Current Affairs Today - From 06.10.2015 to 12.10.2015

1. India, Germany Sign 18 MoUs: As many as 18 MoUs and letters of intent and a new German assistance package for over 1 billion euros for solar projects in India ­ taking overall commitments to more than 2 billion euros ­ were sealed during inter-governmental consultations led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chancellor Angela Merkel here on 05.10.2015.
2. Tamil author Perumal Murugan will be awarded at the fifth ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman to be held in Delhi on November 28, who was caught in controversy over his novel `Madhorubagan' (One Part Woman), has bagged the Indian Language Festival (ILF) Samanvay Bhasha Samman for this very work. 
3. Nobel Prize for medicine awarded to three scientists for discoveries that helped doctors fight malaria and infections caused by parasites. medicine awarded to William Campbell from the US, Satoshi Omura of Japan and Tu Youyou from China -won the Nobel  on 05.10.2015. For more details you may click Here
4. The government on Monday kicked off a project ­ KISAN ­ that will use space technology and drone-based imaging for estimating crop yields. An Android app, designed by space agency ISRO, too was launched which will assess real-time data on hailstorm occurrences to figure out crop loss in affected areas.
5. Tamil Nadu state government, department of economic affairs, under finance ministry , forwarded a proposal to extend financial assistance for setting up the desalination plant to `KfW', a German government-owned development bank. The plant, expected to cost `1,371.86 crore, will have a capacity to treat 150 million litres of water a day.
6. India's first offshore wind farm will likely come up in Tamil Nadu. The sea off Rameswaram and Kanyakumari has been identified as potential sites for these windmills and tenders are planned to be floated in three months.At nearly 7,500MW, Tamil Nadu's installed inland wind capacity has peaked, and offshore offers scope for expansion for this green source of power.
7. India isn't the best place in the world to die. The 2015 Quality of Death Index has put it 67th among 80 countries with regard to people receiving good end-of-life care.This means people in countries as small as Ghana, Tanzania and Zimbabwe are reaching a more dignified end to ife compared to Indians. The Index says India and China perform poorly overall, at positions 67 and 71. “In the light of the size of their populations, this is worrying,“ it adds.
8. Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday ( 06.10.2015) for discovering that the elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos have mass. Neutrinos are the second most bountiful particles after photons, but their true nature has been poorly understood.Kajita and McDonald's breakthrough was the discovery of a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation that has upended scientific thinking.
9. Indian economy is expected to grow faster than other major emerging economies, the IMF said on 06.10.2015, projecting a growth rate of 7.5% for India in 2016 as against China's 6.3%.
10. “India's growth is expected to strengthen from 7.3% this year and last year to 7.5% next year 2016.. Growth will benefit from recent policy reforms, a consequent pickup in investment, and lower commodity prices,“ the IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook Update released here.On the other hand, growth in China is expected to decline to 6.8% this year and 6.3% in 2016.
11. Museum on Nilgiri Mountain Rly opens at Mettupalayam station. The NMR museum, which celebrates the old and historical rail service, was inaugurated on 07.10.2015 .People, who have booked a trip on NMR through the scenic route, can cross the platform in Mettupalayam station and take a few minutes to look around the museum. It showcases the events leading to the setting up of the railway line during the British rule. The museum has on display a historic locomotive (number 37389), manufactured in Switzerland, that was in use since 1925.
12. The Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday (06.10.2015) that Tomas Lindahl from Francis Crick Institute in UK, Paul Modrich from Duke University School of Medicine in US and Aziz Sancar from the University of North Carolina have won the award for their pioneering “mechanistic studies of DNA repair“.
13. The Swedish Academy announced on 09.10.2015)as the winner of Nobel prize for literature 2015 for Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich for documenting and mapping over three decades the world post the collapse of the Soviet Union -her work “not being about the history of events but a history of emotions“.
14. Corals reefs are suffering a severe underwater heatwave this year for the third time on record, including a mysterious warm patch in the Pacific known as “The Blob“, scientists said on Thursday . The bout of record high temperatures in parts of the oceans, stoked by climate change, is expected to kill more than 12,000 sq kms of reefs, or about 5% of the global total.
15. UK firms create world's first drone-freezing gun.The Anti-UAV Defence System (Auds), which has a range upto 8km, works by covertly jamming a drone's signal, making it unresponsive and deterring them from entering sensitive areas. The technology passed with flying colours in March 2015, when the Auds team took part in French government trials, with the counter UAV system detecting and neutralising a variety of fixed and rotary wing micro, compact and standard UAVs.