a very good evening aspirants welcome to the hinder news analysis by shankar iis academy for the day fourth of september 2021 so displayed below are the list of news articles that we'll be discussing in today's discussion and they provided along with the page numbers of different editions and also the link for the handwritten notes in pdf format and also the timestamping of different articles is provided in the comment section as well as in the description box so without wasting much time let's get into our discussion now see this news article this news article talks about a recent discovery by a team of paleontologist and for those who have not heard the word paleontologist see they are a group of people who study the evidence of prehistoric life so when i say prehistoric life it means that it includes the life of plants and animals other than that of humans now the recent discovery is that these a group of paleontologists have found the footprints of three dinosaur species in the thar desert region so this is basically the crux of this news article now having this in the background we are going to learn some important facts that you need to know about dinosaurs and we are also going to learn about the hero or the time period in which this particular species existed so first of all you should know that dinosaur is a reptile and as we know reptiles they generally walk on four legs except for snakes and this dinosaurs they are a specific subgroup of the archosaurs in addition to these dinosaurs the archosaurs group they contain or they include crocodiles and birds also and if you look back the first sufficient complete specimens of dinosaurs was first discovered during the 19th century only and this discovery that was made in the 19th century it actually revealed that some dinosaurs were also bipedal so when i say bipedal it means that they walk on two legs instead of on all four legs like that of other reptiles so by now we know that dinosaurs are reptiles and they are a subgroup of archosaurs and we also know that they are bipedal having learned that now let us see when this particular species existed see the dinosaur species they existed or they lived in the mesozoic area and this is the reason why this mesozoic era is also called as the time of the dinosaurs and i think obviously everyone would have known that each era is split into several smaller parts known as periods or epochs so likewise even this mesozoic era is split into three periods so basically this mesozoic era spans for about 252 to 66 million years ago and the era includes three periods and the three periods are the triassic period, the Jurassic period and the Cretaceous period so when i say triassic period see this period extended from 252 to 201 million years ago and this triassic period marks the beginning of the age of dinosaurs okay so the existence of dinosaurs are said to begin from the triassic period now after triassic period comes the Jurassic period which is spanning from 201 to 145 million years ago and following that towards the end comes the Cretaceous period that spans from 145 to 66 million years ago now here you should remember that dinosaurs lived from the late triassic period until the end of the mesozoic era that is at the end of the Cretaceous period so this means that the dinosaurs they went extinct about 65 million years ago so basically on the whole the dinosaurs they existed for about 165 million years now here you should understand one thing see all the dinosaurs they did not live at the same time okay which means different dinosaur species they lived during different periods say for example some would have lived during the triassic period and then some would have lived during the Jurassic period and then some species would have lived during the Cretaceous period so on the whole they did not live at the same time now say for example when you take the stegosaurus dinosaur they lived during the Jurassic period similarly when you take the tyronosaurus dinosaur, it was a species from the Cretaceous period, okay. So this is one basic thing that you need to keep in mind. Now another thing is that just like how different species belong to different periods, similarly there are also different types of dinosaurs also such as pteropods, sauropods and ornithopods and a picture of them along with a brief description is given below in the form of a picture. So we can have a look at it and read it also. Now coming back, one more important fact about the dinosaurs is that they lived on all the continents, okay. So they were not limited to any particular area such they were evenly distributed on all of the continents. So by now we have a kind of conceptual clarity about the basic facts related to the dinosaurs and also we are clear about the era in which they lived. So now let's come back to the news. See as we saw three footprints of dinosaurs were found by the paleontologist and the found footprints are said to be 200 million years ago and these three footprints they are said to belong to three different species of dinosaurs namely the Eubronches of Gigantius, the Eubronches Glendroscensis and the Grelator Tenebus. And according to the news all these three species they belong to the early Jurassic period and also they are considered to be of the Theropod type. So as we saw earlier Theropods are nothing but they are bipedal and these dinosaurs they had an infeed with only three toes and also they are carnivorous, okay. And one more important fact that is mentioned in the news is that these footprints have been found in the Jayasalma district of Rajasthan that is specifically in the Thar desert. Now this particular discovery it gains importance because this discovery proves the presence of the giant reptiles in the western part of the Rajasthan. And with this we have come to the end of this particular news discussion. So having all these points in mind now let us move on to the next news article. Now for our next discussion we have chosen this article, see this news article mentions about the Red Yard Slider Turtle that has been found in a dam in the Iduki district of Kerala and this discovery has raised concerns because this particular turtle that is the Red Yard Slider Turtle is an invasive species. So in this slide let us see some important points about this Red Yard Slider Turtle and also the reasons as to why they are called an invasive species. Now first of all you should have in mind that this Red Yard Slider Turtle is a medium sized freshwater turtle and these species are native to the Mississippi Valley which is situated in the southern United States. Know that this turtle is an opportunistic omnivore. So being an opportunistic omnivore it survives on a wide variety of plants and animals and its diet may include snails, terrestrial insects, crustaceans, small water breads, etc but however the small ones are mainly carnivorous and as per studies it is only as they grow older they become partially herbivorous. Now more importantly this species can live for about 40 years so therefore even if reproduction does not occur in these species still they can be found to survive in the wild for many years. Now on talking about the habitat see within its natural range this species lives in a wide variety of freshwater habitats including rivers, lakes and ponds and particularly this species it prefers large quiet water bodies with soft bottom and those with an abundance of aquatic plants and in addition to that these species are also highly adaptable so which means they can tolerate anything such as brackish water in fact these species can even thrive in dams that have been polluted by excessive organic matter and similarly they can also tolerate radioactive thermal chemical as well as organic pollution and most importantly this species is also got the potential to adapt itself to sub tropical and tropical areas and an adult species can even survive severe winters through hibernation. Now see this particular species is small in size and they have simple husbandry or breeding requirements and all just that they could also be obtained in low price so because of all these factors this particular red-yard slider turtle has become one of the world's most commonly traded live reptile and it is mainly used as a pet and in addition to that they are also farmed for food purposes in the Philippines, China and Malaysia. So in this way these turtles easily become invasive species in other ecosystems and at present they are found in various countries or regions in Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. This species has got the potential to easily get into the wild because once they become larger the pet owners they automatically release them and additionally millions of red-yard sliders have also been released into the wild in Asia for Buddhist mercy ceremonies. So having said all these now let's see how these species pose threat to the environment. So first of all these species they impact endogenous habitats because of the omnivorous diet and because of the ability to adapt to various habitats. So secondly they also cause reduction in native biodiversity and also they have negative impacts on native turtles and aquatic ecosystems in general. See this is because these species are very aggressive and they compare to wild endogenous species for food nesting as well as for basking sites and thirdly they release into the natural ecosystem actually increases the risk