സൗരയൂഥത്തില്‍ മറ്റൊരു ജലസംഭരണി...?!

ഭൂമിയില്‍ മാത്രമേ ജലമുള്ളൂ എന്നാണല്ലോ നാമിതുവരെ മനസ്സിലാക്കിയിരുന്നത്... എന്നാല്‍ പുതിയൊരു ജലസ്രോതസ്‌കൂടി കണ്ടെത്തിയ വാര്‍ത്തയാണ് ഇപ്പോള്‍ വരുന്നത്. സെറസ് എന്നുപേരായ ക്ഷുദ്രഗ്രഹത്തിലാണ് വാനനിരീക്ഷകര്‍ ജലസാന്നിധ്യം കണ്ടെത്തിയിരിക്കുന്നത്.

യൂറോപ്യന്‍ സ്‌പേസ് ഏജന്‍സിയുടെ ഹെര്‍ഷല്‍ സ്‌പേസ് ഒബ്‌സര്‍വേറ്ററിയിലെ ശാസ്ത്രജ്ഞരാണ് ചൊവ്വ, വ്യാഴം എന്നീ ഗ്രഹങ്ങള്‍ക്കിടയിലുള്ള ഛിന്നഗ്രഹമേഖലയില്‍ സ്ഥിതിചെയ്യുന്ന സെറസില്‍ ജലസാന്നിധ്യം സംബന്ധിച്ച വ്യക്തമായ തെളിവുകള്‍ കണ്ടെത്തിയത്. സൗരയൂഥത്തിലെ ഏറ്റവും വലിയ ക്ഷുദ്രഗ്രഹമായാണ് സെറസ് അറിയപ്പെടുന്നത്. കനത്ത മഞ്ഞുപാളികള്‍ ഈ ഗ്രഹത്തിന്റെ ഉപരിതലത്തില്‍ ഉണ്ടെന്നും സൂര്യതാപത്താല്‍ അവയില്‍നിന്നും നീരാവി ഉയരുന്നതായുമാണ് ശാസ്ത്രജ്ഞരുടെ നിഗമനം. സൗരയൂഥത്തില്‍ മറ്റെവിടെയെങ്കിലും ജീവനുണ്ടോ എന്നുള്ള അന്വേഷണത്തില്‍ ഈ കണ്ടെത്തല്‍ നിര്‍ണ്ണായകമാകുമെന്നാണ് പ്രതീക്ഷിക്കപ്പെടുന്നത്.    

Joseph Murray, the Kidney transplant pioneer died

Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who performed the world’s first successful kidney transplant died  at the age of 93. He had won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work. Murray shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 with Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, who won for his work in bone marrow transplants.

In the early 1950s, there had never been a successful human organ transplant. Murray and his associates at Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, now Brigham and Women’s Hospital, developed new surgical techniques, gaining knowledge by successfully transplanting kidneys on dogs. In December 1954, they found the right patients, 23-year-old Richard Herrick, who had end-stage kidney failure, and his identical twin, Ronald Herrick.
Because of their identical genetic background, they did not face the biggest problem with transplant patients, the immune system’s rejection of foreign tissue.
After the operation, Richard had a functioning kidney transplanted from Ronald. Richard lived another eight years.

Dr. Joseph E. Murray (at center facing camera), is seen performing the first successful organ transplant
at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston on Dec. 23, 1954.

Murray performed more transplants on identical twins over the next few years and tried kidney transplants on other relatives, including fraternal twins, learning more about how to suppress the immune system’s rejection of foreign tissue. In 1962, Murray and his team successfully completed the first organ transplant from an unrelated donor. The 23-year-old patient, Mel Doucette, received a kidney from a man who had died.

Dr. Joseph E. Murray and his wife, Bobby.

Internet in Space!

