Science and Technology News Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The correct match is a-2, b-1, c-4, d-3.

• Cassini-Huygens (NASA, ESA and the Italian Space Agency) studied Saturn, its rings and its moon Titan (2).
• Juno, launched in 2011, orbits Jupiter to study its origin and interior (1).
• Artemis is NASA's programme to return humans to the Moon as a step towards Mars (4).
• VERITAS is a planned NASA mission to map the surface and interior of Venus (3).

The other codes misplace Juno, Artemis or VERITAS; Artemis, for instance, is a human spaceflight programme, not a Venus or Saturn mission.

Answer: D

Tesla's humanoid robot is Optimus.

Tesla showed a working prototype of its general-purpose humanoid robot Optimus, also called the Tesla Bot, at its AI Day event in 2022. It is meant to take over repetitive or dangerous tasks.

Sophia is the humanoid robot made by Hanson Robotics of Hong Kong, Atlas is Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot, and Pepper is SoftBank Robotics' social robot. None is Tesla's.

Answer: D

The submersible was Titan.

OceanGate's submersible Titan imploded in June 2023 during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic, killing all five people on board, including the company's chief executive. The debris was found near the Titanic's bow.

Alvin is the research submersible of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which visited the Titanic in 1986 and has not been lost. Falcon and Trident are not the vessel involved.

Answer: C

The fossils were found in Russia.

Fossils of tillyardembiids, insects from the early Permian period about 280 million years ago, were described in 2023 from deposits in the Ural region of Russia. Pollen grains preserved on their bodies showed that they fed on and carried pollen, making them the oldest known insect pollinators.

Greece, India and China were not where these fossils were found.

Answer: A

The official key names the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Indore, and that is the answer recorded here. The work described is a low-cost flame-imaging set-up: a single DSLR camera is combined with optical filtering so that the emission of several chemical species in a flame can be separated into bands and mapped in one exposure, which normally needs far costlier spectroscopic equipment. The question links the institute with a NASA-Caltech group in the United States and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras are the other institutes offered; the key does not credit any of them with this collaboration. This is a recall item, so the explanation rests on the official key and the description given in the question.

Answer: B

The answer is Haryana and Meghalaya. The question describes a joint team from the zoology departments of Panjab University, Ashoka University and the National Institute of Science Education and Research, which reported three new species of the predatory bush cricket genus Hexacentrus in March 2023. The official key places the new species in Haryana and Meghalaya. Bush crickets are katydids (family Tettigoniidae), and Hexacentrus species hunt other insects at night, which is why the question calls them predatory. Punjab, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh appear in the other options, and none of those pairs is given by the key. The item depends on a single news report, so the key is taken as printed.

Answer: A

Pragyan is the name of the rover of Chandrayaan-3, which was launched by ISRO and which landed with the Vikram lander on the Moon on 23 August 2023. Vikram is the lander and not the rover, so the second option is wrong. Param is the name of a supercomputer series, and Shiv Shakti is the name given to the landing site of the Chandrayaan-3 lander, so neither is the rover.

Answer: D

Aditya-L1 is the first Indian satellite launched to study the Sun. It is placed in a halo orbit around the first Lagrange point (L1) of the Sun-Earth system, from where it can watch the Sun continuously. The other options, Aditya-S1, P1 and K1, are not names used for the mission, and L1 in the name stands for the Lagrange point. So the answer is Aditya-L1.

Answer: B

Russia registered Carnivac-Cov in March 2021, which it announced as the first covid-19 vaccine for animals in the world, for use on cats, dogs, minks, foxes and other animals. India, China and the United States of America had vaccines for people, but the animal vaccine was Russia's first of its kind to be registered. The answer is Russia, option (B), and the item is a recall question of the news of 2021. The vaccine was developed by the Federal Centre for Animal Health in Russia and put in place for use on farm and pet animals.

Answer: A

NTPC commissioned India's first green hydrogen blending project at its Kawas township in Surat, Gujarat. Green hydrogen made by electrolysis of water, using power from an existing 1 MW floating solar plant, is blended into the piped natural gas network that serves the township's homes, in a joint effort with Gujarat Gas. The PNGRB first approved a 5 per cent blend by volume.

NTPC's own announcement dates the start to early January 2023, so the year in the question looks like a slip, but only Surat matches the project, as the key gives. Chennai, Hyderabad and Cochin are not the site of this blending project.