(1). The Short-term debts have to be returned at a shorter interval. This renders an economy vulnerable if the economy is already facing economic crisis as it has an obligation to return the debt as well as interest payments (debt service). Example: Many economies like Mexico, Argentina etc who faced crisis were seen to have borrowed large amounts of short-maturity debt. So, the ideal scenarios is not to depend upon short-term debt during crisis.

(2). Opening up to the foreign banks and depending upon them is not a good idea during crisis. It has been empirically observed in World Bank Research that in many cases (like during Global Financial Crisis 2007-08) that foreign banks reduced their lending during crisis. Many of them choose to retreat from cross-border banking in general, including through cutting back on new entry.

(3) Capital account convertibility would mean that there is no restriction on conversion of the domestic currency into a foreign currency. It is recognised that capital flows are sensitive to macroeconomic conditions. Any deterioration in fiscal conditions, inflation management, balance of payments, or any other economic crisis may cause a cessation or reversal of capital flows. This might make the economy vulnerable if it already suffering from economic crisis.

Areas of heavy traffic, gas stations, and areas near industrial sources may also have higher air levels. Cigarette smoking and secondhand smoke including wood burning are important sources of exposure to benzene. Cigarette smoke accounts for about half of the exposure to benzene in the United States

During fires, polyurethane foams burn rapidly and produce dense smoke, toxic gases and intense heat. Carbon monoxide is most common, but smoke also contains benzene, toluene, nitrogen oxides and hydrogen cyanide.

• Benzene works by causing cells not to work correctly. For example, it can cause bone marrow not to produce enough red blood cells, which can lead to anemia. Also, it can damage the immune system by changing blood levels of antibodies and causing the loss of white blood cells.

• The seriousness of poisoning caused by benzene depends on the amount, route, and length of time of exposure, as well as the age and preexisting medical condition of the exposed person

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a technology for authenticating users and devices in the digital world. The basic idea is to have one or more trusted parties digitally sign documents certifying that a particular cryptographic key belongs to a particular user or device. The key can then be used as an identity for the user in digital networks. The users and devices that have keys are often just called entities. In general, anything can be associated with a key that it can use as its identity. Besides a user or device, it could be a program, process, manufacturer, component, or something else. The purpose of a PKI is to securely associate a key with an entity.

The trusted party signing the document associating the key with the device is called a certificate authority (CA). The certificate authority also has a cryptographic key that it uses for signing these documents. These documents are called certificates. In the real world, there are many certificate authorities, and most computers and web browsers trust a hundred or so certificate authorities by default.

A public key infrastructure relies on digital signature technology, which uses public key cryptography. The basic idea is that the secret key of each entity is only known by that entity and is used for signing. This key is called the private key. There is another key derived from it, called the public key, which is used for verifying signatures but cannot be used to sign. This public key is made available to anyone, and is typically included in the certificate document.

Pneumococcus is a leading cause of bacterial pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis in children. The burden of pneumococcal meningitis, is such that itconstitutes about half of all childhood meningitis cases in most settings and a greater proportion of meningitis deaths.The vaccine will protect children against severe forms of pneumococcal disease, such as pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis. The vaccine also prevents antibiotic-resistant pneumococcal infections caused by vaccine serotypes. Hence, statements 1 and 2 are correct.

 

However, anyone who has ever had a life-threatening allergic reaction to a dose of this vaccine, to an earlier pneumococcal vaccine should not get it. Anyone with a severe allergy to any component of it should not get the vaccine. With any medicine, including vaccines, there is a chance of side effects. These are usually mild and go away on their own, but serious reactions are also possible. Hence, statement 3 is incorrect.

An alternative to the zygote/embryo approach is to perform gene modifications during early gametogenesis. In this manner, growing immature oocytes or sperm or even pre- cursor cells (primordial germ cells) can be gene targeted by using the CRISPR/Cas system, producing genetically corrected mature sperm or oocytes that subsequently can be used for ART. In the male germ cell line, spermatogonial stem cells (SSC) can be harvested more and more efficiently, and in vitro culture systems are being developed, also in the human, and optimized for efficient production of sperm in vitro. So far, animal models have indicated that SSC can be propagated as clones in culture and then transplanted back into the testis to generate mature and functional sperm . So a potential strategy would be to select SSC clones that have undergone correct genomic editing and are free from off-target mutations. These can then be transplanted to undergo final maturation in vivo. Alternatively, the gene edited SSC can be directly differentiated in vitro to mature gene-corrected sperm, to be used for IVF. Still, optimisation of in vitro culture systems is warranted, especially in the human, so that gene editing technologies can be employed safely and with high efficiency. In the female germ line, the oocyte is more easily accessible for genetic manipulation, but currently technical hurdles remain, such as the small number of oocytes that are available . It has been suggested that oogonia-like stem cells could be harvested, cultured and expanded followed by culture in vitro to the mature metaphase II stage . However, there is still controversy over the existence of such oocyte precursor cells in the female and the efficiency at which mature, developmentally competent oocytes can be derived from them.

 

For germ-line modifications in experimental settings the genomic editing system is mostly injected into the cytoplasm or pronuclei of zygotes or into pre-implantation embryos, after which genetic screening is used to select the embryos with a corrected genomic pattern in the absence of detectable off-target genetic modifications. Should this turn out to be safe and effective, then similar applications in the clinic are conceivable. Subsequently, prenatal testing using either cell-free foetal DNA from the pregnant woman’s blood or one of the more invasive methods (chorionic villus sampling or amniocentesis), could in theory verify whether or not a foetus shows molecular or genomic mosaicism. Mosaic embryos arise as a result of inefficient cutting of the nucleases or inaccurate DNA repair before the embryo has reached the stage of cleavage. The pre-implantation embryo stage is generally not favoured for genome editing as it would most likely lead to a mosaic individual and possibly to more unforeseen detrimental effects. Various studies in different animal models have demonstrated the feasibility of gene editing in animals at the zygote stage.Hence, statements 1 and 2 are correct.

