Mains answer writing practice of topics from July 14th 15th 16th 2014

1. Google Glass

Wikipedia

Hindu

2. Financial sector legislative reforms commission:

Hindu

3. Indra-14

Hindu

                                See complete list

Science & Technology July 2014

Food Irradiation

    Source

Gene Therapy

    Wikipedia

Genome Editing

    Wikipedia

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft

     Source

Mapathon 2013 - A Google's competition accused of violating Indian laws

     Source

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Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project for Low Income States (RWSSP-LIS)

 The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs has approved the implementation of the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project for Low Income States (RWSSP-LIS) of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh with World Bank assistance over a period of six years (from 2013-14 to 2019-20).

The key features of the project are: 
(i)      Strengthening   and   empowering   of  Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs)   as  well   as   ensuring direct involvement of beneficiary communities in the scheme implementation.  Schemes   will   be   implemented   with   integral   involvement   of   GPs.
(ii)     Sanitation   in   conjoint  approach  with  water  is  conceptualized   as  an integrated component of the proposed project,
(iii)     The project will implement pilot programs such as 24/7 water supply provision in select areas, and new technologies such as use of solar energy, 
(iv)   There   shall   be   an   intensive   Capacity   Building   programme   for   all stakeholders down to the GP level, 
(v)    Intensive    Information,    Education    and    Communication    (IEC) and Behavioural Change Communication (BCC) programs will be carried out.    Read More

PARAM Yuva II Super Computer

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has achieved a significant milestone with PARAM Yuva II supercomputer being ranked 1st in India, 9th in the Asia Pacific Region and 44th in the world among the most power efficient computer systems as per the Green500 List announced at the Supercomputing Conference (SC`2013) in Denver, Colorado, USA. PARAM Yuva – II uses hybrid technology – processor, co-processor and hardware accelerators - to provide the peak compute power of 520.4 Teraflop/s using 210 kiloWatt power. The interconnect network comprises of homegrown PARAMNet-III and Infiniband FDR System Area Network. This system is designed to solve large and complex computational problems. The system has 200 Terabytes of high performance storage, and requisite system software and utilities for parallel applications development. Read full article