Now onwards Internet can be used from the space to control machines on earth! The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA jointly conducted an experiment in that direction, recently. An interplanetary internet has been used by Sunita Williams, the astronaut at the International Space Station (ISS) to send commands to control a rover in Germany. The new technology named Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol, could be a future way to communicate with astronauts on other planets like Mars!
The work on the DTN was first proposed a decade ago by Vint Cerf - one of the creators of the internet on Earth.The technology was first tested in November 2008, when Nasa successfully transmitted images to and from a spacecraft 20 million miles away with a communications system based on the net.
The experiment demonstrated that it is possible to send commands to a surface robot from an orbiting spacecraft and receive images and data back from the robot.

Chinese writer Mo Yan has been named the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature.

Know Mo Yan more
The Swedish Academy praised MO Yan as one "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".
Mo is described as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers". He is known in the West for two of his novels which were the basis of the film Red Sorghum. He has been referred to as the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.
Mo Yan was born in the Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province to a family of farmers on born February 17, 1955. He left school during the Cultural Revolution to work in a factory that produced oil. He joined the People's Liberation Army at age twenty, and began writing while he was still a soldier, in 1981. Three years later, he was given a teaching position at the Department of Literature in the Army's Cultural Academy.

Mo Yan's Books

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2012 to two Americans

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2012 is awarded to two Americans, Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian K. Kobilka, "for studies of G-protein–coupled receptors".

Robert J. Lefkowitz

Brian K. Kobilka

Our body is a fine-tuned system of interactions between billions of cells. Each cell has tiny receptors that enable it to sense its environment, so it can adapt to new situtations. Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka are awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family of such receptors: G-protein–coupled receptors.
The academy said it was long a mystery how cells interact with their environment and adapt to new situations, such as when adrenaline increases blood pressure and makes the heart beat faster.
Scientists suspected that cell surfaces had some type of receptor for hormones.
Lefkowitz managed to unveil receptors including the receptor for adrenaline, using radioactivity  and started to understand how it works.
Kobilka's work helped researchers realize that there is a whole family of receptors that look alike — a family that is now called G-protein-coupled receptors.
About half of all medications act on these receptors, so learning about them will help scientists to come up with better drugs.
Lefkowitz, 69, is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Kobilka, 57, is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine in California.

Dr. Lefkowitz was born on April 15, 1943 in New York City. He graduated from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1966 with an M.D. Degree.  he served as a Clinical and Research Associate at the National Institutes of Health from 1968 to 1970. From 1970 to 1973 he was at the Harvard University affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, where he completed his medical residency and research and clinical training in cardiovascular disease. Upon completing this training in 1973, he was appointed Associate Professor of Medicine and Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at the Duke University Medical Center. In 1977 he was promoted to Professor of Medicine and in 1982 to James B. Duke Professor of Medicine at Duke University. He is also Professor of Biochemistry.

Brian Kent Kobilka Brian is from central Minnesota. He is a professor in the departments of Molecular and Cellular Physiology and Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in the United States. He is also the co-founder of ConfometRx, a biotechnology company focusing on G-protein coupled receptors. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011. Kobilka is best known for his research on the structure and activity of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs); in particular, work from Kobilka's laboratory determined the molecular structure of the beta-2 adrenergic receptor. His GPCR structure work was named "runner-up" for the 2007 "Breakthrough of the Year" award from Science.

Nissan Unveiled Driver less Car!

The Japanese car maker, Nissan, has unveiled an all electric concept car recently which is bale to drive and park by itself. The advanced functions on the car are controlled from a smartphone. When the driver gets to his destination, rather than look for a parking spot the driver can tap a “park in” button on his smartphone car app and leave the rest up to the car.

In automatic driving mode, the first thing the car needs is an accurate map of its surroundings. That’s fed over an LTE data link that the car relies upon for all its communications.  Then the car pulls in images from four high-definition cameras placed around its body and attempts to recognize its location. This is a more accurate method than using GPS.

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It may be commercially available in 2015. Google is perhaps best known for the technology. It has started testing a self-driving car system since last year.