 

The controversial idea of growing human organs in host animals has passed through a reality check. Despite recent successes at growing mouse organs in rats, using the same trick to grow human organs in larger animals such as pigs is a long way off, new research shows. The researchers tried combining human induced pluripotent stem cells (reprogrammed adult cells that have regained the characteristics of embryonic cells) with pig embryos. After they implanted the chimeras into surrogate mothers, they let the embryos develop for just 3 or 4 weeks, to check whether and where the human cells were contributing. The researchers implanted more than 2000 human-pig chimeric embryos into 41 surrogate sows, resulting in 18 pregnancies and 186 embryos a month later. However, many of the embryos were much smaller than normal and seemed to grow more slowly, the group reports today in Cell. Hence, so far there has not been success in growing human organs in pigs. But this experiment shows that human induced pluripotent cells can be injected into pigs embryo. Hence statement 3 is also correct.

The Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA), a mission planned that uses three separate, but not independent, interferometers installed in three spacecraft located at the corners of a triangle with sides of some 5 million km (3 million miles).

This mission is to be carried out jointly by NASA and ESA.A mission to test the technology for eLISA, LISA Pathfinder, was launched by ESA in 2015. This is stationed around the L1 point between the Earth and the Sun which is nearly 1.5 million km away from the Earth. The aim of the mission is to demonstrate the technology needed to establish a space-based observatory to study gravitational waves.

Drones are already well known to spread pesticides and inspecting volcanoes remotely. Hence statements 1 and 2 are true.

Since 2015 Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Cape Cod have begun using a helicopter-style drone to monitor humpback whales off the coast, collecting breath samples from their blowholes and taking aerial pictures. Getting a breath sample from a whale isn't the easiest task in the world. But with the help of a hexacopter, scientists are getting the job done.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are allotropes of carbon, made of graphite and constructed in cylindrical tubes with nanometer in diameter and several millimeters in length. Their impressive structural, mechanical, and electronic properties are due to their small size and mass, their strong mechanical potency, and their high electrical and thermal conductivity. CNTs have been successfully applied in pharmacy and medicine due to their high surface area that is capable of adsorbing or conjugating with a wide variety of therapeutic and diagnostic agents (drugs, genes, vaccines, antibodies, biosensors, etc.). They have been first proven to be an excellent vehicle for drug delivery directly into cells without metabolism by the body. Then other applications of CNTs have been extensively performed not only for drug and gene therapies but also for tissue regeneration, biosensor diagnosis, enantiomer separation of chiral drugs, extraction and analysis of drugs and pollutants. Hence, statements 1 and 3 are true.

CNTs are used in various biomedical applications like biosensors, diagnostic agents to visualize cancer cells. A multiwalled carbon nanotube–polyurethane nanocomposite (MWCNT-PU) can be used as vascular graft or blood capillaries. The disruption of red blood cells by PU and MWCNT-PU has been studied by measuring the absorbance of free hemoglobin. It has been found that the MWCNTs with an oxygen-containing functional group are well dispersed in polyurethane matrix. The number of platelets adhered to the MWCNT-PU nanocomposite surface was remarkably reduced in comparison to that of the PU surface. Investigation of platelet activation was done by the analysis of conformational changes in glycoprotein measured via flow cytometry.

It is expected that this enabling technology would facilitate the making of nanodevices using these blood-compatible nanomaterials as building blocks for biomedical application such as artificial implants, including structural tissue replacements, that is, artificial blood vessels, or functional devices such as drug delivery matrixes. Hence, statement 2 is true.

Multiple types of microbes including bacteria and fungi have the ability to degrade carbon nanotubes (CNTs), graphene (GRA), and their derivatives and in the future more species with this ability will be found. Hence, CNTs are biodegradable. Therefore, statement 4 is true.

Blockchain can be defined as a distributed ledger technology that can record transactions between parties in a secure and permanent way. By ‘sharing’ databases between multiple parties, blockchain essentially removes the need for intermediaries who were previously required to act as trusted third parties to verify record and coordinate transactions.

 

It is a foundational technology or a platform that allows designing a secure way to record transactions and circulate it among signatories, or any kind of target group with an Internet connection. At its core it is an extremely democratic ledger that cannot be arbitrarily manipulated and easily shareable. Hence, statement 1 is correct.

 

The structure of block chain to eliminate intermediary and enhance authentication such that it supports wide range of applications in health, education, governance, diamond industry, financial sector, etc. Hence, statement 2 is not correct.

Most of the applications using block chain technology do not fulfil the criteria of patent filing in Blockchain Technology. 

 

Distributed ledger in peer to peer network is used for recording the transactions which does not generate much confidence in getting the patent as it is like getting a patent for an algorithm/Computer Program and as per Indian Patent Act, 1970, Section 3(k) which states that “a mathematical or Business method or a computer program per se or Algorithms” are not patentable. As per the ruling of Delhi High Court in the 2014 case of Ericson Vs Intex, the court stated that any invention which has a technical contribution or has a technical effect and is not merely a computer program per se as alleged by the defendant and the same is patentable…..”. Hence, statement 3 is correct.