Global Report on Food Crisis 2024

• According to the 2024 Global Report on Food Crisis (GRFC), almost 282 million people in 59 nations and territories were suffering from high levels of acute hunger in 2023.
• According to this survey, there was a 24 million rise in the global population from the previous year, and 1 in 5 of those tested needed vital, immediate action.
• In 32 nations, 36 million children under the age of five suffer from severe malnutrition. In 2023, acute malnutrition got worse, especially in communities that were relocated.
• 7 Lakh people were at risk of starving (IPC/CH Phase 5) in 2023, the largest number in GRFC's reporting history.
• 36 nations have been regularly featured in GRFC studies since 2016; accounting for 80% of the world's most hungry.
• The Gaza Strip accounts for 80% of those facing imminent famine, along with South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Somalia, and Mali.

World’s Largest 3D Printer Unveiled in USA

• The University of Maine (USA) broke its own record set in 2019 by revealing the largest polymer 3D printer in the world on April 28, 2024.
• 96 feet long, 32 feet wide, and 18 feet high are the maximum dimensions it can print from. It is 4 times larger than the previous printer.
• In roughly 80 hours, it can construct a single-story home. The printer made of thermoplastic polymers was named "Factory of the Future 1.0."
• It blends artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, novel sensors, and robotics activities.
• It may devour up to 500 pounds (227 kg) of material in an hour due to its insatiable appetite.

Microsoft Introduced Phi-3 Mini

• The Microsoft on April 28, 2024 released Phi-3-mini, the smallest model in their new Phi-3 family of open AI models,.
• With only 3.8 billion parameters, Phi-3-mini is supposedly the most powerful and reasonably priced small language model (SLM) on the market.
• It performs better than models twice its size in language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks despite its small size.
• The foundation of AI programs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is made out of language models.
• To address typical language problems like text categorization, question answering, text production, and document summarizing, they are trained on available data.
• SLMs are simplified counterparts of Large Language Models (LLMs), which include large counts of parameters and vast amounts of training data.

Astronomer Rare Giant Flare from Magnetar

• The most distant known occurrence of a massive flare from a magnetar that is found in the Messier 82 (M82) galaxy, popularly referred to as the "Cigar Galaxy" was discovered by scientists as of April 28, 2024.
•  In less than 10th of a second, the flare—a burst of gamma rays—released energy equal to 10000 years' worth of the sun's activity.
• The tiny remains of enormous stars known as magnetars are a class of neutron stars with the greatest magnetic fields yet observed in the cosmos.
•  Every now and then, they unleash massive gamma-ray eruptions known as big flares, which are the strongest known non-destructive energy releases in the universe.
• The massive flare from the galaxy M82 was discovered by the European Space Agency's Integral space observatory on November 15, 2023.

Archery World Cup 2024

• India won the gold medal at the 2024 Hyundai Archery World Cup Stage 1 in Shanghai, China, which took place from April 23–28, 2024.
• In the men's recurve team event championship match, India defeated South Korea 5-1. This is the most gold medals India has won in a single World Cup stage.
• It was the 18th iteration of World Archery's Archery World Cup competition.

Medal Tally (Top 3)-

Indian Medal Winners:-

Maheshwari Chauhan

• Maheshwari Chauhan won a silver medal in the shotgun Olympic qualification competition in Doha, Qatar, on April 28, 2024, securing a Paris 2024 quota for India.
• Out of the 6 shooters, only 4 could meet the quota in the final.
• Following Assem Orynbay of Kazakhstan's disastrous 5th-place finish and Rigina Meftakhetdinova of Azerbaijan's eventual 6th place, Maheshwari and the leading qualifier Victoria Larsson of Sweden were assured of 2 Olympic quotas.
• For India, it was their 6th shotgun quota and their 21st Olympic quota in shooting.

Sunil Kumar Yadav

• The Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer Sunil Kumar Yadav was named the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs' director on April 28, 2024.
•  Sunil Kumar Yadav was appointed in accordance with a Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) directive under the Central Staffing Scheme.
• According to the directive, Sunil Yadav shall serve as Director of MoHUA for a term of five years on the date of his assumption of office or until further directives are issued.
• He will be in charge of managing housing, urban planning, infrastructure development, and smart city projects among other facets of urban development in his capacity as Director of MoHUA.