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| 2012 is National Mathematics Year and 125 Birth Anniversary of Ramanujan |
1 January 2012: On the occasion of Ramanujan's 125th birth anniversary, Ramanujan's tale worth a Movie adaptation.The story of the famed mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan is poised to take Hollywood by a storm soon. Robert Kanigel, biographer of Ramanujan, announced that the shooting for an international film based on the biography written by him on Ramanujan will begin in 2012. Kanigel is the director of the graduate programme in science writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the author of "The man who knew infinity:A life of the Genius Ramanujan".Link: http://www.robertkanigel.com
2 January 2012: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, India-born US citizen who won 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry, has been honoured with a knighthood. Venkatraman will be called ‘Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan’ after Queen Elizabeth confers knighthood on him. He has been conferred knighthood “for services to molecular biology”. Born in 1952 in the temple town of Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc. in Physics from MS University in Baroda, Gujarat and later migrated to the US. He earned his Ph.D in Physics from Ohio University.In 2010, Venkatraman was awarded the Padma Vibhusan, nation’s second highest civilian honour.Link: http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk
3 January 2012: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today inaugurated the 99th ‘Indian Science Congress’ at the campus of Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology University, Bhubaneswar. It is jointly organised by National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) and Indian Science Congress Association. The theme for the 99th Indian Science Congress is “Science and Technology for Inclusive Innovation- Role of Women”. The event will continue till 7th January.Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA) is a premier scientific organisation with the primary objective of promotion of science in India. It was started in 1914 with Headquarters at Kolkata.Link: http://www.iscexpo.in
4 January 2012: The 2011 UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science was officially awarded to René Raúl Drucker Colín, the Mexican physiologist and Neurobiologist who holds a degree in Psychology and a doctorate in medicine, at a ceremony during the Indian Science Congress.Professor Drucker Colín has been described by UNESCO as "an ardent promoter of science." Colin is a regular writer for La Jornada, a daily Mexican newspaper, and a regular participant on the science programs of Televisa, a national television broadcaster. The biennial award was created in 1951 by Irina Bokova, the Director-General of UNESCO. The prize is jointly funded by the Kalinga Foundation and the Government of the Indian state of Orissa.Link:http://www.kalingafoundationtrust.com/
5 January 2012: At 5:53 am today (Perihelion Day), the Earth was at its nearest point from the Sun. The distance at that time is 147 million km. Every January, the Earth is at perihelion, the closest from the Sun for the year and in July it is at aphelion, the farthest to the Sun for the year.All planets, comets and asteroids in our solar system have elliptical orbits. Thus, they all have a closest and a farthest point from the Sun- a perihelion and an aphelion. Many people erroneously believe that the seasons are caused by the earth's distance to the Sun, but this fact disproves this common misconception as January is often the coldest month despite the Earth being at its closest distance from the Sun.Link:http://planetarysocietyindia.blogspot.com/
6 January 2012: As per the 2011 report of Forest Survey of India submitted to the Ministry of Environment and Forests, India's forest cover has declined by 367 sq km between 2007 and 2009. Maximum reduction in forest cover has been reported from insurgency-hit Manipur, totaling 190 sq km. Nagaland comes next with at least 146 sq km forest being lost between 2006 and 2008. The trend is equally worrying in Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya. But there have been some positive indicators elsewhere. Forest cover has increased by 100 sq km during these two years in Punjab. And Haryana and Himachal Pradesh reported slight increase in forest cover - 14 and 11 sq km respectively.Link:http://fsi.org.in/
