The second edition of Belt and Road Forum (BRF) was held in Beijing, China from April 25th to April 27th, 2019 in which 37 heads-of-state had participated along with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and International Monetary Chief (IMF) Christine Lagarde. The theme of this event was "Belt and Road Cooperation: Shaping a Brighter Shared Future".

Microsoft's Project 'ReWeave' will help to preserve traditional weaving forms by upskilling workers, designing and marketing products, and creating sustainable livelihood options. Tata Trusts' initiative, Antaran's main objective is to rejuvenate ailing handloom clusters through an end-to-end programme that would help artisans to become designers and entrepreneurs.

Stockholm International peace research institute (SIPRI) has launched a new initiative named Global Registry of Violent Deaths (GReVD) to establish the annual number of violent deaths worldwide.GReVD will count deaths caused by all forms of violence and display these in an open-source database and enable monitoring of progress on the world's commitment to 'significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere' by 2030 as set out in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)-Goal 16. The database will enable policymakers and researchers and the general public to track trends in violence at global, regional, national, provincial, city and municipal levels. GReVD will hold a single entry for every violent death, including perpetrator, time, location, victim and type of violence. The sources will be verifiable news reports of lethal events and processing will involve machine coding to manage the volume of entries, as well as human coding to ensure accuracy and consistency.

Researchers at the IIT Roorkee have identified a new method to detect two of the worst forms of cancer in women - breast and ovarian cancer. The research published in the journal, 'FASEB Bioadvances' details the use of whole saliva as a body fluid for early detection of breast and ovarian cancers, as opposed to the traditional method of using blood samples. The research team, led by Professor Kiran Ambatipudi from the institute's biotechnology department, identified certain proteins present in the saliva which act as potential biomarkers indicative of breast and ovarian cancer metastasis.

The Union Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy) and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) on April 22, 2019 signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for cooperation in research and education in areas of traditional systems of medicine and its integration with modern science. The MoU enables collaboration in pursuit of Data mining and analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to facilitate concepts such as "Traditional knowledge inspired drug discovery and development" and "Food as Medicine".

Department of Biotechnology (DBT) working under ministry of science and technology has recently launched human tissue mapping project called MANAV: Human Atlas Initiative. It has been launched to improve understanding on human physiology. Objective of this initiative is to map every single tissue of human body to find out deepest information and roles of tissues and cells linked to a variety of ailments. Department of Biotechnology has issued funds of Rs 13 cr to two institutions in Pune, Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER) and National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS).

The researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), US created a 3D-printed device that that can produce electricity from falling snow. The device is small, inexpensive, thin, flexible like a plastic-sheet and can work anywhere because it provides its own power and does not need batteries. The research study was published in the journal 'Nano Energy' and UCLA's Richard Kaner is the senior author of it. The device termed as snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator or snow TENG, generates charge through static electricity and produces energy from electron-exchange.

The report titled "India Inbound Tourism: Unlocking the Opportunity" published that India's MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibition) tourism are growing at 8 per cent a year. The report is published by the Federation of Indian Chambers & Industry (FICCI) in collaboration with Yes Bank.India has ranked 24th in MICE tourism worldwide. Out of 12,563 international meetings held in 2018, India hosts only 175 meetings which are around 1.4% and MICE tourism was pegged at Rs 25,000 crore with a yearly growth of 8%.In 2018, India ranked 5th in the Asia Pacific region in MICE tourism. The top four countries were Japan followed by China, South Korea and Australia.

A study has found that social media fraud increased by 43% in 2018. The cybercriminals are increasingly relying on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other legitimate social media and messaging platforms to sell stolen identities, credit card numbers and other ill-gotten gains. The name of the report is Current State of Cybercrime - 2019, released by RSA security.

The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MOEFCC) notified that a committee will be formed to implement the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) which was launched to handle the major issue of air-pollution in India. Overall guidance would be provided by the committee to implement and review the progress of NCAP for each financial year. The committee would be headed by its Secretary, C K Mishra, and will comprise of one chief secretary each from around 20 states and union territories, an additional secretary and joint secretary, the chairman of the Central Pollution Control Board, the director general of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) and an IIT Kanpur professor as its members.