief Minister and TMC Supremo, Mamta Banerjee won from Bhabanipur Assembly Constituency. 
•    She defeated her nearest Congress rival Deepa Dasmunshi by over 25 thousand votes. 
•    West Bengal Speaker Biman Banerjee has won from Baruipur Paschim Constituency.
•    The huge victory in the assembly elections 2016 compared to 2011 elections by Mamta-led TMC can be attributed to her campaign “Maa, Maati, Maanush.” 
•    In 2011 elections her party was able to secure just 184 seats.
•    Prafulla Chandra Ghosh. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh (1891–1983) was the first Chief Minister of West Bengal, India.

The researchers, writing in the journal Nature Communications, said they had uncovered fossils showing that complex life on Earth began more than 1.5bn years ago.
•    After first emerging from the primordial soup, life remained primitive and single-celled for billions of years, but some of those cells eventually congregated like clones in a colony. 
•    Scientists took to calling the later part of this period the “boring billion” because evolution seemed to have stalled.
•    Previously, eukaryotes of comparable size had not been known to appear in the fossil record until about 600m years ago, when a multitude of soft-bodied creatures inhabited the world’s oceans.
•    Their very existence 1.56bn years ago would mean that “oxygen levels were sufficiently high to allow for such large organisms to subsist”.
•    Antcliffe suggested the fossils were more likely corresponded to colonies of bacterial cells, rather than a single complex organism.
•    Truly multicellular creatures display three-dimensional form in which only some cells are in direct contact with the environment.

Scientists at Tsinghua University in Beijing have created a mirror-image version of a protein responsible for two life-critical functions:, copying DNA and transcribing it into RNA
•    Crucial step in someday making reverse-versions of molecules that could be more resistant to viral attacks.
•    Have to build their own reverse version of the DNA polymerase that coordinates copying, which drastically slowed down the process. 
•    Scientists have been making mirror images of DNA for years, so the Tsinghua researchers were able to order many parts of their experiment, but they did have to build their own reverse version of the DNA polymerase that coordinates copying, which drastically slowed down the process. 
•    That will need to speed up to make the process financially rewarding, but biochemical companies are already looking at the lucrative potential for mirror-image molecules, which could more efficiently operate inside the body without being degraded by enzymes that break down typically-oriented molecules.

Engineers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have set a new world record for solar efficiency, converting sunlight to electricity at a rate of about two-thirds the theoretical limit.
•    The new world record for unfocused sunlight saw the engineers achieve a conversion rate of 34.5 per cent. 
•    This marks nearly a 50 per cent leap on the previous record of 24 per cent efficiency, set by Alta Devices of the United States,
•    For the new record, the UNSW researchers used a 28-cm2 four-junction mini-module embedded in a prism
•    he result was obtained by the same UNSW team that set a world record in 2014, achieving an electricity conversion rate of over 40% by using mirrors to concentrate the light – a technique known as CPV (concentrator photovoltaics) – and then similarly splitting out various wavelengths. The new result, however, was achieved using normal sunlight with no concentrators.

India on 15 May 2016 successfully test fired an indigenously developed Advanced Air Defence interceptor missile, Ashwin. 
•    It was launched from the complex of Abdul Kalam Island (formerly known as Wheeler Island) off Odisha coast.
•    Ashwin is capable of destroying any incoming hostile ballistic missile.
•    Indigenously developed by DRDO, the ADD interceptor missile isa 7.5-meter long single-stage solid rocket propelled guided missile equipped with a navigation system, a hi-tech computer and an electro-mechanical activator.
•    It weighs around 1.2 tonnes and has a diameter of less than 0.5 meter.
•    With this, India became the fourth country to have successfully developed this anti-ballistic missile system. 
•    The other three are United States, Russia and Israel. 
•    This is inspired by late President of India Shri Abdul Kalam
•    This interceptor missile is enough to destroy various demo.