Nobel Laureate Har Gobind Khorana passed away

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Nobel prize-winning Indian-born biochemist Har Gobind Khorana has passed away on November 9, 2011, in Concord, Massachusetts. He was 89. Khorana was born in 1922 in Raipur village of Punjab.
A Panjab University alumnus, Khorana shared the Nobel prize in medicine in 1968 with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that helped to show how nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell, control the cell's synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.
Khorana did his BSc from Punjab University, in 1943, and MSc from the same university in 1945.  He was awarded the Government of India Fellowship that enabled him to go to England where he studied for his PhD at the University of Liverpool.

!968 Nobel Laureates in Medicine

Khorana spent eight years in Vancouver, Canada, carrying out work on proteins and nucleic acids before moving in 1960 to the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the US, where he became co-director of the Institute for Enzyme Research. The work he and his colleagues did at the institute on the RNA codes for the synthesis of proteins led to the Nobel prize in 1968.
Khorana became a naturalised citizen of the US in 1966, and subsequently received the National Medal of Science. In 1970, he became the Alfred Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked until his retirement in 2007.

Two New Elements to the Periodic Table!

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An international team of scientists has agreed to add two new elements to the periodic table, element 114 and element 116. These new elements are the heaviest elements yet to appear on the periodic table, with atomic masses of 289 and 292 atomic mass units, respectively.

The existence of these elements has been suspected for quite some time, but required rigorous verification. In 1999, a single atom of element 114 was produced by bombarding plutonium-244 with calcium-48. Element 116 decays into 114, which undergoes alpha decay to become copernicium.

As is traditional, the discoverers of the elements will get the honor of proposing their names. The Dubna team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia has proposed "flerovium" for 114, after Georgy Flyorov, a Soviet scientist who discovered elements. The proposed name for element 116 is "moscovium", after the Russian Moscow region.

Lucas Papademos the new Greek Prime Minister

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Lucas Papademos was designated as Prime Minister of Greece on 11 November 2011 to head an interim coalition government. He was Governor of the Bank of Greece from 1994 to 2002 and Vice President of the European Central Bank from 2002 to 2010. He was also a visiting professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Financial Studies at the University of Frankfurt. Lucas Papademos, aged 64, has been named as the replacement for outgoing Prime Minister George Papendreou.
Papademos was instrumental in Greece’s transition to the Euro. Greece is now under a major political crisis caused by the country's debt crisis. Being a famous economist, all believe that Papademos can save the country from the crisis.

Kavery Kalanithi, the highest paid Indian woman!!!

Kavri, Vinitha & Kochar

Who is the highest paid Indian woman? The first name in your mind may be ICICI Bank chief executive Chanda Kochhar and the like. But she is no where near some other ‘real earning ladies’. Sun TV Network’s joint MD Kavery Kalanithi, the wife Kalanidhi Maran, is the highest earner with an annual salary of $13.09 million. This is equivalent to 64.4 crores! That means a monthly salary of 5. 37 crores!!!

Urvi & Preetha

Can you imagine such a  salary?! Kochhar does not find a place among the ten highest paid women executives in the country. Strange, isn’t it?
Chairperson of the real estate company, Peninsula Land,  Urvi A Piramal is at the second place with $ 1.74 million pay (about 8.7 crores). At third place there is  Preetha Reddy, hte MD of Appolo Hospitals, with $ 1.11 million (about 5.5 crores) and at fourth there is Vinita Bali, the managing director of Britania Industries with $ 1.03 million (about 5.1 crores).
What about these figures? Try today itself. You may one day get such salary! Just imagin if you get those awesome salaries, what would you do? The rest is upto you guys...

Ezhuthachan Award to M.T. Vasudevan Nair

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When some award is given to somebody the worth of the award itself gets multiplied! Here is such a news. Eminent Malayalam writer M.T. Vasudevan Nair has been chosen for the Ezhuthachan Award, the highest literary prize instituted by the Kerala government. The award consists of a cash prize of Rs. 1.5 lakh, a citation and a memento. The cash prize is increased this year from previous 1 lakh.
The Award jury, chaired by the most illustrious literary critic Dr. M. Leelavathi, decided to confer the honour on MT in recognition of his literary career spanning more than 50 years. The jury felt that the Ezhuthachan award had been long overdue to the 78-year- old writer, who had won the Jnanpith Award  in 1995, for ‘Randamoozham’ ( Second Turn).

MT had won the Kerala Sahitya Academy Awards for his novel ‘Nalukettu’ in 1958; drama, ‘Gopura Nadayil’ in 1982 and short story, ‘Swargam Thurakkunna Samayam’ in 1986. He had also been conferred with the Kendra Sahitya Academy Award for his novel ‘Kaalam’ in 1970.
The late T.M. Jacob had instituted the Ezhuthachan Award when he was the Culture Minister in 1993 in memory of Thunchathathu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan, the father of literary tradition in Malayalam.

Ezhuthachan Awards
Year, name
1993 Sooranad Kunjan Pillai
1994 Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai
1995 Balamani Amma
1996 K. M. George
1997 Ponkunnam Varkey
1998 M. P. Appan
1999 K. P. Narayana Pisharody
2000 Pala Narayanan Nair
2001 O. V. Vijayan
2002 Kamala Surayya (Madhavikkutty)
2003 T. Padmanabhan
2004 Sukumar Azhikkode
2005 S. Gupthan Nair
2006 Kovilan
2007 O. N. V. Kurup
2008 Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri
2009 Sugathakumari
2010 M. Leelavathi
2011 M. T. Vasudevan Nair