of parasite transmission to native species and in addition to that they also affect humans since salmonella which is a type of bacteria can be transferred to humans when drinking water has been contaminated by turtles. So it is due to all these reasons that this particular red-yard slider turtle is known as a successful invasive species and even how you see and has listed this red-yard slider among the hundred examples of the world's worst invasive species and therefore its import is banned in many countries. So these are some important points that you need to remember when you learn about the red-yard slider turtle. Now we are going to discuss about this government ad that is published in the Thiruvananthapuram edition. Now this ad it talks about the Jammu and Kashmir tourist village network that was launched under the mission youth and for those who are not aware see this mission youth is an initiative of the government of Jammu and Kashmir and through this initiative the government aims to provide a vibrant medium for the youth engagement and they also pay for their empowerment. Now let's very briefly know about this tourist village initiative see through this particular initiative the government is aiming to transform 75 villages of Jammu and Kashmir into tourist villages. So for this purpose they will be choosing those villages which are known for their historical, picturesque beauty and also those which are known for their cultural significance and after choosing the villages they will transform the chosen villages or they will promote the chosen villages into a tourist village by showcasing their inherent characteristics like that of their landscapes then their indigenous knowledge systems or their cultural diversity and heritage or even their local values and traditions and besides this the government will also be encouraging film shooting in such areas in order to bring them to the limelight and so on that line they will be offering financial incentives as well. So as we saw earlier this particular tourist village network is launched under mission youth so under this mission youths initiative both registered youth as well as self-help groups will be given the opportunity to be a part of the government's endeavor to transform the chosen villages of Jammu and Kashmir into tourist villages and as you can see here a special incentive of about 8 to 10 lakhs is given for music, video or song shootings in the tourist villages that are developed under this scheme I know that this incentive is being provided in addition to the financial assistance that is provided by the government in order to bring these areas into limelight and likewise even a special assistance of up to 2 lakh rupees is said to be provided for those local artists as a means to promote the traditional performing arts and also the local producers and for your additional information the list of these initiatives objectives is given below for your reference so you can just quickly pour through it. See as we know Jammu and Kashmir has already got a good position when it comes through the tourist influx so on that line this said youth led sustainable tourism initiative is expected to further strengthen the rural economy and also the community entrepreneurship therein and in addition to that it is also expected to empower the youth and also the women by providing both direct as well as indirect employment opportunities so these are some important points about this tourist villages so now let's move on to the next news discussion now for our next news discussion we have taken this news article now this particular article reports about a statement that was made by our Indian prime minister Wiley was addressing the east economic forum and have in mind the east economic forum is now being held at Vladivostok which is Russian city that is situated in the east coast you can locate the place in the map given below now with this background first let us have a 360 degree analysis of India Russia bilateral relations in the discussion and then we will see in brief about the eastern economic forum that is mentioned in today's news the syllabus covered by this article is given below now firstly know that Russia has been a long-standing and also a time-tested partner for India and this strong relationship is evident with both sides signing the declaration on the India Russia strategic partnership back in October 2000 and in fact we can see them cooperate in almost all areas of bilateral relationship ranging right from political security defense trade economy signs and tech and also in culture now know that the strategic partnership between both countries was elevated to the level of a special and also a privileged strategic partnership only in the year 2010 December during the visit of the then Russian President to India so in simple words both these countries they always have had a robust partnership now before going into our discussion let's split up this discussion on the India Russia relationship into five different parts with each part covering the different angles of the India Russian bilateral ties so in the first part let us see some of the important multilateral organization and some important connectivity projects in which both India and Russia are partnering now the first and the foremost or the most important one in this regard is the BRICS which has always been one of the recurring topics in news see this BRICS consists of five major emerging countries which are which includes Brazil Russia India China and South Africa and the most prominent areas of cooperation under this are in the fields of economy finance health science technology and also in innovation security and business now the second one in which both the countries are pairing is the Shanghai cooperation organization see this Shanghai cooperation organization is a permanent intergovernmental organization and its creation was announced back in the year 2001 in the month of June at Shanghai in China and this said announcement of Shanghai cooperation organization was made by six countries and these six countries are the Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan China Russia Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and remember that on June 2017 both India and Pakistan were made as full-time members of this Shanghai cooperation organization so that means at present India is serving as a full-time member of this Shanghai cooperation organization and this said organization it mainly focuses on the regional security issues and it also fights against regional terrorism ethnic separatism and also religious extremism now thirdly Russia has reiterated its unwavering support to India for the permanent membership in an expanded UNSC and finally so know that Russia has been a long-standing supporter of India's membership of the nuclear suppliers group now having said that let's have a very brief understanding about this nuclear suppliers group see this said nucleus suppliers group is a group of nuclear supplier countries and it seeks to prevent nuclear proliferation I know both the sentences are contradicting and you may be wondering how a nuclear supplier country may seek to prevent nuclear proliferation now the answer to this is these nuclear supplier countries they prevent the nuclear proliferation by controlling the export of materials equipment and technology that can be used to manufacture nuclear weapons I know that India was not able to be a member of this elite group due to the opposition from some countries like that of China and the main reason for the opposition is that India has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty because signing this nuclear non-proliferation treaty is a prerequisite for a country to be admitted into this nuclear suppliers group and so it is in this regard that Russia is supporting India for its membership in this nuclear suppliers group so these are some of the multilateral agreements or arrangements in which India and Russia are partnering and with that we are done with the first part now coming to the second part see in this part we are going to talk about the defense and the security cooperation and in fact India has got a long standing and also a wide-ranging cooperation with Russia when it comes to the field of defense see initially India Russia military technical cooperation was in the level of a buyer seller framework only but then it was only in the course of time that this cooperation evolved into one that involved joint research development and also the production of advanced defense technologies and system and here the Brahmos missile system as well as the licensed production in India of the SU-30 aircraft and the T-90 tanks are some examples of such flagship cooperation and the two sides also concluded agreements on supply of the S-400 air defense systems and then the construction of frigates under the project 1135.6 and also for manufacturing the KA-226 T helicopters in India and here it is to be noted that the India and Russia they also hold exchanges and training exercises between their armed forces annually so in this regard India Russia exercises between the army navy and air force of the two countries have been held since the year 2005 and moreover joint tri-services exercises INDRA are also being held once in every two years since the year 2017 and for your additional information the last INDRA tri-services exercise was held in India