Today's Brief 8-10/10/2025

1 .Apache Spark 4.0 is the latest major release of the large-scale data analytics engine, offering significant upgrades focused on modernization and developer experience.

Key features include enabling ANSI SQL mode by default for stricter data integrity, introducing the VARIANT data type for efficient handling of semi-structured data like JSON, and enhancing Spark Connect for lightweight, remote cluster interaction.

The release also boosts the Python ecosystem with a new Python Data Source API and native plotting in PySpark, while adopting Java 17 as the default runtime to improve performance and infrastructure.

These changes aim to make Spark faster, more standards-compliant, and easier to use for data and AI workloads.

2 .BIRC 2025: The Indian Rice Exporters Federation (IREF) has announced the upcoming Bharat International Rice Conference 2025 (BIRC 2025), scheduled to be held on October 30th and 31st, 2025, at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi.

Co-organized with the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), this landmark event is set to be the world's largest gathering of the global rice export ecosystem.

The conference aims to strengthen India's position as a reliable global rice supplier by showcasing a wide range of premium and GI-tagged Indian rice varieties, the latest Agri-tech innovations (including AI-powered tools), and providing a platform for critical B2B and B2G dialogues on trade, logistics, and sustainability.

3 .World Mental Health Day is an international day for global mental health education, awareness, and advocacy, observed every year on October 10th. Instituted by the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) in 1992, the day serves as a crucial reminder of the importance of emotional well-being and the urgent need to destigmatize mental health challenges.

For 2025, the theme is “Access to Services – Mental Health in Catastrophes and Emergencies,” which highlights the critical need to provide accessible psychological and trauma support to individuals and communities affected by crises such as conflicts, natural disasters, and pandemics.

The day encourages governments, organizations, and the public to mobilize efforts to make mental health care a reality for all, ensuring that mental health is prioritized as equally as physical health worldwide.

4 . Nobel Prizes 2025 have been announced across five categories.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance, which is crucial for preventing the immune system from attacking the body's own organs.

The Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.

In Chemistry, the prize went to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi for developing metal–organic frameworks (MOFs).

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai for his "compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art."

Finally, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Venezuelan politician Maria Corina Machado for her "tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy."