Science & Technology GK Questions with Answers – Page 9

The digital rupee, written as e-rupee, is the digital form of sovereign currency issued by the Reserve Bank of India.

From July 2022 a person paying any consideration for the transfer of a virtual digital asset must deduct tax at source at one per cent of that consideration, a provision introduced by the Finance Act of 2022 so that the tax department can see the volume and the parties in…

The Finance Act of 2022 inserted a definition of the virtual digital asset into the Income Tax Act and taxed income from the transfer of such an asset at a flat thirty per cent, plus the applicable surcharge and cess.

A blockchain is a ledger whose identical copies are held by many nodes, with new entries grouped into blocks, each linked to the previous one by its hash, and added only when the network agrees by a consensus rule.

The transactions in a block are hashed in pairs, the resulting hashes are hashed in pairs again, and the process repeats until a single hash remains; that hash is the Merkle root, named after Ralph Merkle, and it is stored in the block header.

Ethereum was described by Vitalik Buterin in a white paper of 2013 and the network went live in 2015.

In proof of work, the computers called miners compete to find a nonce that makes the hash of the proposed block meet a difficulty target.

The bitcoin protocol fixes the total supply at twenty-one million coins. New coins enter circulation only as the reward paid to whoever adds a block, and that reward is halved every two hundred and ten thousand blocks, which works out to roughly every four years, so issuance falls geometrically towards…

Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hash function, part of the Secure Hash Algorithm family, which turns an input of any length into a fixed output of two hundred and fifty-six bits.

The paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was circulated in 2008 under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym whose owner has never been established, and it set out how a chain of hashed blocks and proof of work could prevent double spending without any trusted third party.

Kulasekarapattinam lies in the Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu, on the southern coast, and is being developed as a spaceport for small satellite launch vehicles.

The Indian Space Policy was approved in 2023 and set out in writing the division of work that the reforms of 2020 had begun: private companies, called non-government entities, may carry out the whole range of space activities; ISRO is to concentrate on research and advanced missions; NSIL is to…

Under the policy amended in 2024, the manufacture of components, systems and sub-systems for satellites and for the ground and user segment is open to foreign direct investment up to 100 per cent through the automatic route, the most liberal of the three groups, because it is a manufacturing activity…

The amendment approved by the Union Cabinet in February 2024 divides space activities into three groups with different automatic-route ceilings.

Under the reforms of 2020 and the Indian Space Policy of 2023, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre is the single-window autonomous body that authorises, promotes, hand-holds and supervises the space activities of non-government entities, and that permits them to use the facilities of the Department of Space.

Antrix Corporation Limited was set up in 1992 at Bengaluru as a wholly government-owned company under the Department of Space, to market the products and services of the Indian space programme abroad, including launch services, satellite capacity and remote sensing data.

Agnibaan SOrTeD, flown by Agnikul Cosmos of Chennai in 2024, carried the Agnilet engine, a semi-cryogenic engine printed as a single piece, and it lifted off from a launch pad the company had built for itself at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

Skyroot Aerospace named the maiden flight of Vikram-S Mission Prarambh, a Sanskrit word meaning beginning, because it was the first flight by a private Indian rocket.

Vikram-S was built by Skyroot Aerospace of Hyderabad and flew a sub-orbital mission from Sriharikota in November 2022 under the name Mission Prarambh, which means beginning.

NewSpace India Limited was incorporated in 2019 as a public sector undertaking under the Department of Space, with its registered office at Bengaluru.