during the year 2019 December and the military exercise was recently conducted in Russia in the beginning of August now let us move on to the third part in the India Russia relationship see this part is going to be about the trade and economic relations that is shared between the two countries know that India and Russia have revised the targets to increase bilateral investment to about 50 billion US dollars and bilateral trade to 30 billion US dollars by the year 2025 so take a quick look into the import and export items you need not memorize everything but then have in mind at least two or three for the exams and it is also to be noted that the bilateral trade in services has always remained stable during the last five years with the trade balance in Russia's favor and on that line a few important steps or a few important projects that could provide a major boost to bilateral trade includes the operationalization of the green corridor project and then the international north south transport corridor and also the signing of an FTA or a free trade agreement with the Eurasian economic union and on that line even the operationalization of the Chennai Vladivostok eastern maritime corridor could also help and now the fourth part of the bilateral ties is going to be about the cooperation in the nuclear energy see Russia is an important partner for India in the area of peaceful use of nuclear energy and the Kudankulam nuclear power plant is being built in India with Russian cooperation and also know that this Kudankulam nuclear power plant units 1 and 2 have already become operational and the construction of the third and fourth unit is going on and also the credit protocol for the fifth and sixth unit was also signed recently now coming to the last part of the bilateral ties which is going to be space cooperation see in space cooperation both sides they actually cooperate in the peaceful uses of outer space including the satellite launches the GLONASS navigation system the remote sensing and also other societal applications of outer space so on that line and memorandum of understanding was signed by the ISRO and the ROS COSMOS on joint activities in the field of human space flight program and since then the negotiation of contracts and cooperation for realization of the India's human space flight program that is a Gaganyar are taking place so this is a broad overview of the important points that you need to have in mind whenever you learn about the India Russia cooperation so now with this understanding let us have a quick run through of the eastern economic forum that was mentioned in today's news see the said eastern economic forum was established by a degree of the president of the Russian Federation that is the Vladimir Putin and this forum was established with the aim of supporting the economic development of Russia's Far East and also to expand the international cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region and remember this forum takes place each year in Vladivostok and with that let's wind up this particular news article and let's move on to the next news article now look at this news article now this particular article who talks about a project agreement that was signed between India and the United States on July 30 and according to the defense ministry this project agreement was signed for an air-launched unmanned aerial vehicle and the particular agreement is also said to be signed under the ambit of the defense technology and trade initiative so this is the news now based on this context let us talk about the said unmanned aerial vehicle and let us also see about the mentioned defense technology and trade initiative see first of all in simple words an air-launched unmanned aerial vehicle is nothing but a drone which can be launched from an aircraft so we all know that drones are also called as unmanned aerial vehicles and they're also named as unmanned aircraft systems so basically these drones they refer to a flying robot which is navigated from the ground using a GPS tracking system now apart from being remotely controlled these drones they've got the capability to fly autonomously through a software controlled flight plan and remember drones they've got the capability of reaching even the most remotest areas that will be little to no manpower in the least amount of effort time and energy and it is because of this unique characteristic the drones are being adopted worldwide especially in crucial sectors like that of military personnel and future technology and also for commercial purposes now on talking about the structure of drones see drones are equipped with a different state of the art technology say like that of infrared cameras, GPS and also laser and these drones they are usually controlled by remote ground control systems and also know that usually an unmanned aerial vehicle system will consist of two parts which is the drone itself and the control system and generally the nose of this unmanned aerial vehicle is where all these sensors and the navigational systems are present and apart from the nose the rest of the body of the drone will be filled with technology systems is there is no space required to accommodate any humans there and also remember the engineering materials that are employed in the manufacturing of the drones are generally very lightweight and they're also highly complex that are designed in a way to absorb the vibration which will eventually decrease the sound produced and when you look at the applications of drones know that the drones are used for multiple purposes in a varied range of sectors some examples of propeller drones are the attack drones the delivery drones the surveillance drones etc so now let's see some important examples of drones and their application in various fields the first comes the attack drones see these drones are generally used only by the military and they are equipped with weapons which can be used for controlled head strikes and when you take the delivery drones they are being employed as a new way of delivering items to customers and for this purpose they are generally used by some big shipping companies say like that of amazon etc and on talking about the surveillance drones these drones are equipped with cameras and they're used across a number of industries that are for various purposes like that of law enforcement sports then forestry farming etc now due to their greater efficiency these drones are also used in the field of agriculture as agricultural drones and these agricultural drones they are used for carrying out field surveys and they can also estimate the crop yield and they also keep track of the livestock's there and apart from these drones are also used for search rescue operations now apart from all these broad areas of application the drones are also used for search or rescue operations for geographically mapping and inaccessible terrain or location and also for building safety inspections storm tracking as well as in the field of photography and videography as well so by now we have a basic conceptual clarity on the drones their structure and also their application so now let us move to know about the DTTI or the defense technology and trade initiative that is mentioned in today's news see this said defense technology and trade initiative is a major strategy that is used to facilitate the development of defense technology and under this strategy they facilitate the defense technology by reducing the bureaucratic processes and also by reducing the legal requirements that are needed in all possible ways and for your information this defense technology and trade initiative between united states and india was launched back in the year 2012 and the main aim of this was to bring a sustained leadership focus to promote collaborative technology exchange and in addition to this to also create opportunities for the co-production and co-development of future technologies for the purpose of india and us military forces so on that line under this defense technology and trade initiative joined working groups on land naval air and aircraft carrier technologies have been established in order to focus on the mutually agreed projects in respective domains now here you should understand one thing see we cannot call the defense technology and trade initiative as any kind of law or any kind of treaty but instead it has been given a name of a flexible machinery which will help the senior leaders from the united states of america and also from india to ensure a determined and also a focused approach on channelizing the opportunities and also on channelizing the challenges that are related with the growing the mutual defense partnership and with this let's wind up this particular news discussion and move on to the next news article now have a look at this news article which reports about the financial stability and development council now this financial stability and development council was a news because recently the council met and it discussed a host of issues concerning our economy and the said meeting is a 24th meeting of this financial stability and development council so during the meeting this council deliberated on various mandates like that of financial stability financial sector development then on inter-regulatory coordination financial literacy financial inclusion and macro prudential supervision of the economy including the functioning of large