Defense,
National Security and Terrorism, Profile of States
Tu-142M anti-submarine
aircraft
Navy’s
flagship anti-submarine aircraft Tu-142M will be turned into a museum.
The aircraft
will be given to the Andhra Pradesh government to be converted into a museum
and kept on the Beach Road close to the Submarine Kursura in Visakhaptnam.
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Latest
Diary of Events
World Homeopathy Day –
April 10
World
Homoeopathy Day is being observed on 10 April 2017.
It
commemorates the 262nd
birth anniversary of the founder of Homoeopathy, Dr. Christian Friedrich Samuel
Hahnemann, a German physician.
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Awards
and Honours
Asian Business woman of the year
An
Indian-origin educationist in the UK, has been named the Asian Business woman
of the Year in an award ceremony in Birmingham.
65-year-old Dame Asha Khemka,
Principal and CEO of West Nottinghamshire College, was honoured for her efforts
in the field of education and skills at the Asian Business Awards ceremony
About her:
Born in Bihar’s Sitamarhi district, Dame
Khemka left school after passing her exams at the age of 13.
She
taught herself English by watching children’s TV shows and talking to other
young mothers.
She went
on to acquire a business degree from Cardiff University before becoming a
lecturer and eventually taking over as principal and CEO of West
Nottinghamshire College, one of the largest in the UK.
In 2013,
she was awarded a Dame
Commander of the Order of the British Empire, one of
Britain`s highest civilian awards.
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New Appointments, Persons in News
Malala to become
youngest United Nations Messenger of Peace
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has
selected Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Malala Yousafzai to be a UN messenger of peace.
Also, UN
spokesman Stephane Dujarric announced that she would focus on promoting girls’
education worldwide.
Har Gobind Khorana, was born in 1922. He obtained his M.Sc. degree from Punjab University in Lahore. He worked with Professor Vladimir Prelog, who moulded Khorana’s thought and philosophy towards science, work and effort. After a brief stay in India in 1949, Khorana went back to England and worked with Professor G.W. Kenner and Professor A.R.Todd. It was at Cambridge, U.K. that he got interested in both proteins and nucleic acids. Dr Khorana shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1968 with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley for cracking the genetic code.
Victor Grignard had a strange start in academic life for a chemist - he took a maths degree. When he eventually switched to chemistry, it was not to the mathematical province of physical chemistry but to organic chemistry. While attempting to find an efficient catalyst for the process of methylation, he noted that Zn in diethyl ether had been used for this purpose and wondered whether the Mg/ether combination might be successful. Grignard reagents were first reported in 1900 and Grignard used this work for his doctoral thesis in 1901. In 1910, Grignard obtained a professorship at the University of Nancy and in 1912, he was awarded the Nobel prize for Chemistry which he shared with Paul Sabatier who had made advances in nickel catalysed hydrogenation.
Werner was born on December 12, 1866, in Mülhouse, a small community in the French province of Alsace. His study of chemistry began in Karlsruhe (Germany) and continued in Zurich (Switzerland), where in his doctoral thesis in 1890, he explained the difference in properties of certain nitrogen containing organic substances on the basis of isomerism. He extended vant Hoff’s theory of tetrahedral carbon atom and modified it for nitrogen. Werner showed optical and electrical differences between complex compounds based on physical measurements. In fact, Werner was the first to discover optical activity in certain coordination compounds.