7 January 2012: India’s Prime Minister has appointed Anil Kakodkar as the new head of his government’s the recently launched Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI).Kakodkar is a member of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and previously led India’s nuclear programme. The SECI has been created to act as the executing arm of the government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM).It has been registered as a non-profit company under Section 25 of the Companies Act, 1956, and will work under the administrative control of the New and Renewable Energy Ministry (NREM). Kakodkar was in media for his support for nuclear energy to meet India's energy needs. Link: http://www.mnre.gov.in
8 January 2012: The famous physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking turns 70 today. The British scientist was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease when he was a 21-year-old student at Cambridge University.Hawking first gained attention with his 1988 book A Brief History of Time, a simplified overview of the universe.His subsequent theories have revolutionized modern understanding of concepts like black holes and the Big Bang theory of how the universe began. For 30 years, he held a mathematics post at the Cambridge University previously held by Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking is now director of research at the Cambridge university's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.Link: http://www.hawking.org.uk
9 January 2012: An Indian mission to Mars is taking shape with space scientists proposing 10 experiments, mostly related to the study of the Red Planet’s atmosphere.Mars Mission Study Team has already been formed. According to the scientists, if the launch takes place in November 2013, then the Indian spacecraft will enter the orbit around Mars in September 2014. It will be an orbiting mission and not a landing one. The 10 Indian Martian experiments include: Probe For Infrared Spectroscopy for Mars (PRISM), Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyzer (MENCA), Mars Color Camera (MCC), Mars Radiation Spectrometer (MARIS), Plasma and Current Experiment (PACE) etc.Link: http://www.isro.org
10 January 2012:Six distinguished scientists have been awarded the InfosysPrize,the highest award in Indiain terms of money (Rupees5Million),instituted by the Infosys Science Foundation,for the year 2011.The winners are Kalyanmoy Deb,Director, Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (Engineering and Computer science), Imran Siddiqi, Scientist, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (Life Sciences), Kannan Soundararajan, Professor, Stanford University (Mathematical Sciences) Sriram Ramaswamy, Professor, Indian Institute of Science (Physical Sciences), Raghuram G. Rajan, Professor, University of Chicago (Economics) and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research (Political Science and International Relations).Link: http://www.infosys-science-foundation.com
11 January 2012: One World's smallest vertebrate has been declared to be a frog with scientific name Paedophryne amanuensis. The adult frogs are about three-tenths of an inch long, and a millimetre or so smaller than a carp found on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The frogs are so small that Louisiana State University Herpetologist and Environmental biologist Christopher Austin had to enlarge close-up photos to describe them.Mr Austin discovered the tiny frogs while on a trip to Papua New Guinea. The expedition was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.The discovery is published in the journal PLoS.Link: http://www.plosone.org
12 January 2012: World’s largest solar telescope will be set-up in the cold desert in Ladakh. National Large Solar Telescope (NLST) will be set-up at Pangong Tso Lake Merak in Ladakh region.The site was selected after carefully studying various scientific and environmental aspects.The solar telescope will help the scientific community to study the long term changes in earth’s climate and environment and also provide useful data to carry out research in order to minimize or remove disruptions to communications network and satellites due to periodic solar winds.The facility will also provide employment opportunities to the local population in the area.Link: http://www.iiap.res.in
13 January 2012: Agriculture ministry of India has decided to continue government-funded Bt-cotton research. In the pipeline is the hunt for a next-generation “Super Bt cotton”, a project worth Rs 8,200 crore.The Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) has given the go-ahead for a multi-pronged project that aims to create genes that would offer protection from Jassids, a leaf hopping pest, and also give viral immunity to the cotton plant.Bikaneri and NHH 44 were the only Bt-cotton varieties developed through government-funded research to provide cheaper alternatives to farmers, while numerous other privately developed varieties crowd India’s royalty-driven Rs 2,000-crore cotton seed market. Link: http://www.iiap.res.in.