financial conglomerates and also in the meeting the council stressed on the need for keeping a continuous vigil on the financial sector by the government as well as different regulators so these are the important points from the news article so in this context let us very briefly say about some important facts about the financial stability and the development councils in the preliminary perspective see the financial stability and development council is an autonomous body that was constituted by the government of India and this body was constituted by an executive order of the union government as a non-statutory apex body under the ministry of finance back in the year 2010 and also know that this financial stability and development council shortly called as FSDC was created on the recommendation of the Raghuram Rajan committee I'll repeat on the recommendation on the Raghuram Rajan committee on the financial sector reforms and this committee was set up in the year 2008 so now let us see about the members of this FSDC see first of all the finance minister is the chairman of the financial stability and development council and then this council it also includes the heads of financial sector regulators which includes the heads of the reserve bank of India the insurance regulatory and development authority the securities and exchange board of India and also the pension fund regulatory and development authority and in addition to that the finance secretary the chief economic advisor the secretary of the department of financial services and then the ministry of state responsible for the department of economic affairs and also the secretary of the department of electronics and information technology then the revenue secretary and the chairman of the insolvency and the bankruptcy board of India are also the members of this FSDC now let us move on to see about the functions of this financial stability and development council see this body it mainly deals with the macro prudential and the financial regularities in the entire financial sector of India and this body also envisages to strengthen and institutionalize the mechanism of maintaining financial stability financial sector development inter-regulatory coordination along with monitoring macro prudential regulation of the economy so far we saw about its function and now let's see about its responsibilities so some of the major responsibilities of the FSDC are to bring about stability in the financial sector to develop the financial sector to coordinate between the inter-regulatory bodies to promote the financial literacy to ensure the financial inclusion and apart from this it is also responsible for the macro prudential supervision of the economy including the functioning of the large financial conglomerates and also for coordinating India's international interface with financial sector bodies like the financial action task force the financial stability board and any other such body that is decided by the finance minister from time to time so with this we have come to the end of this article discussion now let's move on to the next part of our hinder news analysis now see this article this news article mentions that in Kerala pink colored ration cards will be provided to more than one lakh people and already ration cards in the antyodaya anayojina category were provided to 11,230 persons so this is the news mentioned here now with this background let us learn about these ration cards and also the purpose behind see we all know that the government distributes food grains to the poorest section of the society and this process of distributing food grains is called as targeted public distribution system so this targeted public distribution system it is done through the government regulated ration shops which is also known as a fair price shops so what they usually do in these fair price shops is that they used to keep stock of food grains sugar kerosene oil etc for cooking and they used to sell these items to people at a lower price than that which is sold in the market so any family with a ration card can buy a stipulated amount of these items every month so having said that now let's see very briefly on what is a ration card see in simple words a ration card is a card that entitles the older to get access to food supplies at subsidized rates so you should know that in our country the ration card system is devolved to the state level so this means that each state has got its own system for distributing food to people who qualify for a ration card so that means there are differences in the way in which ration cards are administered from state to state but however nationally there used to be three main groups entitled to ration cards or we can say that three main kinds of ration cards existed before and they are the antyo they are cards the bpl cards or the below poverty line cards and the apl cards or the above poverty line cards so each group's card are usually different in color in order to enhance the ease of identification or they are given different colors for identification purposes so let's see about these cards one by one now first comes the antyo they are cards these cards are provided under the antyo they are anay urchana scheme see this scheme is designed for the poorest of the poor people or for those people who have no regular income coming into the household so they are even the poorest among the bpl or the below poverty line families and many of the people who fall into this category they include the households who are headed by widows, terminally ill persons, disabled persons or persons above 60 years and all other primitive tribal households and the process of identifying the antyo they are anay urchana families and also the issuing of distant a ration card is a responsibility of the concerned state government so now let's see what benefits do people get if they have this particular card so those people who have the aay card or the antyo they are cards they can buy 35 kilograms of food grains per household per month and the food grains are provided with the prices of rupees 3 per kg for rice and rupees 2 per kg for wheat and rupees 1 per kg for coarse grains okay so next comes the bpl and the apl cards or the below poverty and the above poverty line cards see bpl cards or below poverty line cards belongs to those people who are below the poverty line and as the name suggests the apl card or the above poverty line cards is applicable for all others that is for those people who are not included in aay card and the bpl cards so these were the three main ones that were there in existence before the national food security act of 2013 came into force but then after this national food security act the apl that is the above poverty line cards or categories and the below poverty line cards and categories were done with so at present only the eligible households and those households were covered under the antyo they are under yojana are entitled to receive food grains under the targeted public distribution system if you remember i mentioned a term called eligible households see these eligible households are also called as priority households and it refers to those families were not covered under antyo they are under yojana so usually these priority households they receive the phh or the priority household cards and they are entitled to get food grains of about 5 kg per person per month now apart from this the state governments also they issue color wise ration cards to various qualifying groups but again such cards and the categories of people to which it is provided it varies from state to state for example as it is mentioned in today's news pink ration card is given to the phh or the priority households including the below poverty line families so these are some basic things that you need to have in mind whenever you come across or whenever you learn about the public distribution system so with these details now let us move on to the next discussion now having done with the article discussion let us now move on to the next segment of our hinder news analysis that is the prelims practice question discussion so now let us take up this practice question about the tar desert three statements are given and we need to find the correct statements now the question goes as which of the following statements is or are correct with reference to tar desert and statement one says that it is spread across two countries and the second statement is that its eastern most boundary limit is the r r valley hills and the third statement says that its landscape is characterized by undulating sand dunes scanty rainfall and extreme temperature now see tar is the great indian desert and it is the eastern limit of the perso arabian desert and this tar desert it extends up to 2.3 million square kilometers in india and pakistan and 85 percent of this desert is in india and the remaining part is situated in eastern sindh province and some area of the pakistan panjab so basically in india it is spread across rajasthan hariana panjab and the rhan of kachan gujarat so this makes the first statement correct now coming to the second statement see this statement is also right because the tar desert is the only ecosystem of its type in the indian subcontinent and its eastern most boundary limit is the r r valley hills and its western limit is defined by the fertile plains of the hinders and when you take its southern limit it is