GK and Current Affairs Updates

The world's first artificial intelligence lawyer has been employed by a law firm in the U.S., which will use the robot to assist its various teams in legal research.
•    The robot called 'ROSS' is built upon Watson, IBM's cognitive computer. 
•    With the support of Watson's cognitive computing and natural language processing capabilities, lawyers can ask ROSS their research question and the robot reads through the law, gathers evidence, draws inferences and returns highly relevant, evidence-based answers. 
•    ROSS also monitors the law around the clock to notify users of new court decisions that can affect a case. 
•    ROSS Intelligence, the company that built ROSS, began out of research at the University of Toronto in 2014
•    Robot culture seems to be very vast and clear. This is this reason why team is looking forward to it

Sevilla achieved a remarkable hat-trick as it became the first club to win three successive Europa League titles with victory over Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool .
•    The Spanish club came from behind to defeat its English opponent 3-1 at the St. Jakob-Park stadium in Basel, Switzerland, with Kevin Gameiro canceling out Daniel Sturridge's beautifully controlled first half strike before a brace from Coke sealed Sevilla's success.
•    The victory marks Sevilla's fifth Europa League success in 11 years and ensures it will qualify for next season's Champions League.
•    Liverpool, meanwhile, will miss out on European competition altogether next year having finished a poor eighth in the English Premier League this season.
•    This win is being great achievement for the team as the level of enthusiasm is on week 

Beti, a four minute documentary film on girl child education from India, has been invited for special screening at the 42nd Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), Washington DC.
•    Beti is the only short film from India to be featured amongst 421 films representing 85 countries and will be screened on 30 May 2016, which is Seattle Memorial Day at the SIFF.
•    The film was made by young student filmmakers of Chandigarh.
•    The movie is directed by Shivain Arora.
•    The short film promotes girl child by narrating the real life story of three girls from a government school and their dream for the future.
•    The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), held annually in Seattle, Washington since 1976, is among the top film festivals in North America. 
•    Audiences have grown steadily; the 2006 festival had 160,000 attendees. 
•    In recent years, the SIFF has run for more than three weeks (24 days), in May/June, and features a diverse assortment of predominantly independent and foreign films and, in recent years, a strong contingent of documentaries.

World’s largest Single Rooftop Solar Power Plant with capacity of11.5 MegaWatt (MW) was inaugurated at Dera Baba Jaimal Singhat Beas, in Amritsar, Punjab. 
•    It was inaugurated by Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal on 18 May 2016.
•    This is the largest Solar Power Plant spread over 82 acres of rooftop in single campus on multiple roofs with installed capacity of 19.5 MW.
•    The plant has been set up with the cost of 139 crore rupees.
•    The project will generate clean and green energy sufficient to power approximately 8000 homes.
•    This solar power project at Dera Beas will help in abating about 4lakh tonnes of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in next 25 years
•    This is equivalent to plant nearly 2 lakh trees.
•    Considering the fact that pollution level and global temperature has gone up like anything, any such initiative is quite commendable.

The Indian 4x100m women's relay team on 18 May 2016 broke the 18-year-old national record to finish in 4th position at the IAAF World Challenge held in Beijing, China.
•    The 4x100m women relay team, included Dutee Chand,     Srabani Nanda, HM Jyoti and Merlin Joseph, clocked 44.03 seconds to finish the race.
•    The clocked time broke the 18-year-old record of 44.43s created by the quartet of Saraswati Dey, Rachita Mistry, EB Shyla and PT Usha on 22 July 1998 in Fukuoka, Japan. 
•    The China A and the China B team grabbed the first and third position respectively while Japan finished second.
•    The China A team clocked 42.65s for the gold medal. 
•    Japan finished the race in 43.81s for the silver medal. 
•    The China B team finished third for the bronze medal by clocking 43.89s.

Scientists have genetically engineered a clone of the Zika virus strain, an advance that may aid the development of vaccine and therapies against the infection which has been linked to serious birth defects.
•    Cloning the virus unlocks scientists’ ability to more quickly develop countermeasures and explore whether or how the Zika virus has evolved to spread more quickly and cause more severe diseases in people.
•    For 60 years, the Zika virus remained obscure, with few identified cases in people and mild disease symptoms.
•    However, since 2007, the virus has sparked frequent epidemics associated with serious diseases such as microcephaly and Guillain-Barre syndrome. The researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) first constructed the Zika virus clone.
•    Five fragments spanning the complete viral genome were individually cloned and assembled into the full-length clone of the Zika virus.
•    The infectious complementary DNA (cDNA) clone allows researchers to make Zika virus from test tube and cells on petri dishes.
•    The researchers then used the UTMB-developed Zika mouse model to demonstrate that the cloned virus infected the mice and gave them neurological disease.
•    Furthermore, the team engineered a luciferase reporter Zika virus. Luciferase is the chemical in fireflies that gives them their signature glow.
•    The “glowing” reporter virus could be used for antiviral drug screening and to track Zika virus infection in mosquitoes and small animal models.
•    There are a number of possible factors that may account for the current Zika virus epidemic that can now be tested with the UTMB clone.
•    For instance, the Zika virus may have evolved in a way that enhances mosquito transmission, leading to it spreading much more quickly.
•    This idea could be tested by comparing how infectious the original Zika strains are to mosquitoes with current strains, followed by manipulating the clone to test the effects of recent mutations on mosquito transmission.
•    The study was published in the journal Cell Host and Microbe.

