UPSC Current Affairs 26 September 2026

• Stress & sleep:
  • Some randomized trials suggest certain ashwagandha extracts can reduce perceived stress and improve sleep quality.
  • Proposed pathway: lowering cortisol and modulating nervous/immune systems.
• Male fertility (limited):
  • Some studies (2–4 months use) show increased testosterone and improved sperm parameters, but sample sizes are small and heterogenous.
• Unclear / Insufficient evidence

• Anxiety disorders, cognitive function, diabetes control, athletic performance, menopause, female infertility, asthma – not enough robust human trials to conclude benefit.
• COVID-19 treatment/prevention: No high-quality evidence supporting use.

• Scientific Name: Scientifically known as Withania somnifera, it is a small perennial shrub with white flowers and orange-red berries.
• Common Aliases: It is widely referred to as "Indian Winter Cherry" or "Indian Ginseng" due to its rejuvenating qualities.
• Growing Regions: It thrives in dry, sub-tropical regions. In India, it is heavily cultivated across states like Madhya Pradesh (which dominates production), Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Maharashtra.

• Bioactive Matrix: The herb is packed with phytochemicals, primarily withanolides (glycowithanolides), which mimic the body's natural stress-reducing hormones and lower cortisol.
• Pharmacological Traits: These compounds give Ashwagandha its characteristic anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-stress, and immunomodulatory properties.

• Stress and Anxiety Relief: It acts as a powerful adaptogen, meaning it helps the body cope with mental and physical stress by regulating cortisol pathways.
• Improves Sleep Quality: Clinical trials show that Ashwagandha extracts significantly enhance sleep quality and morning alertness, particularly in individuals dealing with insomnia.
• Cognitive Enhancement: Research indicates it boosts various cognitive functions, focusing heavily on improving attention span, concentration, and sensory-motor reaction speeds.
• Physical Performance & Recovery: It is popular among athletes for improving oxygen consumption, boosting physical endurance, and mitigating muscle damage.

• Identity: Also known as Kalaburagi Togari Bele or Red Gram, it is a premium variety of pigeon pea widely cultivated in the drylands of the Kalaburagi region in North Karnataka.
• The "Gold of North Karnataka": Due to its incredible popularity and economic contribution to the region, it is locally dubbed the "Gold of North Karnataka".

• Soil & Climate Influence: The Kalaburagi region features a distinct type of black soil that is highly rich in calcium and potassium.
• Superior Characteristics: This unique soil profile gives the dal an exceptional aroma, rich taste, superior cooking properties, and a significantly higher protein content compared to other varieties.

• Registration Year: The product officially received its Geographical Indication (GI) status tag on August 14, 2019.
• Registered Proprietors: The application was jointly registered by the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Raichur and the Karnataka Togari Abhivrudhi Mandali Ltd. (Karnataka Pulses Development Board).
• Significance: It was the 49th product from Karnataka and only the second pigeon pea variety in India (after Maharashtra's Navapur Tur Dal) to obtain a GI tag, protecting it against counterfeiting and unauthorized marketing.

• Annual Output Value: The Gulbarga region produces Tur Dal worth approximately ₹3,000 crore annually, serving as the backbone of the local dryland agricultural economy.
• Government Support: To counteract unauthorized mills and ensure genuine pricing, the Karnataka Government distributes authenticated versions of the pulse under state-backed initiatives like Bhima Pulses, which sources directly from local farmers.

• Unified Interface: The portal functions as a collaborative ecosystem bringing three key stakeholders onto a single interface:
  1. Property Managers (PMs)
  2. Digital Connectivity Rating Agencies (DCRAs)
  3. End Consumers
• Property Lifecycle Coverage: It accommodates rating procedures for both fully constructed and under-construction real estate.
• Property Classification: Property Managers can submit assessment applications for diverse categories, including Public, Government, Commercial, and Private residential setups.
• Mobile Testing App: The launch includes a dedicated mobile application for live field-testing of network signals and coverage capabilities.

• Core Assessment Parameters: Buildings are systematically evaluated and given weighted scores based on:
  • Fibre readiness (presence of optical fibre cables)
  • Mobile network availability across multiple telecom service providers
  • In-building connectivity solutions (dedicated internal booster setups)
  • Wi-Fi infrastructure and overall indoor signal strength
• Searchable Database: Consumers can search the public database for rated properties by searching the property name, location, or certificate ID.
• Tamper-proof Verification: The platform generates digitally signed rating certificates. Anyone can verify the authenticity of a rating using an embedded QR code on the certificate.

• Empowering Buyers & Tenants: Consumers can cross-check internet capabilities before making final financial commitments to purchase or lease a space.
• Real Estate Differentiation: A high digital score provides building owners with a distinct marketing advantage, effectively boosting property valuation.
• Future-Proof Development: Knowing the property value relies on digital infrastructure, builders are incentivized to integrate robust fibre and network pathways at the early structural design phase rather than as a costly afterthought.