the great rhan of kach and its northern limits are formed by the riparian sub himalayan plains so this statement is also right now moving on to the third statement see this statement is correct as well because the landscape of the tar desert is characterized by undulating sand dunes scanty rainfall then extremes of temperature and sparse human population and it is also the most thickly populated desert in the world with an average density of 83 persons per kilometer and also it hosts a rich diversity of life and for your additional information the tar desert includes the desert natural park wildlife sanctuary and some important species that are spotted in the tar are the great indian bustard and two species of gypsu vulture namely the oriental wide-backed vulture and the long-built vulture so from this we can find that all the three statements that is given here are right and therefore the correct answer here is option d that is one two and three now look at this practice question statement one the prime minister of india is the chairman of the financial stability and development council and statement two the fs dc or the financial stability and development council is a statutory body functioning under the ministry of finance see based on a discussion itself we can infer that both the statements are incorrect because it is the finance minister who is the chairman of the financial stability and development council and not the prime minister of india likewise this council is a non-statutory body that is functioning under the ministry of finance and it is not a statutory body so since both the statements that is given here are incorrect the correct answer here will be option d that is neither one nor two now look at this question are you seeing as listed the red-haired slider among hundred examples of the world's worst invasive species so what are the threads posed by it statement one they take over nests of water birds statement two they damage and prey on the eggs and hatchlings of other species and statement three they increase the risk of parasite transmission to native species and we need to find the correct statements see in this question all the three statements that is given here are correct because as we saw in the discussion these species they cause reduction in native biodiversity and there are also considerable evidence that red-haired sliders have got negative impacts on native turtles and also on the aquatic ecosystems in general now this is said so because these species are found to be aggressive and they're also found to compete with the indigenous species when it comes to food nesting and basking sites now say for example in Singapore the red-haired sliders are posing a significant threat when it comes to the survival of the critically endangered river terrapins so since all the statements that is given here are correct the correct answer here is option d that is all of the above now look at this question statement one says that the priority households are entitled to get food grains of 35 kilograms per person per month and statement two says that the households covered under antheodaya under yojana are not eligible to get food grains under the national food security act of 2013 see the first statement that is given here is incorrect because the priority households are entitled to get only five kilograms of food grains per person per month and not 35 kilogram so this statement is wrong now coming to the second statement see as per section three clause one of the act that is section three clause one of the national food security act of 2013 the priority households and the households who are covered under the antheodaya under yojana are in fact eligible to get food grains and these priority households can get five kilograms while the antheodaya under yojana households can get 35 kilograms per household per month so this statement again is wrong since both the statements are incorrect the correct answer here is option c both one and two because the question wants us to find only the wrong statements the list of main's questions is displayed below so interested aspirants can write your answers and post them in the comment section so with this we have come to the end of today's internews analysis and if you've liked the video then don't forget to like comment and share and do subscribe to shankar eyes academy youtube channel for more updates regarding upsc civil services preparation


good morning guys and welcome to a new vlog starting out the vlog in the car on the way to cycle bar because it is tuesday i didn't end up going on monday because i was just kind of having like a lazy day so i was like i'm not gonna sweat it i'm just gonna have my chill day and then we'll go on tuesday so that's what we're doing it's a dual ride i really like when there's two instructors on the podium because it's just cool i don't know it brings more energy and stuff i'm excited for that and then after the ride i don't know where the day is gonna take me i think well i have to make my dog's grooming appointment i was gonna do that a little later but i think i'll do it today i might take her out for like a walk we might go to the dog park but other than that that's pretty much my plans for today because i'm chilling out i'm relaxing i'm taking my vacation and stride i don't want to be like overly stressed oh tomorrow i think i'm gonna vlog today and tomorrow just so i can get some more footage because again you guys know i need to have an footage for a video so um i'm definitely going to vlog tomorrow but i'm going to be vlogging on my phone because last time i took my cameras and stuff they got sand everywhere you guys know i hate sand like that's the one part about the beach that i like cannot stand because it gets everywhere it's annoying and uncomfortable but it's fine because it is the ocean it's nice and semi relaxing when it's not raining um but yeah i've definitely learned my lesson because almost broke my camera the other time i took my camera to the beach um the g7x and there's no way in heck i'm taking this one to the beach i think i've taken it like once or twice to the beach but i'm definitely not going to because i don't want the sand to scratch this lens because there's no like well there is a lens cover but the thing is i don't want the lens to get scratched if you know what i mean so anyway i just went on a big long tangent about this camera and okay i am exhausted my legs feel like they're gonna fall off because that ride was so intense i rode with a new like instructor and she like had so many intervals she put the rpm like really high whoo haven't worked that hard in a spin glass in a long long time my legs are so sore but i had a fun idea that we're going to try this like it's called green crisp i don't really know i'll vlog it but basically it's like a healthy place that i want to see if they have green juice if they don't i'm gonna be really sad and i'll just go to starbucks but let's see if they have some green juice because i'm kind of craving it after that really really intense ride i'm still out of breath and i've come to the conclusion this top is going in the trash when i get home like literally because it's just a really stinky top like i gave it so many chances and i think i'm just gonna have to pull the cord and throw it away because it's just disgusting okay so i ended up going with a smoothie because the lady looked at me like i was crazy when i was like do you make green juice here because i didn't really like see that on the menu but there's no harm in asking um so i'm gonna try this um hopefully it's good it probably will be good but yeah i was i was hoping for like a juice but it's fine it's a smoothie not bad i think it could use some more celery like celery flavor but overall it's not a bad drink show i think i'm gonna listen to the episode of manifest while i drive home and i'm immediately going home because this top is just not it i'm gonna change my top because and this one just smells bad and i need to throw it away it just needs to go okay so i ended up going into the house and then i showered decided to boil my eggs and eat my lunch so that's what i did an hour finally on the way to the park right piper right anyway probably stay about an hour i hope no one's there i really don't feel like talking to anyone i don't know if it's just my luck probably me not paying attention but the freaking dog park is closed for landscaping and maintenance or whatever which i don't see any maintenance happening so i don't really understand that there's like no one here doing anything so i'm a little like mad because every time i come here it's it's very like it's unusual for this thing to be open because every time i come it's either closed for maintenance or like right now it's closed for maintenance or it's like getting redone i'm like what is this thing open that like i'm able to like go on my schedule i don't like going at four or five even though that's like the prime times it's just like in the evenings i'm home like i want to stay home so anyway it's fine we're gonna go downtown celebration and walk around a bit i'll take her for a little a little walk so she can get out i feel so bad this is like the third time this has happened and i mean like i don't know how she gets excited and then like nothing because she just gets out she takes a shit and then i'm like come on we have to get back in the car because the