News in Short

• The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs said it had entered into an MoU with Swiggy to on board street food vendors on its online food-delivery platform, aimed at giving these vendors access to more consumers.
• Initially, MoHUA and Swiggy will run a pilot programme by on boarding 250 vendors across five cities – Ahmedabad, Chennai, Delhi, Indore, and Varanasi.
• The street vendors will be assisted in getting PAN and FSSAI registration, trained in app usage, menu digitisation, pricing, hygiene and packaging best practices.
• Once the pilot is successfully completed, the initiative, a part of Prime Minister Street Vendor’s Atmanirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) scheme, will be expanded across the country in phases.
• The PM SVANidhi scheme for providing affordable working capital loan to street vendors aims to benefit over 50 lakh street vendors, who had been vending on or before March 24, 2020.

• The 2020 Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to Roger Penrose for black hole discovery and Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for discovering “a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.”
• The three laureates share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole.
• Roger Penrose invented ingenious mathematical methods to explore Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He showed that the theory leads to the formation of black holes.
• Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy. A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation.

• Scientists have identified 24 planets outside our solar system that they say may have conditions more suitable for life than the Earth.
• The study details characteristics of potential “super habitable” planets, that include those that are older, a little larger, slightly warmer, and possibly wetter than Earth.
• The 24 top contenders for super habitable planets are all more than 100 light years away, but the study could help focus future observation efforts, such as from NASA’s James Web Space Telescope.
• While the Sun is the centre of our solar system, it has a relatively short lifespan of less than 10 billion years.
• Since it took nearly 4 billion years before any form of complex life appeared on Earth, many similar stars to our sun, called G stars, might run out of fuel before complex life can develop.

• The Ministry of Jal Shakti (MoJS) has agreed to look into the request of Telangana to consider the ongoing Krishna water dispute with Andhra Pradesh afresh under Section 3 of the Inter State River Water Disputes Act.
• The Centre has also agreed to consider the two States’ request to finalise the share of water in the Godavari river too. The two States have agreed to send proposals seeking a fresh tribunal to decide the share of water.
• As per the Inter State River Disputes Act, the Centre is empowered to take a decision on handing over the matter to a tribunal even if one riparian State asks for it, within a year after getting the proposal/request.

• Eddie Van Halen, the guitar virtuoso whose blinding speed, control and innovation propelled his band Van Halen into one of hard rock's biggest groups, has passed away. He was 65.
• With his distinct solos, Eddie Van Halen fuelled the ultimate California party band and helped knock disco off the charts starting in the late 1970s with his band's self-titled debut album and then with the blockbuster record "1984," which contains the classics "Jump," "Panama" and "Hot for Teacher."
• Van Halen is among the top 20 best-selling artists of all time, and the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Rolling Stone magazine put Eddie Van Halen at No. 8 in its list of the 100 greatest guitarists.