04 May 2016 Current Affairs

Portal For Contract Labour Payment Management System Launched

Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (IC) for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy on 4 May launched ‘Contract Labour Payment Management System’- a portal of Coal India Limited (CIL). This web portal will help the government to curb problems like corruption and exploitation of contractual workers by contractors. It will also help in providing proper and timely wages to contractual workers. It has been planned to make payment to the contractors only after submitting a system generated declaration of compliance. The Contract Labour Payment Management System web portal is created for monitoring compliance of labour payment and other benefits to the contract workers under the Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act. 1970. It is an integrated system for all subsidiaries of CIL. The in-house developed application will maintain a comprehensive database of all contract workers engaged by different contractors in CIL and all its subsidiaries. Central Mine Planning and Development Institute (CMPDI) the Ranchi based consultancy subsidiary of Coal India Limited shall maintain the portal.


Anti-Hijacking Bill, 2014 Passed in Rajya Sabha

The Rajya Sabha on 4 May 2016 passed the Anti-Hijacking Bill, 2014, which provides for the death penalty even if ground handling staff and airport personnel are killed during such acts. In the earlier Bill, hijackers could be tried for the death penalty only in the event of death of hostages, such as flight crew, passengers and security personnel. Besides broadening the definition of hijacking, it also provides for an enhanced punishment to the perpetrators as well as the area of jurisdiction.


Gravitational Wave Scientists Won Special Breakthrough Prize

The scientists and engineers of the  Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration, who detected gravitational waves and reported their discovery in February 2015, have been awarded a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The prize will be shared between two groups of laureates : the three founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), who will each equally share $1 million; and 1,012 contributors to the experiment, who will each equally share $2 million. The three founders are Rainer Weiss, emeritus professor of physics at MIT; Kip Thorne, Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus; and Ronald Drever, emeritus professor of physics at Caltech.


Scientists Developed World’s Smallest Light Powered Engine

A group of researchers from University of Cambridge have built the world’s smallest (nanoscale) working engine. The research team was led by Professor Jeremy Baumberg from the Cavendish Laboratory. They have named the microscopic engine as ANTs (Actuating Nano-Transducers). The nanoscale engine is just a few billionths of a metre in size and uses light to power itself. The prototype engine was made of tiny charged particles of gold. It was bound together with temperature-responsive gel-like polymer called pNIPAM.


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