14 January 2012: More than two-thirds of Indian milk is adulterated with items ranging from salt to detergent and may be unsafe to drink, according to the survey conducted by Food Safety and Standards Authority of India.The survey conducted in 33 states found that 68.4% of 1,791 milk samples were contaminated.The survey said that only two states - Goa and Pondicherry - sold unadulterated milk, while all 250 samples from four eastern states were found to be contaminated with detergent. It is the first time that such findings had been released by a government agency. The survey is also significant because it was one of the biggest survey ever conducted taking 1,800 samples from 33 states and union territories. Link: http://www.fssai.gov.in
15 January 2012: The failed Russian Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt,fell into the Pacific Ocean today. The crash marked a dramatic end toPhobos-Grunt's brief and troubled life.The $165 million probe launched Nov. 8 on a mission to collect soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos and send them back to Earth in a return capsule ("grunt" means "soil" in Russian).Russian officials still aren't sure what went wrong in Phobos-Grunt and perhaps for the other four embarrassing space failures.Phobos-Grunt was also carrying China's first attempt at a Mars orbiter. This is the third spacecraft failure in four months, following the return in September of the American UARS satellite and the German Rosat telescope in October.Link: http://www.russianspaceweb.com
16 January 2012: Scientists have claimed that chunks of a meteorite which fell near Foumzgit in Morocco during July 2011 were from Mars - a rare event which happened for the first time in 50 years.It is the fifth time that such Martian meteorite fall has been reported.The first was in 1815 in France, second in 1865 in India , followed by Egypt in 1911 and Nigeria in 1962.In fact, astronomers believe that millions of years ago something large collided with Mars, spraying rock into space where it began gliding through the solar system until a piece entered Earth's atmosphere. It fragmented as it descended and one large piece reached the ground where it broke up into smaller pieces weighing 15 pounds. Link: http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov
17 January 2012: The Doppler Weather RADAR was installed at Anisabad, Bihar which is likely to be a boon for people of Bihar and Jharkhand to know in advance about weather behaviour.The newly installed "S-Band Doppler RADAR" will scan the atmosphere round-the-clock and provides information about the presence of clouds within the range of 500-km radius around Patna. The 'Doppler Weather RADAR' installed by Indian Meteorological Department. It is the seventh such RADAR installed across the country so far to monitor and scan weather round-the-clock. Data gathered through Doppler RADAR could be transmitted to other centres across the country. Link: http://www.imd.gov.in
18 January 2012: Arctic sea has become the latest battleground for international diplomacy, with India, China and Brazil trying to join the Arctic Council.Non-Arctic countries are only given the status of observers.Besides eight full members - Canada, Russia, US, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland and Denmark - the council currently has six non-Arctic countries as observers - the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands. India, China, Brazil, South Korea and Japan, which have no Arctic territory are seeking to become observers.India already has the status of observer in the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), which in turn is an observer in the Arctic Council.Link: http://iasc.arcticportal.org
19 January 2012: The country's first Public Private Partnership (PPP) telecom business incubator - 'Startup Village' - will be set up at KINFRA (Kerala Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation) Park in Kalamassery near Cochin, Kerala. Startup Village will focus primarily on student start-ups from college campuses and would be modelled on Silicon Valley, US.The National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), the Department of Science and Technology (DST),Technopark and MobME Wireless have joined hands to set up Startup Village.The first phase of the Startup Village is expected to be inaugurated by February 2012 and the first batch would be inducted by April 2012.Link: http://www.nstedb.com
20 January 2012: Indian Space Research Organisation will launch the Radar Image Satellite Microwave 1 (RI Sat 1), the first Indian satellite equipped with a radar system (microwave system) in 15 March 2012.The radar/microwave system will enable the country to create images during different weather conditions and also will map the terrain of India as opposed to earlier remote-sensing missions, which relied primarily on optical instruments.Apart from RI Sat 1, Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSVL) Mk-III flight will reach the cryogenic state around June, 2012. There are also plans for a Geographic Information System (GIS) at the national level which will be widely accessible to various users at different levels.Link: http://www.isro.org
21 January 2012: China's Sunway BlueLight supercomputer, which was built with ShenWei processors solely developed by the People's Republic of China, which is capable of performing around 1,000 trillion calculations per second, has officially begun operations. It was developed by National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center and supported by Technology Department 863 project. The computer began working at the National Supercomputing Centre in the Shandong province.This makes China the third country in the world - after the US and Japan - to produce a supercomputer with domestically-produced processors.The Sunway BlueLight will be used to increase the accuracy of climate simulations. Link: http://www.cistc.gov.cn