• The Mission: Launched in 2021, Project mBridge is a blockchain-based platform designed to facilitate instant, cheap, cross-border payments directly between central banks using digital currencies (CBDCs).
• The Core Participants: It was co-developed by the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE. Macau joined later in 2024.
• The Scale: According to data from the Atlantic Council, the platform has actively progressed, facilitating over 4,000 transactions crossing a volume of $55 billion.

• 2023 (Observer): SAMA initially entered the project as an observing member under the BIS umbrella to assist internal technical research.
• June 2024 (Full Member): Saudi Arabia upgraded to a full participant to test wholesale CBDC efficiencies for commercial settlements.
• May 13, 2025 (Exit): SAMA formally completed its targeted test and concluded active membership.

• The Official Rationale: SAMA maintains that the exit was not a sudden policy reversal. It stated that its participation was structurally limited from the outset to a "Proof of Concept" (PoC) trial, which simply reached its planned completion.
• The Geopolitical Reality: Analysts highlight intense pressure on Riyadh. Being caught between its deep security/financial ties with the US and growing trade ties with China, remaining in an explicitly "anti-dollar" network posed an unnecessary diplomatic risk for the Kingdom.

• A Symbolic Hit to De-Dollarisation: Saudi Arabia's departure slows down the momentum of building a robust alternative to the SWIFT system backed by major oil economies.
• Narrower Regional Scope: Experts note that while the exit "dents the anti-dollar coalition story," mBridge is far from dead. The platform will continue to function, but its operational scope will likely remain narrower and heavily focused on intra-Asian trade corridors.

• Core Definition: BCD is the foundational tax imposed on goods imported into India.
• Legal Framework: It is levied under Section 12 of the Customs Act, 1962. The specific rates are catalogued in the First Schedule of the Customs Tariff Act, 1975.
• Calculation Basis: It is typically computed on an ad-valorem basis—meaning it is a set percentage calculated against the total assessed value (CIF value) of the imported item.

• Domestic Industry Protection: By raising the cost of imported foreign items, it protects Indian MSMEs and manufacturers from being undercut by cheap foreign alternatives.
• Revenue Generation: It serves as a vital indirect tax collection system for the Central Government.
• Policy Lever: The government actively increases or decreases BCD to manage the domestic supply of critical components (e.g., green mobility, electronics).

• Dynamic Range: Rates typically fluctuate between 5% to 40% depending on product classification and Harmonized System (HS) codes. The median rate for industrial products remains steady at 10%.
• Country-Specific Relief: Standard rates apply to most countries, but preferential lower rates are applicable if India shares a specific Trade Agreement with the origin country.
• Absolute Authority: The Central Government holds the unilateral power to fully exempt or slash BCD on any item via official gazette notifications.

• BCD is the first major duty stacked onto an import value.
• Other subsequent taxes, such as the Social Welfare Surcharge (SWS) (which is 10% of the BCD value) and Integrated GST (IGST), are calculated after adding the BCD amount to the product value. Thus, a shift in BCD fundamentally swings the final landed cost of a product.

• Size: It is the second or third-largest gecko species in the world, growing between 11 to 16 inches (28 to 40 cm) in length.
• Appearance: They feature a distinctive bluish-grey or fluorescent blue body covered in bright orange, red, or yellow spots.
• Eyes & Grip: They possess large, prominent eyes with vertical pupils. Their toe pads contain millions of microscopic hairs (setae) that use Van der Waals forces to stick to smooth, vertical surfaces and walk upside down.
• Powerful Bite: They are fast and possess remarkably strong, non-venomous jaws capable of delivering a severe bite that can draw blood if they feel threatened.

• Native Range: They are native to Northeast India, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and throughout Southeast Asia (including Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia).
• Environment: They naturally inhabit tropical rainforests, tree hollows, and limestone cliffs.
• Adaptability: They adapt remarkably well to rural and urban human structures, frequently seen roaming walls and ceilings near lights to hunt insects.

• Nocturnal & Solitary: They are strictly nocturnal hunters and solitary creatures, only interacting with the opposite sex during the breeding season.
• Vocalisation: They are named after their loud, distinct pre-mating or defensive call that sounds like "To-kay" or "Gek-ko".
• Defense Mechanism: Like many lizards, they exhibit autotomy—the ability to drop their tail when attacked. The detached tail wiggles violently for several minutes to distract predators while the gecko escapes. A new tail regenerates in about three weeks.
• Diet: They are primary insectivores, eating cockroaches, crickets, moths, mosquitoes, and locusts. Large individuals also prey on small rats, mice, and small snakes, acting as vital natural pest control.

• IUCN Red List: Least Concern (though local wild populations are rapidly declining due to overexploitation).
• CITES: Listed under Appendix-II, which strictly regulates its international commercial trade.
• Indian Wildlife Protection Act: It is afforded strict legal protection inside India to curb poaching and illegal wildlife trade.

• Project Suncatcher is Google’s long-term research initiative to explore whether large-scale AI computing infrastructure can eventually be located in space.
• Its broad vision is a constellation of satellites equipped with AI processors, powered primarily by continuous solar energy, and linked through high-speed optical/laser communication.
• The project is motivated by the rapidly rising electricity, cooling and land requirements of terrestrial AI data centres.

