GS Paper: GS3-17.Awareness in the fields of IT, Space, Computers, Robotics, Nano-technology, Bio-technology and issues relating to Intellectual Property Rights.

Why in the News

Macroeconomic stabilisation has moved from John Maynard Keynes‘s assumed straight line links between economic variables to policy built on how households and firms actually behave. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2026 to Robert E Hall of Stanford University and Michael Woodford of Columbia University, “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation“.

What is macroeconomic stabilisation?

1. What it is: Macroeconomic stabilisation means the policies governments and central banks use to smooth booms and slumps. It works like a thermostat, cooling an overheating economy and warming a slowing one.
2. Inflation fight: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) raised interest rates last week to contain inflation. Prices had risen after the war between the United States (US) and Iran and the Strait of Hormuz blockade lifted crude and commodity costs.
3. Recovery support: In the years around the Covid-19 pandemic, the Union government cut direct taxes and the Goods and Services Tax (GST), and the RBI cut interest rates, to boost consumption and investment.
4. Cost of doing nothing: Without intervention, inflation can soar and people cut all but essential spending. Many businesses then fail, jobs are lost and recovery takes much longer.
5. The takeaway: Stabilisation policy decides whether a price or demand shock passes quickly or turns into years of lost jobs and output, which is why the economics behind it earned the prize.

How did stabilisation policy rise and fall?

1. Great Depression: A stock market crash in October 1929 began the Great Depression in the US. Thousands of banks and businesses failed, and the crisis spread to Europe.
2. Scale of the slump: US gross domestic product (GDP), the value of annual output, fell by 30% and the unemployment rate soared to 25%.
3. Laissez faire: The ruling view of the time held that governments should not intervene in the economy.
4. Keynes’s remedy: In a slowdown, policymakers should cut rates and taxes and spend more, even on a budget deficit. They should raise rates when the economy overheats.
5. Stagflation: In the 1970s, repeated oil price shocks brought high inflation and high unemployment together. Boosting growth spiked inflation and fighting inflation worsened unemployment, so Keynesian policy came to be seen as the problem.

What did Hall and Woodford add?

1. Grounded in data: From the late 1970s, the two rebuilt the Keynesian approach on research. Keynes had assumed linear links, such as between inflation and unemployment; they studied ground level data instead.
2. Hall, the demand side: Hall studied how people decide how much to consume, and when they raise or cut spending, using household data.
3. Hand to mouth households: In 1982, Hall used microdata on individual households to show that not everyone raises spending when they expect higher income. Hand to mouth households, which spend what they earn, do not.
4. Woodford, the supply side: Firms do not change prices every day, and they look to the future when fixing them. So expectations about future interest rates shape today’s inflation.

Why does their work matter for policy today?

1. Forward guidance: Woodford’s finding means central banks must clearly convey what they intend to do, because firms set prices on that basis. This practice is known as forward guidance.
2. Evidence based policy: Hall’s household level evidence on who changes spending, and when, has informed policy choices on supporting consumption.
3. Resilience to shocks: A pandemic, wars that spiked commodity prices and policy missteps such as tariffs have hit the world economy. Growth has still surprised on the upside, partly because policy draws on such work.

Conclusion

Stabilisation policy now rests on evidence about how real households and firms behave rather than on assumed relationships, which has made a central bank’s communication a policy tool in its own right. How clearly the RBI signals its path as it fights oil driven inflation is a live test of that insight in India.

Back2Basics: Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

1. Origin: Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, instituted the prize in 1968 to mark its 300th anniversary. It is not one of the five prizes in Alfred Nobel’s will.
2. Award: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences selects the laureates. The first prize, in 1969, went to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen.
3. Indian laureates: Amartya Sen won in 1998, and Abhijit Banerjee in 2019, with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer.
4. Prize money: This year’s laureates share 12 million Swedish kronor, about Rs 12 crore.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2026] ‘X’, born in the UK, was conferred the Nobel Prize in 2025. He was a professor in an American university when the prize was announced. Identify ‘X’: (a) Michel H. Devoret (b) Richard Robson (c) John Clarke (d) Joel Mokyr ANSWER: C”

Why in the News

The Nobel Peace Prize, which seldom goes to jurists, has this year honoured the rule of law itself as the foundation of peace. The 2026 prize went to South African jurist Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, 85, “for her efforts to promote peace, international law”, amid widening war.

