Badge Engineering

• Badge engineering refers to the sharing of a platform or an entire vehicle by different car manufacturers, with at least one of them not needing to design or engineer a new model from scratch.
• Example: In India, the Hindustan Motors Ambassador was probably the earliest successful badge-engineered product, with a production life from 1957 to 2014. At its core, the good old Ambassador was a rebadged Series III Morris Oxford.
• Recent example includes collaboration of Toyota and Maruti Suzuki that has resulted in twin cars like Glanza & Baleno, Vitara & Hyryder, etc. 

Planet Parade

• It is a natural phenomenon that occurs when planets in our solar system align in a relatively straight line, at least from our perspective here on Earth.
• The early months of 2025 will witness Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars being set to align in a spectacular display in the night sky and visible after dark.

Paraquat

• Recently, a 24-year-old woman was awarded the death sentence by a Thiruvananthapuram court which found her guilty of poisoning her boyfriend in 2022 with a chemical herbicide called paraquat.
• Also known as paraquat dichloride or methyl viologen, it is one of the world’s most-used herbicides primarily used to control the growth of weeds and desiccate crops like cotton before harvest.
• The World Health Organisation (WHO) classifies paraquat as a Category 2 (moderately hazardous and moderately irritating) chemical. 
• Its sale is already banned in over 70 countries, including China and the European Union, due to its potent toxicity. However, it is still used in countries like the United States and India.

Suzetrigine

The United States Food and Drug Administration approved a new type of non-opioid painkiller, Suzetrigine.

Suzetrigine will be sold under the brand name Journavx, and manufactured by US-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

• Opioids are a class of drugs that “derive from, or mimic, natural substances found in the opium poppy plant”. Some common opioids include oxycodone, morphine, codeine, heroin, and fentanyl.

Prescription opioids are primarily used for pain relief. Unlike opioids, which numb the sensation of pain in the brain, suzetrigine works by targeting pain signals before they reach the brain.

Body Mass Index (BMI)

Recently, the Lancet (a London-based commission of the medical journal) has proposed a new definition and method for diagnosing Obesity which moves beyond a simple cutoff mark for Body Mass Index (BMI), used as the standard worldwide. 

BMI is an anthropometric index, of height/weight characteristics in adults and for classifying (categorizing) them into groups.

BMI is calculated by dividing weight (in kg) by height (in meters squared).

BMI has been the standard for diagnosing obesity worldwide.

• Underweight: BMI < 18.5
• Normal: BMI between 18.5–24.9
• Overweight: BMI between 25–29.9
• Obese: BMI > 30

Bickerstaff’s Brainstem Encephalitis

• A rare case and subsequent death owing to cardiac arrest after a rare case of Bickerstaff brainstem encephalitis (BBE) was found in a 60-year-old man diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) in Pune, Maharashtra, India.
• It is a rare, autoimmune disease of the peripheral and central nervous system and is considered a variant of other immune-mediated polyneuropathies, such as Guillain Barré syndrome (GBS) and Miller Fisher syndrome (MFS). 
• BBE classically presents as an acute triad of ataxia, encephalopathy, and ophthalmoplegia, typically subsequent to infection.