SpaceX Dragon launches first commercial flight

The history of space travel has got a new glittering episode to its store! The first commercial cargo flight has launched successfully to the International Space Station (ISS). The reusable unmanned freighter, Dragon, was lifted into orbit from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

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The flight that carried 905 kg of cargo is the first of the twelve contracted flights that Dragon is scheduled to make to the station. The Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), which builds and operates the Dragon and the Falcon 9 booster, has contracted with NASA for such cargo transportation to the ISS. It is the first of at least 12 SpaceX missions to the ISS as part of the contract.

It was Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), who is on board the ISS, captured Dragon using one of the station's robotic arms and guided it to a docking port to unload cargo. The mission, officially known as CRS-1, is not the first visit made by Dragon to the ISS. Last May, a Dragon freighter made its first docking with the station, but that was part of a test to determine if the Dragon could be used as a cargo carrier.

Dragon is a free-flying, reusable spacecraft that stands 4.4 m (14.4 ft) tall and is 3.66 m (12 ft) in diameter. Weighing 6,000 (13,228 lbs) at launch, it consists of a pressurized capsule and an unpressurized trunk that houses the craft’s solar power array. Now Dragon returns by parachute for a water recovery before refurbishment and reuse. But SpaceX have plans to upgrade it in the near future to make powered landings and eventually carry a crew.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2012

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2012 was awarded jointly to Frenchman Serge Haroche and American David J. Wineland "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems". These two work in the field of quantum optics, which deals with the interaction between light and matter.

Serge Haroche

David J. Wineland

Haroche and Wineland, both 68, are awarded for inventing and developing methods for observing tiny quantum particles without destroying them. The discovery may pave way to building a new type of super fast computer based on quantum physics.

Serge Haroche was born on11 September 1944 in Casablanca, Morocco. Since 2001, Haroche has been a Professor at the College de France and holds the Chair of Quantum Physics. Haroche is member of the French Physical Society, the European Physical society and a fellow and member of the American Physical Society. He is the uncle of French singer–songwriter and actor Raphael Haroche.

David Jeffrey Wineland was born on February 24, 1944. He is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) physics laboratory in Boulder. Wineland is a fellow of the American Physical society, the American Optical society, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992.

Britain's Sir John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan win Nobel Prize for medicine

Britain's Sir John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan have won the 2012 Nobel Prize for medicine.

The duo had been awarded for their research in nuclear reprogramming, a process that instructs adult cells to form early stem cells which can then be used to form any tissue type.
The prize committee at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said Monday that the two researchers won the award "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent."
The committee says the discovery have "revolutionised our understanding of how cells and organisms develop."

See Nobel History

See Nobel Official Website

Malayalam actor Thilakan Passed Away

Veteran Malayalam actor Thilakan passed away following a cardiac arrest, at 3 am on 24th September 2012. He was 74. Thilakan was admitted due to serious illness since August 23.

He had played various roles in about 300 films in different langauges. He is survived by two sons and two daughters. Thilakan had been struggling ever since he was admitted on August 23. He also suffered from an attack of pneumonia.
Thilakan made his debut in cinema in 1972 with ‘Periyar’. But it was with K.G. George’s Kolangal (1981) that he truly rose to fame. From the beginning of his film career to the recent ‘Ustad Hotel’ Surendranath Thilakan remained an actor beyond comparison. Actually his passion for acting began while he was still at school. The acting career was started in the 1950s in popular dramas.
Many awards and recognitions were won by him. He won the Best Supporting Actor award for his role in ‘Rithubhedam’ in the year 1988. Thilakan's performance in ‘Perumthachan’ fetched him the Best Actor award by the Kerala State govt. in 1990. In 1994, he once again won the State Best Actor award for his movies ‘Gamanam’ and ‘Santhanagopalam’. He won Special Jury Award for his performance in ‘Ekantham’ in 2007. Thilakan was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009 for his contributions towards arts.
Thilakan was born at Ayroor, now in Pathanamthitta district, on July 15, 1938.