Why did the Committee honour a jurist?

1. The citation: The Nobel Committee cited her “exceptional courage and integrity”, holding that the rule of law, national and international, underpins the system for keeping peace.
2. Peace requires justice: The Committee’s line “Peace requires justice” means a settlement lasts only when grave crimes are punished, much as courts, not revenge, keep order within a country.
3. Prosecuting atrocities: It credited her with ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.
4. Nuremberg inspiration: The post war Nuremberg Trials showed her how law, through judicial power backed by punishment, could tackle state sponsored violence.
5. The takeaway: Honouring a judge signals that international law is itself an instrument of peace, not a backdrop to diplomacy.

How did apartheid shape her career?

1. Indentured roots: Her Indian Tamil grandparents went to Africa as indentured labourers (workers bound by contract to years of labour abroad), and she grew up under racially discriminatory laws.
2. Harvard doctorate: She became the first South African to earn a doctorate in law from Harvard University.
3. Firsts in Natal: She was the first Black woman to start a law practice in Natal Province and the first to serve in its High Court, nominated by Nelson Mandela.
4. Defending prisoners: She defended Mandela, the 1993 Nobel Peace laureate, in court and fought for anti apartheid prisoners’ rights such as access to lawyers.

What did the Rwanda tribunal establish?

1. ICTR: She served eight years as a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which tried crimes of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
2. Scale of killing: The genocide killed about 800,000 people in 100 days.
3. First genocide judgment: The ICTR was the first international tribunal to enter a judgment for genocide, interpreting it under the Geneva Conventions against war crimes.
4. Rape as genocide: It defined the crime of rape in international law and recognised it as a means of perpetrating genocide.
5. Propaganda: It was the first to recognise the role of propaganda in aiding genocide, and held members of the media responsible.

Where does her work stand today?

1. ICJ ad hoc judge: She is an ad hoc judge (appointed by a party for one case) at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Gambia v. Myanmar, a genocide case over Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims.
2. Gaza inquiry: From 2021 to 2025 she chaired the United Nations (UN) Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It found Israeli forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children “resulting in genocide” in Gaza.
3. Existential challenges: Amid “existential challenges” and more wars than in a long time, the Committee called international law an “absolute necessity”. Critics call the UN and ICJ powerless to stop violence.
4. Call to states: Pillay says justice after conflict is still new and needs support from states, which should “care and act collectively”.

Challenges

1. No enforcement arm: International courts depend on states to arrest suspects and carry out rulings.
2. Great power resistance: Powerful states reject findings or penalise courts. Eg. The US sanctioned the International Criminal Court hours after the prize.
3. Slow proceedings: Genocide cases take years to decide, delaying redress for victims.

Way Forward

1. State cooperation: States should execute arrest warrants and comply with the rulings of international courts.
2. Protected tribunals: Fund international tribunals adequately and shield their judges and staff from sanctions.
3. Domestic prosecution: Countries should enact laws on genocide and crimes against humanity so national courts can try such crimes.

Conclusion

The prize rests on a wager that law, not force, can still restrain states in a period of widening war. That wager will be tested by whether governments comply with genocide rulings and protect international courts from political pressure.

