Tamil Nadu IAS officer Supriya Sahu awarded for her pioneering leadership on critical environmental challenges in India, including plastics and wildlife conservation.

About Award

• UN's highest environmental honour.
• Awarded every year since 2005.
• UNEP honours individuals and organizations working on innovative and sustainable solutions to address the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste. 

Assam’s Majuli hosts Charaichung Festival to revive Asia's first protected royal bird sanctuary.

• The festival commemorates the 392-year-old legacy of Asia's first protected Royal Bird Sanctuary, 'Charaichung', established in 1633 AD by Ahom king Swargadeu Pratap Singha. 

About Majuli

• Majuli is the world's largest river island in the Brahmaputra River, Assam.

Google CEO has announced that the company has begun work on a long-term research initiative, Project Suncatcher aiming to put solar powered data centers in space.

About Project Suncatcher

• It is a Google initiative aimed at building solar-powered satellite constellations capable of performing large-scale machine learning computations in space.
• Satellites will be equipped with Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) .
• Advantages:
  • Avoids environmental impact of Earth-based data centres.
  • Reduces vulnerability to power outages, undersea cable cuts, and natural disasters.
  • Facilitates data sovereignty, as outer space is not subject to national jurisdiction under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

Construction at the Ratle Project in Kishtwar faces a shutdown threat.

About Ratle Hydroelectric Project

• Run of River Scheme located on River Chenab.
  • Chenab River is a key tributary of the Indus, formed by the Chandra and Bhaga streams.
• Location: Kishtwar District of J&K.
• Capacity: 850 MW.

Recently NASA's James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) has observed one of the earliest supernova recorded.

• JWST is a collaboration between NASA, European and Canadian Space Agency to understand the early universe. It orbits the sun at 2^nd Lagrange point (L2) and views the universe primarily in the infrared spectrum.

About Supernova 

• It is an explosion of a star and is of several types:-
  • Core-collapse” supernova- When the massive star (5-8 times the size of the sun) exhausts its nuclear fuel, it begins to cool, causing the outward pressure to drop significantly. 
    • When pressure is no longer sufficient to counteract gravity, the star collapses leaving behind a dense core and a cloud of hot gas ie. nebula .
    • If star was ~10 times larger than sun it may leave behind Black Hole.
  • Thermal Runaway Supernova: It forms when 2 stars orbiting one another (at least 1 being white dwarf) collide or white dwarf pulls too much matter from a nearby star.
    • White dwarfs are the remains of a star roughly the size of our Sun when it runs out of fuel.

UNESCO unveiled a report titled Right to Education: Past, Present and Future which reflected on the achievements of the 1960 UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education.

About the Convention 

• Origin - It was adopted in 1960 by UNESCO.
• Legality: It is the First legally binding international instrument which is entirely dedicated to the right to education.
• Rights and Obligations: It reaffirms education as a  fundamental human right and obligates states to ensure:
  • Free and compulsory Primary education 
  • Secondary Education accessible and available to all 
  • Higher education equally accessible to all on the basis of individual capacity
  • It bans any form of discrimination in education etc. 
• India has not ratified it.

Supreme Court held that any forced or involuntary narco test shall be unconstitutional and invalid.

About Narco Test 

• A narco test is a process of investigation where the accused is sedated by administering a certain class of substances, such as barbiturates, for instance, Sodium Pentothal, to reduce a subject’s inhibitions and reasoning ability. 
• Legality -
  • Article 20 of constitution provides for protection against self-incrimination.
  • Selvi Guidelines laid out by SC held that without free consent, any such test would be unconstitutional and any information obtained shall not be used as evidence.
  • In Manoj Kumar Saini Case (2023) and Vinobhai Case (2025), court held that such tests do not confirm guilt but information obtained might contribute to the investigation.