Science and Technology News Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The department is the Department of Science and Technology.

Science Central, at sciencecentral.in, is a central harvester that regularly collects the content of the institutional repositories of DST and DBT laboratories, so that research literature can be searched in one place. It follows the open access policy of the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology.

NCERT, UGC and the Department of Higher Education do not run this service.

The harvester gathers metadata and full texts from the institutional repositories of laboratories supported by the two departments, so that students and researchers can search them for free. Because it serves research papers, it belongs to the science departments and not to the education bodies in the other options.

Answer: B

The Department of Telecommunications named 13 cities for the first phase of 5G: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Gandhinagar, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Jamnagar, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Pune. Counting that list gives 13, which is the second option. The figures 12, 14 and 15 do not match the number of cities in the announced list, so they are wrong. Lucknow, Gandhinagar and Jamnagar were among the smaller cities on the list, along with big cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.

Answer: C

Tianwen-1 is a mission of China.

The China National Space Administration launched Tianwen-1 in July 2020. It reached Mars orbit in February 2021, and in May 2021 it landed the Zhurong rover in Utopia Planitia, making China the second country after the USA to operate a rover on Mars.

Japan's planned Mars mission is MMX, to the moon Phobos. South Korea has no Mars mission. The USA's Mars missions include Perseverance and Curiosity, not Tianwen.

Answer: A

The institute named is the National Physical Laboratory.

The draft Legal Metrology (Indian Standard Time) Rules, 2025, published by the Department of Consumer Affairs in January 2025 for comment, were prepared by an inter-ministerial committee that included the CSIR-National Physical Laboratory, ISRO, IIT Kanpur and the National Informatics Centre. NPL is the custodian of Indian Standard Time, keeps it traceable to UTC and works with ISRO to distribute it, so it is the institute tied to the rules.

The Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad works on space and atmospheric science, the Central Scientific Instruments Organisation makes scientific instruments, and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram works on materials and chemistry. None of them keeps the national time scale.

Answer: D

Threads was developed by Meta Platforms.

Threads, a text-based conversation app linked to Instagram accounts, was launched by Meta (the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) in July 2023 as a rival to Twitter (now X). It gained over 100 million sign-ups within days of launch.

Adobe makes creative software, Google runs YouTube and Search, and Microsoft owns LinkedIn; none of them built Threads.

Answer: B

The rover was named Pragyan.

Chandrayaan-2 (launched 2019) carried the lander Vikram with the rover Pragyan ('wisdom') inside it. The lander crash-landed, so Pragyan never operated, but a rover of the same name rolled out of the Vikram lander on Chandrayaan-3, which landed near the lunar south pole on 23 August 2023.

Prakashan, Pratham and Param are not the names of ISRO's lunar rovers.

Answer: C

MF Hydra was in the news because it runs on liquid hydrogen.

MF Hydra, a car and passenger ferry operated by the Norwegian company Norled, became the world's first vessel to run on liquid hydrogen when it entered service in 2023. Its fuel cells turn the hydrogen into electricity, so the ferry produces no carbon emissions in operation.

It is a coastal ferry, not an Arctic or deep-sea research ship, and it has no connection with Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Answer: C

LIGO-India is being set up at Hingoli.

LIGO-India, a gravitational-wave observatory to be built with the US LIGO Laboratory, was approved by the Union Cabinet in April 2023 at a site near Aundha in Hingoli district, Maharashtra. It will join the detectors in the USA, Italy and Japan to locate gravitational-wave sources more precisely.

Hoshangabad (Madhya Pradesh), Junagadh (Gujarat) and Sirohi (Rajasthan) are not the chosen site.

Answer: B

The super-magnet is Demo-4.

Demo4 is a full fusion-power-plant-scale magnet system built by the British company Tokamak Energy from high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape. Announced in 2023, it arranges dozens of HTS magnets in the configuration of a tokamak, to test them under the conditions a fusion power plant would impose.

HTS-4, Toka-4 and MTF-4 echo parts of the description (high-temperature superconductor, tokamak, magnetised target fusion) but are not the name of the magnet.

Answer: A

The key's answer is Meteorological Satellite.

INSAT (Indian National Satellite System) is a series of geostationary multipurpose satellites for telecommunication, television broadcasting and meteorology. Its weather instruments, such as the Very High Resolution Radiometer, provide cloud images and data used by the India Meteorological Department, so among the options it is the meteorological use that fits.

Resource satellites are the IRS series in polar orbit. INSAT satellites are geostationary, so 'Polar orbiting Satellite' is wrong, and they are not military satellites.