Back2Basics: International Court of Justice

1. Status: The principal judicial organ of the UN, often called the “World Court”, based at The Hague, Netherlands.
2. Origin: The UN Charter established it in 1945, and it began work in 1946, succeeding the Permanent Court of International Justice.
3. Bench: Its 15 judges are elected for nine year terms by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.
4. Jurisdiction: It settles disputes between states through binding rulings and gives non-binding advisory opinions to authorised UN bodies.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2026] ‘X’, born in the UK, was conferred the Nobel Prize in 2025. He was a professor in an American university when the prize was announced. Identify ‘X’: (a) Michel H. Devoret (b) Richard Robson (c) John Clarke (d) Joel Mokyr ANSWER: C”

Why in the News

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature honours a writer for creating new forms in dialogue with the classical tradition, not for mastering one genre. The Swedish Academy has named Anne Carson, a 76 year old Canadian poet, classicist, essayist and translator. Her books move between poetry, fiction, criticism and memoir.

Who is Anne Carson, and what did the Nobel recognise?

1. The citation: It recognises her “bold and inventive oeuvre (body of work) that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
2. Early life: Born in Toronto in June 1950, she changed schools often. A school Latin teacher, whom she credits for her “career and happiness”, taught her Greek in lunch hour lessons.
3. Classics: She studied Classics (ancient Greek and Latin literature) at the University of Toronto. Her 1981 doctoral dissertation was on Sappho, an ancient Greek poet.
4. Why she writes: In a 2004 interview she said she writes “to find out what I think about something”. She uses ancient Greek literature to clarify the contemporary.
5. The takeaway: The prize rewards a scholar of the ancient world who turned classical learning into forms that read as contemporary.

Which works built her reputation?

1. Eros the Bittersweet (1986): Her first book grew from her academic work and examines desire through a classical lens. It holds that desire is created by distance and shaped by longing and imagination.
2. Autobiography of Red (1998): A novel in verse recasting the myth of Geryon, a red winged monster killed by Herakles, as a sensitive adolescent’s love for Herakles. Red Doc> (2013) later returned to its characters.
3. The Beauty of the Husband (2001): “A fictional essay in 29 tangos”. It made her the first woman to win the TS Eliot Prize.
4. Nox (2010): Made after her estranged brother Michael died, it joins photographs, letters, translation and handwritten fragments in an accordion fold. It explores grief and the difficulty of holding on to someone through language.
5. Wrong Norma (2024): Won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2025.

What makes her work distinct?

1. Crossing genres: A poem can become an essay in her hands, an essay a translation and a translation autobiography. An ancient myth turns into a modern love story.
2. Reluctant poet: She hesitates to call herself a poet and has described much of her writing as “some heretic form of poetry”.
3. Emotional detachment: She writes about desire, abandonment and bereavement without confessional warmth. Feeling arrives indirectly, through a Sappho fragment, a myth, a photograph or an abrupt change of form.
4. Translations: She has translated Sappho, Euripides and other classical writers, most notably in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and An Oresteia.
5. Classics as contemporary: Her work shows that the classics remain radically contemporary and that there is no single way to arrive at or dwell in poetry.

Conclusion

The literature prize recognises a writer who treats genre as optional and the classics as a living resource. The next announcement in the 2026 Nobel calendar is the Peace Prize.

Back2Basics: Nobel Prize in Literature

1. Origin: Created by the will of Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901.
2. Selection: The Swedish Academy awards it, and its permanent secretary announced the 2026 winner in Stockholm.
3. Prize money: 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million) per prize this year.
4. Ceremony: Prizes are presented on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2026] ‘X’, born in the UK, was conferred the Nobel Prize in 2025. He was a professor in an American university when the prize was announced. Identify ‘X’: (a) Michel H. Devoret (b) Richard Robson (c) John Clarke (d) Joel Mokyr ANSWER: C”

Why in the News

Chemists have moved from making mirror-image molecules as near-even mixtures of both forms to producing one form almost exclusively, as living cells do. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to Henri B Kagan of France and Kenso Soai of Japan “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis“.

What is chirality, and why does life use only one form?

