The United Nations has released the World Happiness Report- 2019.
The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be.
It is released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations by the UN General Assembly.
It ranks the countries of the world on the basis of questions primarily from the Gallup World Poll.
SpiceJet has announced its membership of global airlines' grouping 'International Air Transport Association' (IATA).
SpiceJet is the first Indian low-budget carrier to join the IATA.
The membership will allow SpiceJet to explore and grow its collaborations with international member airlines of the IATA grouping through interlining and code shares.
It will also enable the low cost carrier in seamlessly expanding its network options for its passengers in future.
Formed in April 1945, it is the successor to the International Air Traffic Association.
It supports airline activity and helps formulate industry policy and standards.
It also provides consulting and training services in many areas crucial to aviation.
Geneva-based non-profit decided to endorse the Certification Standard for Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) developed by Network for Certification and Conservation of Forests (NCCF), an Indian non-profit.
The NCCF's forest certification scheme is aimed to improve India's forest management regime that is often criticised for various issues ailing the sector such as forest rights, forest degradation, biodiversity losses, encroachments, lack of manpower etc.
It will facilitate finding the causes of these chronic problems through the lens of forest certification and third-party monitoring to suggest suitable and sustainable solutions to Indian forest management.
Forest certification has been accepted as an efficient tool for forest management world over.
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) has finalised the first draft of the comprehensive amendments to the Indian Forest Act, 1927 (IFA).
The draft has been prepared based on the inputs of a core committee constituted by the ministry.
The United States has decided to build the fastest supercomputer titled 'Aurora supercomputer'.
It is scheduled to be delivered to the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in 2021.
It will be the first machine to reach a milestone called "exascale" performance, i.e. one billion billion calculations per second.
This speed is around seven times the speed of the most powerful system built to date, or 1,000 times faster than the first "petascale" systems built in 2008.
The new machines will let researchers create significantly more accurate simulations of phenomena such as drug responses, climate changes, the inner workings of combustion engines and solar panels.
An International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation system called Summit(OLCF-4), built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA is the fastest supercomputer in the world with a clocked speed of 143.5 petaflops.
At present, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology has Pratyush supercomputer, which is the fastest supercomputer in India, it has a speed of 4.0 Petaflops.
National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting has Mihir, which has a speed of 2.8 petaflops.
Teraflops: It is a unit of computing speed equal to one million million (10^12) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
Petaflops: It is a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (10^15) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
Exaflops: It is a unit of computing speed equal to one billion billion (10^18) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
The Abel Prize(Math's Nobel) in mathematics was awarded to Karen Uhlenbeck of the U.S. for her work on partial differential equations, the first woman to win the award.