freaking dog park opens at three and i'm not gonna just sit and wait here till three and like it's hot i don't know i'm just like annoyed so i think we're gonna walk around the lake and then call it a day just to get some steps in and so she doesn't feel like it's a complete waste of her time and mind low key she loves chasing the birds sniffing all around i decided to have some rosé because it's a perfect summer day and i just wanted to have some fun also check out my friend kair's channel because she's uploading more and i know she'd probably like if she got like some more of you so i'm gonna watch her video and yeah the next day all right so we made it not yet but we're on our way to the beach did you bring your camera i did actually wait really i didn't because it almost broke the last time so that's why we're on the phone sand went everywhere on the camera and i like a life update jamie anyway yeah that's good that you brought a pouch because i couldn't turn it on and off when i well like the lens wouldn't go back oh yeah perfect like blue skies everything kaira manifested the rain away so test the rain away yeah i mean there's nothing really going on there was an emergency where's like this truck was driving by and it was like but it was kind of like not that exciting at the same time so yeah i'm gonna go dip my toes in we're gonna have a good time got the hat on everything their store because kaira was looking for a like wine section apparently they moved it so we're just gonna check over here with trying to not get run over yeah so we're gonna check out this place while we're just checking out some of the shops here walking around this room is pretty cute i think i've been here like one other time but it's a cute little place i would definitely come back definitely come back she found it so we're getting mcdonald's but apparently they can only do two transactions and it's like the it's the little one apparently they can only do two transactions so we had to have like jamie put her order on my tab which is like her liver is it's fine though she'll just spend money it's still i thought it was so funny because i've never actually had that happen before and i drive through but i'm just documenting for the mebs so i'm just coming on to in the video i had such a good day with my friends at the beach if you haven't already follow me on instagram so you can see my photos i'm actually gonna post one pretty soon because i wanted to post like two but i didn't want to post that like you know the same day follow me on there and yeah that is pretty much it so if you guys enjoyed it make sure to give this video subscribe and i'll see you guys in my next video bye


Can we start now? Yeah, OK. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Martin Baer. I live in China. And I came with my colleague Zhu Feng. She's sitting here in the front. So I will talk about Elastos, a project that, as you said, may blow your mind. Before I talk about Elastos, I want to talk a little bit about the Internet itself, the history of the Internet, how it was evolved, and how it came to be. So basically, the Internet was built on trust. When the Internet was designed in the 60s, 70s, it was kind of assumed that everyone who would ever get onto that network was a trusted person from some trusted institution, and we knew we would know who everybody is and we could trust everyone and there's no bad people that would ever be able to use this. So nobody thought about making the Internet in any way safe and build protections against bad people. So somebody at another conference gave a talk about IoT and he described the Internet as a coffee party.  Everybody is nice and polite, everybody is friendly, and nobody steals anything and nobody does bad things. Because of that assumption, because of believing that there are no bad people, no protections were built in and so now we have a problem that we cannot keep the bad people out. We have to deal with spam. We have to deal with denial of service attacks. We have problems with cookies. Cookies are being abused. Cookies are so bad. I don't know if you are aware of this here, but in the European Union, the European Union made a law that requires every website that uses cookies to have a message or notice to tell the visitor that we're using cookies and you have to approve that you understand what that means. I don't think it changes anything, but basically you have to think about that. We as engineers, we build something that is so bad that a government has made laws to warn the common people against the threats of what we built. And the same thing might be coming with IoT devices because effectively IoT made everything worse. IoT devices are so hopelessly insecure that really the only thing you want to do, the only thing you can do at this point is to try to just block IoT devices from being able to access the internet entirely. At Scale, the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, two weeks ago, John Holly gave a talk with the topic Good Fences Make Good Neighbors in IoT, and he was describing in graphic detail what you had to do in order to protect his network from bad IoT devices. I'll have a link to that talk in the slides. So are you familiar with the OC model of networking? Basically the OC model describes seven network layers. There's a physical layer and a data link layer which is mostly your cables, your Wi-Fi signals and so on. There's a network layer where you'll run IP and basically your internet connections. A transport layer where you have the network protocols, HTTP and SSL and so on. Session layer, presentation layer and application layer. So basically the important thing to understand is that the bottom layers are mostly hardware. The network layer and the transport layer partly are in the kernel, and the rest is in your application. Applications are taken care of those top layers. What's most important is applications are responsible for making their own network connections secure. So every application that is running is on its own responsible for making sure that it has a secure network. Your web browser is using TLS to secure the network with the web server, and your email client may use TLS or may not use TLS depending on how it's configured to secure its network connection. At every program, whatever you install is responsible for its own. And you have a TLS, SSH, PGP and different ways to secure different aspects of the network, and you sometimes use multiple combinations of those to get the job done. What is very important is that identification of communication partners, identification of people that you are communicating with is happening within the application. In email, for example, the decision who is sending an email, who sent you an email is made by you as a reader of the email and by the email program, by identifying the email address. And effectively, every application has its own user database. SSH is using the system database in most cases, but it could in theory use its own database. Most websites, web services that run on the machine have their own user database. Your mail server has a different user database. Depending on how it's configured, they all have a different source of what identities exist. I have an SSH identity, I have an email identity, I have a web identity, I have hundreds of different identities. Even though they're all on the same machine, they're all doing different things. SPAM effectively comes from the fact that there is no programmatic user identification. When I receive an email, only me as a reader can actually identify who is the sender of this email. And sometimes I can use the email address, but I cannot trust that email address. SPAM can fake email addresses. And the computer, the software has no way to be 100% sure that an email is sent from the person that it claims to be. Only I as a reader can potentially verify that, and even I as a reader can sometimes not even do that if I don't know this person very well and I know exactly whether they're going to send me that or not. The Nile of Service attacks are even at one level, a few levels lower. They happen at the network level before even they get into the computer. They just spam your computer with network packages. And there's nothing I can do on any machine to prevent that. Because by the time I can do anything about a bad network packet, the packet already is clogging the network because it's already gone through the network. I cannot stop the Nile of Service attacks at the source. I cannot stop SPAM at the source. So how do we get out of this mess? By putting user identification first. By creating an operating system that allows applications to be built on a user-first paradigm. So any kind of networking happens, before any kind of networking happens, the applications have to identify the communication partners and verify that this communication is what we want to do. So quickly, what is Elastos? How are we doing it? First of all, Elastos is a complete set of C++ API and frameworks. It's an operating system runtime that provides end-to-end security across a peer-to-peer network. And it's designed for containers and virtual machines, so it can run in any kind of environment. It can also run natively. And it uses blockchain for user identities and other authentication. Very quickly, the C++ API and frameworks are basically sandbox at the C level. So we allow app developers to write applications