1. What it is: Some molecules exist in two forms that are mirror images but cannot be superimposed, like a person’s left and right hands. This property is called chirality.
2. Enantiomers: The two forms, called enantiomers, have the same atoms joined in the same order. Only their three-dimensional arrangement differs.
3. Homochirality: Life’s building blocks, such as the amino acids in proteins and the sugars in DNA, use only one form. This preference is called homochirality.
4. Laboratory problem: Ordinary chemical reactions produce both enantiomers in almost equal amounts, so chemists had to separate the form they wanted.
5. The takeaway: Making only the form the body uses lets chemists copy what living cells do, which is why the work matters for medicines.

How did Kagan and Soai make one form dominate?

1. Marckwald’s start: In the early 1900s, German chemist Willy Marckwald used a chiral catalyst (a chemical that speeds a reaction without being used up) and got slightly more of one form.
2. Stalled progress: Later attempts failed to raise this asymmetry, and chemists did not understand how a chiral catalyst skewed the result.
3. Kagan’s non-linear effect: Chemists assumed a linear relationship: a product favours one form only as much as its catalyst. In the 1980s, Kagan showed a catalyst barely favouring one form could yield a product strongly favouring it.
4. Soai’s autocatalysis: In an autocatalytic reaction, the product itself acts as the catalyst. From the 1990s, Soai spent about a decade building one in which a single enantiomer copied itself.
5. Near-total selectivity: Soai’s final product held 99.5% of one enantiomer, close to the preference seen in living systems.

Why does it matter beyond the laboratory?

1. Medicines: Many drug molecules are chiral, and the human body uses only one form. The other form can be ineffective or even harmful.
2. Cleaner manufacture: Drug makers once produced both forms and then separated the useful one, an expensive and wasteful process. Asymmetric synthesis now makes the needed form directly and is widely used.
3. Wider uses: The same approach serves other products that interact with living organisms, such as flavours, fragrances and pesticides.
4. Origin of life: The work shows homochirality can arise in a laboratory, not only in nature. It does not explain how life itself came to prefer one form.

What does the thalidomide tragedy show?

1. Morning sickness drug: Thalidomide, a sedative marketed by a West German company from the late 1950s, was widely prescribed, including to pregnant women for morning sickness.
2. Birth defects: By 1961, doctors had linked it to severe birth defects in thousands of babies across 46 countries, many with phocomelia (severely shortened or absent limbs).
3. Mirror-image problem: One enantiomer produced the desired effect and the other caused the defects. The two forms were later found to interconvert in the body.

Challenges

1. Conversion inside the body: Some drugs switch between forms after they are taken, so a pure enantiomer alone cannot guarantee safety. Eg. Thalidomide.
2. Narrow reactions: Autocatalytic reactions like Soai’s work only for specific molecules, so extending them to many industrial products is difficult.
3. Testing burden: Each enantiomer of a new drug must be studied separately for its effects, which raises development time and cost.
4. Unsolved origin: The work shows how one form can come to dominate, but not why life settled on the forms it uses.

Way Forward

1. Enantiomer-level safety review: Drug regulators should require data on both forms of a chiral drug, and on their interconversion, before approval.
2. Greener generic manufacture: Indian drug makers can use asymmetric catalysis to cut waste and cost in producing active ingredients.
3. Origin-of-life research: Fund research linking autocatalysis to how homochirality first emerged on the early Earth.

Conclusion

Chemists can now make the one mirror-image form that living systems use, a capability that medicine and agriculture already rely on. Why life chose one form in the first place remains unanswered, and that is where this work points next.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2026] ‘X’, born in the UK, was conferred the Nobel Prize in 2025. He was a professor in an American university when the prize was announced. Identify ‘X’: (a) Michel H. Devoret (b) Richard Robson (c) John Clarke (d) Joel Mokyr ANSWER: C”

Why in the News

Astronomy has moved from detecting neutrinos made close to Earth, mostly in the Sun, to catching high-energy neutrinos from far beyond our galaxy. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to Francis Halzen, 82, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”.

What are neutrinos, and why are they hard to catch?