Union Urban Development Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday flagged off the trial run of a driverless Metro train here.
•    The trial run started at the Mukundpur depot of Delhi Metro and ended at Majalis Park station on the Majlis Park-Shiv Vihar corridor of phase 3.
•    The new train will undergo rigorous trials to ensure these are ready for smooth operations after the commissioning of the new corridors.
•    Initially, train operators will run them for around a year before completely switching to unmanned train operations,
•    Later, Naidu and Kejriwal stressed the need to improve public transport system to reduce air pollution in Delhi.
•    Naidu said the Delhi government's odd-even traffic scheme was a temporary measure to reduce air pollution.
•    The driverless train is manufactured at Changwon in South Korea. It arrived in India at the Mundra port in Gujarat and was brought by road to Delhi on specially-made trailers.

Researchers in Ireland have discovered a new form of light. Their discovery is expected to reshape scientists' understanding of light's basic nature.
•    Angular momentum describes the rotation of a light beam around its axis. Until now, researchers believed the angular momentum was always a multiple of Planck's constant -- a constant ratio that describes the relationship between photon energy and frequency, and also sets the scale for quantum mechanics.
•    The newly discovered form of light, however, features photons with an angular momentum of just half the value of Planck's constant. The difference sounds small, but researchers say the significance of the discovery is great.
•    "For a beam of light, although traveling in a straight line it can also be rotating around its own axis," John Donegan, a professor at Trinity College Dublin's School of Physics, explained in a news release. "So when light from the mirror hits your eye in the morning, every photon twists your eye a little, one way or another."
•    "Our discovery will have real impacts for the study of light waves in areas such as secure optical communications," Donegan added.
•    Researchers made their discovery after passing light through special crystals to create a light beam with a hollow, screw-like structure. Using quantum mechanics, the physicists theorized that the beam's twisting photons were being slowed to a half-integer of Planck's constant.
•    The team of researchers then designed a device to measure the beam's angular momentum as it passed through the crystal. As they had predicted, they registered a shift in the flow of photons caused by quantum effects.
•    The researchers described their discovery in a paper published this week in the journal Science Advances.

India's first national social security platform will be developed by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology ( DeitY ), which has been entrusted with the task following the intervention of the Prime Minister's Office to end the tug of war between three central ministries.
•    Officials said the PMO stepped in after the ministries of labour, finance, and communications and IT could not reach consensus on who should set up the backbone for distributing social security benefits.
•    Finance minister Arun Jaitley had in his budget speech said that the government will develop a national social security platform for handing out monetary benefits.
•    Officials said that once the platform is established, beneficiaries under various schemes will have to enrol with the ministries concerned which are offering benefits under the particular schemes.
•    Multiple Benefits Providing social security to Indians has been one of the key focus areas of various schemes launched by the Narendra Modi -led NDA government. Most of these schemes require the beneficiary to pay a small amount as premium or contribution.
•    While the Jan Dhan scheme launched in 2014 aimed to provide a bank account along with a Rupay debit card to every Indian household, the Jan Suraksha Scheme launched in 2015 aimed to provide a social security net to Indians.
•    Under Jan Suraksha, the government brought in three schemes - Suraksha Bima Yojana providing an accident cover, Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana providing a life insurance cover and the Atal Pension Yojana for old age pension.

Justice Tinlianthang Vaiphei on 16 May 2016 was sworn in as the acting Chief Justice of Tripura High Court. He was administered the oath of office by the Governor Tathagata Roy at the Raj Bhavan in Agartala.
•    At present Vaiphei is the Acting Chief Justice of the Gauhati High Court. He replaced Deepak Kumar Gupta, who was transferred as the chief justice of the Chhattisgarh High Court.
•    Vaiphei was appointed as an Additional Judge in the Gauhati High Court in July 2003. He was elevated as the Chief Justice (Acting) in October 2015.
•    High Court of the state of Tripura was established in March 2013.
•    Prior to the establishment, a bench of the Gauhati High Court used to have jurisdiction over the state.
•    The seat of the High Court is at Agartala, the capital of Tripura.
•    Deepak Gupta worked as the first Chief Justice of the court.
•    This article empowers the President of India to appoint acting Chief Justice to a High Court.
•    Appointment of acting Chief Justice takes place when the office of Chief Justice of High Court is vacant.
•    Such an appointment also takes place when any such Chief Justice is, by reason of absence or otherwise, unable to perform the duties of his office.