in C and C++, but we're still able to provide a sandboxed environment for those applications. They're running inside our sandbox. And we have a runtime inspection system that allows distributed apps to talk to each other. And in order to get there, we rewrote the whole Android stack in C++. I think about that one for a moment. Do you know how big Android is? The whole Android stack, the whole Android frameworks? I think it's about 10 million lines of code or something like that. So the whole thing has been rewritten in C++. When I first heard that, I thought these guys are either crazy or they're genius or both. So why did they do that? Performance, memory footprint. So we're targeting primarily IoT devices because there the need is the greatest. So we want the system to be small and compact and allow IoT developers to write small and compact and fast applications that don't need many resources. We want to enable developers who are at this point mostly used to writing Android applications to be able to write C++ applications in the same style that they already learned from writing Android applications. And we also want to enable porting Android applications directly to Elastos. We can run native Android applications and you can use Java to write your applications, but for a small IoT device, you wouldn't really want that. The distributed OS runtime. So basically, we're building a network on top of the internet and we're using peer-to-peer to connect the devices and nodes. And the idea is, yes, so we're providing end-to-end security across that network. And when the network connection happens, so, sorry, the key point is we prohibit apps from doing their own networking. So all the networking is going through the operating system and this is the important part. Every network connection is approved by the operating system. So applications no longer do their own networking and that addresses the problem. So now I'm going to explain a little more detail. So you've seen that slide before and when Elastos comes into the picture, it looks like this. So Elastos is taking over those middle layers, transport, session, and presentation layer pretty much and part of the application layer. And the applications really are mostly responsible for the user interface, for the application logic, but they're no longer responsible for networking. Networking is effectively the same in every application, so there's no need to repeat all that into every application. And so we are providing the networking as a service to the application and the applications themselves just use that. And so what we achieve by doing that is we're able to move the user identification away from the application layer. We're basically letting the apps specify that they want to talk to a certain identity. If I want to send a message to you, then I will have your identity in some form as a cryptographic key and then the application sends a request to the operating system that I want to send a message to this person and then the operating system will use the peer-to-peer network to find that identity. So there's no more IP addresses involved. I mean, yes, in the lower level, of course, there's IP, but for the applications, the IP address is no longer matter. The applications don't say, I want to talk to this IP address. They just say, I want to talk to this identity. The operating system goes out and finds the identity wherever it may be. It could be moving around from one machine to another. It's certainly going to move around from one IP address to another because depending on where you are, your mobile phone or your computer may have a different IP address. And once it found that identity and basically with a key exchange verified, but this is the correct identity, and also then both sides have verified that they actually approve for this communication to happen, only after that the application itself will be able to send a message to that recipient. And so this authentication verification happens in the beginning so that basically we can approve that we are communication partners, and then after that the operating system just checks that all these checks are in place. And as a user, I don't actually notice that there's something going on. The message just gets sent. So the connections are only opened after the user IDs have been verified and the connection has been approved. And so this way, we basically prevent any form of spam, denial of service attacks, worms, viruses and what have you because applications cannot just do what they want on the internet. And instead of having identities on the application level, we have a kind of network-wide system of identities that can be verified through cryptographic keys. Okay, continuing the runtime. So basically you can imagine if you're familiar with Java, the Java virtual machine, it's kind of like a Java virtual machine, but it's a C++ virtual machine and runtime. And so there's no need to break out of that virtual machine or in order to write native code. That's a problem Java has. You have occasionally a situation where Java runtime doesn't provide what you need and you need to write some stuff in C++ or C, and then you break out of this Java runtime and use a Java native interface to write native code. And so we don't need to do that because we already are at the C++ C level and so you can basically always stay within the sandbox in order to do everything that you need to do. Yeah. So it's kind of like providing a hybrid programming model where you can write in C++. You can write in any kind of runtime language, scripting language, Python, Ruby or anything else you like. You can write in Java or any other language, basically anything that can potentially compile to C, which is pretty much everything. And you get kind of like an Android-like programming environment and feeling like you're programming for Android, but you're doing it in C++ or in other languages. Now, where does the blockchain come in? I've already mentioned the blockchain is used for once for managing user IDs. So we're going to put the user IDs onto the blockchain and then we're using the blockchain to verify that these IDs are genuine and are the ones that we want to talk to. There are other uses for the blockchain. One example is digital asset management. So what we're doing is we're actually on top of just using the blockchain for our networking, we're also providing a blockchain development environment so you can write blockchain applications. But the key point is we're not only about blockchain applications. You can write blockchain applications. You can write regular applications that just do networking. You can write applications that don't do networking if you don't need to. You can write any kind of applications like in any kind of development system like in Android. And the blockchain is just part of the set of features that are being offered to application writers. And there's also coins to enable trading and to enable market-like applications and things like that. I want to expand on this thing, what we call digital assets. That's kind of a key point from a free software perspective because basically if you look at today, we have a few types of digital content and a few ways to share digital content. And one is free to share, which is GNU, which you probably all know, Creative Commons, where you can basically share and do pretty much whatever you want with it as long as you follow the license. And then there is DRM Free, which is... You can share it, but it's actually... You're not legally allowed to share it. I mean, it's like you can copy it, but then you would be breaking the law, but nobody's stopping you from doing it. And then we have at least entitled control by distributors, digital rights management or digital restriction management, however you want to call that, where the distributor controls what you do with the content that you receive. I don't know if you still remember the story when Amazon decided to delete the book 1984 from everybody's Kindle devices. And so you bought that book and you were maybe in the middle of reading it and then Amazon decides that we're terminating that license and we're just going to take it away from everybody. That's what DRM gives you and that's what we don't want. So with the blockchain, we can offer another alternative. The blockchain allows us to track ownership of a piece of digital content. And because we can track the ownership, that means we can allow the reselling of content, which enables this secondary market, which in the world of books used to be a big issue that when you buy a book, where you're allowed to resell the book that you bought or not, there have been lawsuits fought about that. And at least in the US it has been made very clear that there is no way that you can prevent anybody from reselling a book that they ever bought. I don't know how it is in Singapore, and in other countries it may be the same or worse. But the point is with digital assets on the blockchain, we enable the same mechanism where when you own, when you buy a piece of digital content, whether it's a book or a movie or something else, or a program, you are able to resell it because you can prove that you made that sale and the programs that read your digital content, they can verify on the blockchain whether you still have the permission to read it or whether you sold it and you don't actually have it anymore. The