1. What they are: Neutrinos are tiny sub-atomic particles produced mainly by nuclear reactions inside stars. They are the second most abundant particle in the universe, after photons, the particles of light.
2. Ghost particles: Neutrinos carry no electric charge and almost never interact with matter, so they pass straight through it. Nearly 65 billion pass through a fingernail every second.
3. Rare interactions: Only about one neutrino in billions or trillions interacts, so the Nobel committee calls it the “shyest particle”. Detectors are huge, isolated and often underground, to catch more hits and less noise.
4. The takeaway: Neutrinos cross dense regions of space that absorb or scatter light, so they can reveal processes no telescope can see.

How does IceCube catch neutrinos?

1. Soviet radio attempts: Halzen had studied cosmic rays since the 1960s. He learned Soviet scientists had tried to catch neutrinos in Antarctic ice by detecting radio waves from their collisions.
2. Halzen’s light-sensor idea: He proposed placing light sensors deep in glacier ice instead. Near the South Pole, the ice is isolated and dark at depth, with no interfering signals.
3. The detector: IceCube, at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, uses one cubic kilometre of ice fitted with over 5,000 light sensors on long cables. A surface facility collects their signals.
4. Cherenkov glow: A neutrino striking a nucleus in the ice creates a charged particle. Light slows down in ice, so this particle outruns it and emits a faint glow, Cherenkov radiation, like a sonic boom of light.
5. Reading the signal: Scientists reconstruct the neutrino’s energy and direction from the glow, which points back towards its source.

What did IceCube discover, and why does it matter?

1. Earlier detections: Neutrinos were proposed in the 1930s and first detected in the 1950s. Several observatories worldwide study them.
2. Near-Earth only: Until IceCube, detectors caught only neutrinos produced near Earth, mostly in the Sun’s nuclear reactions.
3. Cosmic discovery: IceCube began full operation in 2011. In 2013 it presented the first evidence of very high-energy neutrinos from distant space.
4. Multi-messenger astronomy: Astronomy grew from visible light to the full electromagnetic spectrum, cosmic rays and, in 2015, gravitational waves. Neutrinos add another signal, so one cosmic event can be studied several ways.
5. Nobel lineage: Neutrino research has won Nobel Prizes before. Eg. The 2015 prize recognised the discovery that neutrinos change type, which shows they have mass.

Challenges

1. Few sources traced: Most cosmic neutrinos still cannot be tied to a specific galaxy or event. Eg. One neutrino traced to a distant blazar galaxy in 2018 was a rare match.
2. Scale and cost: Catching rare interactions needs detectors of cubic-kilometre size, which few countries can fund alone.
3. Polar logistics: Sensors under Antarctic ice can be installed and serviced only in the short polar summer.
4. India’s stalled detector: The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), planned first in Kerala and then in Tamil Nadu, met opposition over land acquisition and the environment. Its new site is yet to be finalised.

Way Forward

1. Settle the INO site: The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) should finalise a site after early community consultation and environmental review.
2. Global collaboration: Indian institutes should join next-generation detectors such as IceCube-Gen2, the planned expansion of IceCube.
3. Linked alerts: Connect LIGO-India, the planned gravitational-wave detector, and Indian telescopes to neutrino alert networks.

Conclusion

Halzen’s prize marks the neutrino’s arrival as a working tool of astronomy, not just an object of physics. Whether India finalises a site for its own long-delayed detector will decide if it contributes to this field or only watches it.

Back2Basics: India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO)

1. Aim: An underground laboratory to study atmospheric neutrinos, with rock overhead to block cosmic-ray noise.
2. Detector: Its main instrument is a planned 50,000-tonne magnetised Iron Calorimeter (ICAL).
3. Funding: It is a joint project of the DAE and the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
4. Science goal: It seeks to settle the neutrino mass ordering, the order of the masses of the three neutrino types.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2026] ‘X’, born in the UK, was conferred the Nobel Prize in 2025. He was a professor in an American university when the prize was announced. Identify ‘X’: (a) Michel H. Devoret (b) Richard Robson (c) John Clarke (d) Joel Mokyr ANSWER: C”