A recent report highlights a deepening Vitamin D deficiency crisis in India, with one in five Indians affected.

• Factors such as urban lifestyles, high air pollution, indoor work culture etc. are contributing to reduced synthesis of Vitamin D in body.

About Vitamin D

• Vitamin D, also known as calciferol, is a fat-soluble vitamin that plays a crucial role in maintaining health. 
• It is naturally present in a limited number of foods, can be added to others, and is available as a dietary supplement.
• Sources of Vitamin D
  • Natural: The body makes Vitamin D naturally from sunlight
  • Foods: Oily fish (salmon, sardines, herring, mackerel),Red meat and liver (avoid liver if pregnant),Egg yolks etc.
• Importance: plays a vital role in regulating calcium and phosphate levels in the body, essential for keeping bones, teeth, and muscles healthy.
• Deficiency: Causes bone density loss, leading to osteoporosis and fractures. In children, it can result in rickets, a condition that softens and weakens bones.

To counter ‘greenwashing’ allegations against it, Waste to energy (WTE) industry seems to have adapted ‘bluewashing’.

About Blue Washing

• It is a deceptive marketing tactic that overstates a company's commitment to responsible and sustainable social and ethical business practices.
• Other related terms:
  • Greenwashing:Making false or misleading claims about a company’s environmental efforts to appear eco-friendly.
  • Pinkwashing: Using LGBTQ+ rights as a marketing tool while ignoring or failing to improve conditions for LGBTQ+ employees.

Diatoms like Pseudo-nitzschia produce domoic acid, a marine toxin that enters the food chain and causes aggressive behavior in sea lions.

About Diatoms

• Diatoms are photosynthetic algae with silica-based shells, found in nearly all aquatic and moist environments from oceans and rivers to soil.
• Significance
  • Photosynthesis: Use chlorophyll a and c to convert sunlight into energy.
  • Oxygen Production: Produce 20-25% of Earth’s oxygen.
  • Carbon Fixation: Remove CO₂, release O₂.
  • Food Web Base: Source of long-chain fatty acids—feed zooplankton, insects, fish, whales.
  • Water Quality Indicators: Sensitive to pH, salinity, nutrients, sediment, and human impact 

The material cost for providing midday meals to schoolchildren under the PM-POSHAN scheme has been enhanced by 9.5%.

About PM-POSHAN

• Ministry: Implemented by Ministry of Education.
• Objective: To address hunger and education by improving nutritional status of eligible children.
• It is a centrally sponsored scheme under which hot cooked meals are served to over eleven crore students studying in Balvatika and classes 1 to 8 in government and government-aided schools.
• Tenure: 2021-22 to 2025-26.
• Bal Vatika: There is provision of hot cooked meals to children of pre-schools or (before class I).
• Tithi Bhojan: It is a community participation programme in which people provide special food to children on special occasions/festivals.
• Special provision is made for providing supplementary nutrition items to children in aspirational districts and districts with high prevalence of Anemia.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment has confirmed Charge-Parity (CP) violation in baryons - particles that make up atomic nuclei, including protons and neutrons.

• Particles and anti-particles are like perfect mirror images of one another but some particles disobey this symmetry in a phenomenon known as CP violation. 
• Matter and antimatter particles (same mass as matter but opposite electric charge) are always produced as a pair.
  • If they come in contact, they annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy.
• After the Big Bang, a tiny portion of matter survived, creating all visible matter in today’s universe.

According to a study, Arctic Tundra Biome is losing its capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere due to wildfires around the globe.

About Arctic Tundra Biome

• Location: North of the Arctic Circle (66° 33’N) and includes areas of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia.
• Features: 
  • Climate: Extremely cold temperatures (with mean temperatures below 0°C for six to 10 months), low amounts of precipitation, making it similar to desert.
  • Permafrost is a defining characteristic of the tundra biome.
  • Vegetation: With no deep root systems, flora includes mosses, lichens, dwarf shrubs, grasses, and sedges.
  • Wildlife: Lemmings, Arctic Wolves, Polar Bears, Falcons, etc. 

As per INCOIS, all Indian coastal Union Territories and states are prone to tsunamis emanating from the two major subduction zones: Andaman-Nicobar-Sumatra Island Arc and Makran Subduction Zone.

About Andaman-Nicobar-Sumatra Island Arc

• It is a 5,000 km long chain of islands and mountains from Myanmar in the north to Indonesian archipelago in the south. 
• It is a major subduction zone, where the Indian plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian plate.

About Makran Subduction Zone

• It is a tectonic plate boundary where the Arabian Sea Plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian Plate, primarily in southeastern Iran and southwestern Pakistan.

A report by Rights and Resources Initiative provided a snapshot of carbon rights.

About Carbon Rights

• Currently, there is no internationally accepted definition of carbon rights.
  • Some organizations define carbon rights as legal claim or entitlement to the benefits generated by activities that sequester or remove carbon from the atmosphere. 
• The term carbon rights comprises two fundamental concepts: 
  • Property rights to sequester and store carbon, contained in land, trees, soil, etc. and 
  • The right to benefits that arise from the transfer of these property rights (i.e. through emissions trading schemes).