• Hardware Survival: To test whether Google’s proprietary Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) can reliably survive and run intensive AI workloads in space.
• Identify Failure Points: Google has explicitly stated that this is a long-term research moonshot. The immediate goal is to gather data and find operational flaws rather than open a fully commercial data centre right away

• Space Radiation & Bit Flips: Cosmic rays and solar events can degrade hardware or cause "bit flips" (data errors). Ground tests at UC Davis showed Google’s Trillium TPUs can withstand radiation equivalent to a 5-year space mission, but real orbital data is required.
• Thermal Management in a Vacuum: AI chips produce immense heat. Because conventional airflow cooling is impossible in the vacuum of space, Google is testing a system that combines heat pipes with external radiators to dissipate heat.
• Launch Stresses: The mission will check how the hardware copes with extreme launch vibrations and gravitational forces.

• Abundant Solar Energy: Low-Earth orbit offers nearly constant sunlight, allowing solar panels to generate up to eight times more power than they would on Earth.
• Bypassing Terrestrial Constraints: Running modern AI requires immense electricity and land. Moving computing infrastructure into space avoids earthbound community resistance and power grid bottlenecks.

• 2027 Laser Interconnectivity: Google intends to launch two more satellites in 2027 to test high-bandwidth laser links.
• Distributed Clusters: If successful, future Suncatcher missions will communicate via these short-distance high-speed lasers, enabling dozens of satellites to work together as a single, massive, distributed AI computing network.

• Chemical Group: It is a highly toxic, persistent organophosphorus (OP) insecticide and acaricide first introduced commercially in 1949.
• Primary Use: Used worldwide in agriculture as a foliar spray to control chewing and sucking insects.
• Target Crops: Primarily recommended for cotton, paddy, wheat, pulses (like green gram), and oilseeds (like mustard). However, unauthorized or illegal use on vegetables, spices, and residential spaces remains a significant issue.

• Neurotoxicity: It functions as a potent acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitor. It blocks essential enzymes, leading to the overstimulation of muscle and nerve fibers in both pests and humans.
• Absorption: It is highly dangerous because it is readily and rapidly absorbed through all routes of exposure, including oral ingestion, skin contact (dermal), and inhalation.

• Human Health Risks: Exposure causes acute cholinergic overstimulation. Symptoms include behavioural changes, respiratory depression, dizziness, uncontrollable twitching, convulsions, coma, and death. Long-term exposure is linked to cognitive dysfunction and central nervous system damage.
• Impact on Wildlife: It is a non-selective pesticide that is highly lethal to beneficial species, particularly honey bees.
• Environmental Persistence: It is retained longer in soil than in air or water. Microbial degradation is its primary route of breakdown in nature.

• Due to its extreme toxicity—especially to children and field workers—many regulatory bodies like the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have previously cancelled or severely restricted its use on food crops.
• The latest push by the Rotterdam Convention's Chemical Review Committee marks a major step toward establishing binding international trade barriers to limit its global distribution.

• A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a specialised processor that performs many computations simultaneously.
• Its original role is to process:
  • Images and video
  • Screen/display output
  • Animation and graphics rendering
  • Visual data
• Modern high-end GPUs are also used for:
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning
  • Scientific simulations
  • High-performance computing
  • Gaming and data centres
• Unlike a CPU, which is optimised for a smaller number of complex sequential tasks, a GPU is built for large-scale parallel processing.

Aspect	IIT Delhi micro-GPU	High-end commercial GPU
Main purpose	Basic graphics, displays and embedded visualisation	AI training, gaming, supercomputing, complex graphics
Target devices	Affordable embedded devices	PCs, servers, data centres, gaming systems
Present implementation	Spartan-7 FPGA board	Dedicated fabricated semiconductor chip
Scale	Compact and scalable architecture	Very large, highly complex multi-core hardware
Intended cost	Low-cost deployment	High cost and high-power consumption

• The Brains Behind It: The project was developed at IIT Delhi's Electrical Engineering Department by M.Tech students Nammi Akash and M. Ravi Teja, under the mentorship of Prof. Jayadeva and Prof. Kaushik Saha.
• Architecture: The micro-GPU features a custom floating-point GPU engine. The entire framework was built using Register Transfer Language (RTL).
• Current Prototype: For demonstration, the architecture has been mapped to a Spartan-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform, which allows testing before shifting to permanent silicon chips.

• E-Rickshaw dashboards and digital navigator displays.
• Inland-water navigation terminals for small fishing boats.
• Educational e-book readers designed for affordable digital learning.
• Industrial control panels and human-machine interfaces.

• Multi-Core Scaling: The research team is already designing an expanded 8-to-16 core vector-style graphics processor.
• Software Ecosystem: They are building a dedicated, optimized compiler and graphics software toolchain to complement the new hardware.
• Commercial Production: The ultimate goal is to transition the technology from the testing platform to a proof-of-concept on a mature, economically viable 65nm ASIC process node for commercial mass production.

1. Its scientific name is Withania somnifera.
2. Withanolides are among its major bioactive compounds.
3. It is commonly known as Indian Winter Cherry.

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