important part is that we're taking away the control from distributors to decide what happens with this content and we're giving that control to the consumer who is buying the content who can then decide who to give it to next. A bit about the history. Elastos development started around the year 2000 as a research project at Tsinghua University in Beijing and they were trying to build a smartphone operating system and when iOS and Android came out, they stopped working on that. Tufank may have some more details on that story. Then in 2012, development was restarted. It was then received $30 million funding by Foxconn and it reached beta status. So the $30 million were basically used to, at least as my understanding is, were used to rewrite that Android runtime. So we got Elastos running natively on a bunch of devices, beta status. That phone, I actually have it here if somebody wants to take a look later, running Elastos natively. Although now, I didn't mention that before, Elastos will not run natively on the phones. That's not our target at the moment, although it technically could, but we're actually building an Android and iOS runtime environment that you can basically install into your Android phone, into your iOS phone and then run Elastos apps within that environment so you don't have to flash your phone with a new operating system because nobody really wants to do that. So blockchain development started last year in 2017. There was a private funding round funded from Bitcoin investors and then in January we had an ICO and we got some more Bitcoins. And you can already see from the numbers the ICO was not done to get money in order to fund the project because we already had a bunch of money but it was more done to get mindshare and get people actually interested in the project. And so the roadmap is currently we're working on the peer-to-peer network. I've seen the reports from the developers that this is already now in a working state and there's work done with the development partners to build strategic applications that we want in the ecosystem. The blockchain part is being worked on. We're adding features like side chains so that blockchain applications don't have to put everything on the main chain. We're building a framework for web applications so that you can run apps within the browser and still have the same advantages and there's going to be the public minding of the ELR tokens will start at the end of the year. So that's pretty much it. If you download the slides I have trouble uploading them but I will try to get them uploaded before the conference ends or at least a few days after the conference then you can get all these links from the slides. The resource links is mostly GitHub and Elastos website. And yeah, with that I want to close just one more thing. I've been giving this talk at a few conferences now and everywhere I go I'm trying to assemble all the people who are working with blockchain in the free software community because I have a feeling that there's not enough free software in the blockchain world. It's dominated by investors, by ICOs, by token trading and there's not enough focus on development on free software, focus on the ideals that the free software community wants to share and so I want to get us together and at the end of this track tomorrow afternoon, after the last blockchain talk we're going to have a meet-up of all people who are interested in blockchain development to share what we can do as a community to strengthen our case in the blockchain world and in the world as such and also just mentioning there's going to be a blockchain track at the Hong Kong Open Source Conference in June and I'm also preparing one for the Cos Cup in Taiwan and I'm still looking for volunteers to help me with that. That's it. You have already seen this slide about me and Zhu Feng, as I mentioned she's here. She has been working on Elastos very, very early in the years 2003 to 2006 so she can tell you a little bit about the early history of Elastos and she rejoined the project this year as a product manager. Yeah, and there are links to the slides. So, questions? Yes?  Yes, you will have to change your mental model as far as network access is concerned because you're no longer thinking about, say, the most common way to work with today is that you have some kind of URL and the URL specifies a host name it specifies a path it may specify a user identity and, or like an email address and so, and then you have to figure out okay, what kind of URL is this? Is this a web URL? Is it an email address? So, how do I send a message or is it an IRC address or something like that? How do I send a message to this person? And depending on what you want to support in your application then you have to write your your networking code accordingly you open a connection to this port and then you start sending your HTTP There are libraries for, of course, for all of these but there's a different library for each way there's a library for email there's a library for HTTP requests there's a library for sending Java, XNPP messages and so on and so, now you will have one library framework for networking and all you're putting in is a user or application identity and you want to connect with this particular identity and then you wait for the approval and then you get the socket to send the message and you write applications that the actual application or do we have to only use the last-door applications because your change on the networking so I'm just wondering Okay, there are two answers to this the question is, can you use or write regular Android applications? So for one, yes, you can still write applications in Java and you can write pretty much traditional Android applications as long as they don't do networking because the networking system is changing so if you want to run inside the Elastos environment you have to use the Elastos way of networking but the rest will stay the same and on top of that you can write your applications in C++ in the same logic and structure as you would do it in Android because we're basically duplicating that way of developing Yes? You mentioned using blockchain Is that public blockchain or are you using it your own? And if you're using a public place for fees? Okay, so the question is if we're using a public blockchain or if we use our own blockchain I'm not sure about the details here but what I understand is that this is actually flexible so we pretty much have our own blockchain ecosystem but we're working with Neo for the whole blockchain technology and so I'm not sure if we're using Neo's main blockchain or if we're using our own but basically we're also providing an environment for other people to write their own blockchain applications and so we're having at least one main blockchain where Elastos is running on and then lots of sidechains for different applications that don't need to be on the main chain so it's pretty complex and I haven't really looked into that detail yet because it's still evolving and it may change over time depending on what makes most sense Any other questions? What's the meetup tomorrow? The meetup tomorrow is after the last talk so I think the last talk ends at 2.25 so at 2.30 in the same room as the last blockchain talk so basically just look at the blockchain track at the end actually this is not on the official schedule but it has been approved by the organizers but they couldn't put it on the online schedule because they're too busy solving other problems but after this I'm going to go around and where I see the schedule printed I'm going to pencil in that we're going to have this event so people can see it I'm going to put it on the board downstairs and to spread the word if you talk to anybody about blockchain mention tomorrow afternoon to come here after the talk after the last one so that we can share and connect Alright, thank you


Sedimentation is the tendency for particles in suspension to settle out of the fluid in which they are entrained and come to rest against a barrier. This is due to their motion through the fluid in response to the forces acting on them. These forces can be due to gravity, centrifugal acceleration, or electromagnetism. In geology, sedimentation is often used as the opposite of erosion, i.e., the terminal end of sediment transport. In that sense, it includes the termination of transport by saltation or true-bed load transport. Settling is the falling of suspended particles through the liquid, whereas sedimentation is the termination of the settling process. In estuarine environments, settling can be influenced by the presence or absence of vegetation. Trees such as mangroves are crucial to the attenuation of waves or currents, promoting the settlement of suspended particles. Sedimentation may pertain to objects of various sizes, ranging from large rocks in flowing water to suspensions of dust and pollen particles to cellular suspensions to solutions of single molecules such as proteins and peptides. Even small molecules supply a sufficiently strong force to produce significant sedimentation. The term is typically used in geology to describe the deposition of sediment which results in the formation of sedimentary rock, but it is also used in various chemical and environmental fields to describe the motion of often smaller particles and molecules. This process is also used in the biotech industry to separate cells from the culture media.