22 January 2012: The Atomic Minerals Directorate (AMD) of India is now continuing its Uranium exploration in the Satpuda-Gondwana formations, especially in the Sarguja belt in Chhattisgarh.The directorate is also focusing on increasing exploration activities in Karnataka(Marlagalam in Mandya district), Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh(Kadappa district) for rare earth metals like Niobium (used in nuclear reactors) and Tantalum (used in electronics industry).Uranium Corporation India Limited ( UCIL) has already constructed an underground mine at Tummalapalle in the Tumalapalli village of Andhra Pradesh. The commercial production of Uranium may commence any time this year.Link:http://www.amd.gov.in
23 January 2012: The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has decided to postpone by at least three years the decision on the continuance of the ‘leap second’.The union considers a "leap second" as a second, as measured by an atomic clock, added to or subtracted from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to make it agree with astronomical time to within 0.9 second.Referring to the leap second, the Radiocommunication Assembly of the International Telecommunication Union has reached an important decision to defer the development of a continuous time standard.These studies will be referred to the next Radiocommunication Assembly and World Radiocommunication Conference scheduled for 2015.Link:http://www.itu.int/en
24 January 2012: India became the world's sixth country after the US, Russia, France, the UK and China to operate Nuclear-powered submarines when the Russian Akula-II class submarine `K-152 Nerpa' was commissioned into Indian Navy as INS Chakra on a 10-year lease under a secretive contract.The 8,140-tonne INS Chakra, however, is not armed with long-range nuclear missiles due to international non-proliferation treaties like the Missile Technology Control Regime. Meanwhile,the homegrown nuclear submarine, INS Arihant equipped to carry 3,500km range ballistic missiles, becomes fully operational by early-2013.The `Charlie-I' class nuclear submarine leased from Russia for the period of 1988 to 1991 was also named INS Chakra. Link:http://indiannavy.nic.in
25 January 2012:Solar radiation from a massive sun storm - the largest in nearly a decade - collided with the Earth's atmosphere prompting an airline to reroute flights and sky watchers to seek out spectacular light displays.Flight in transpolar journeys between Asia and the United States had to be rerouted to avoid problems caused by the radiation storm. NASA confirmed the coronal mass ejection (CME) began colliding with Earth's magnetic field around 10:00 AM (1500 GMT) Tuesday, adding that the storm was now being considered the largest since October 2003. Radiation storms are not harmful to humans, on Earth at least, they can, however, affect satellite operations.Link: http://spaceweather.com
26 January 2012: In what's claimed to be the third time in recorded history,two amateur British astronomers say they have discovered a new planet which they want to be named after them.Chris Holmes and Lee Threapleton spotted the new planet which is thought to be gaseous and around the size of Neptune. they were working on a project to find planets beyond our solar system, publicized by Brian Cox in his Stargazing Live series. If their discovery is confirmed by planetary scientists, then the planet will be named 'Threapleton Holmes B'. They made the discovery from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope images.The planet appears to be orbiting a sun called SPH 10066540, which lies between 600 and 3,000 light years away. Link:http://www.planethunters.org
27 January 2012: Padma Awards for the year 2012 have been announced. In the field of Science: Padma Vibhushan: Dr. Kantilal Hastimal Sancheti (Medicine); Padma Bhushan: Prof. Shashikumar Chitre, Dr. M S Raghunathan, (Science and Engineering), Dr. Suresh H. Advani (Medicine/Oncology), Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty (Medicine/Cardiology), Dr. Noshir H Wadia (Medicine/Neurology); Padma Shri:Dr. V. Adimurth, Dr. Krishna Lal Chadha, Prof. Virander Singh Chauhan (Science and Engineering), Prof. Mahdi Hasan (Medicine/Anatomy), Dr. J. Hareendran Nair (Medicine/Ayurveda), Dr. Jitendra Kumar Singh (Medicine/Oncology),Dr. K. (Kota) Ullas Karanth (Wildlife Conservation and Environment Protection), Shri Swapan Guha (Ceramics).Link:http://india.gov.in
28 January 2012: NASA's Kepler Space Telescope mission has confirmed 26 new planets outside our solar system, all of them orbiting too close to their host stars to sustain life.Scattered across 11 planetary systems, their temperatures would be too hot for survival, as they all circle their stars closer than Venus, the second planet from the Sun, which has a surface temperature of 464 Celsius (867 F).The 26 planets orbit their stars between every six and 143 days. In December last year, Kepler had confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar system, Kepler 22b.The discoveries are described in four different papers in the Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Link:http://www.nasa.gov
29 January 2012: The State Government of Kerala has decided to establish a Wetland Research Institute at Kottayam.The announcement came as part of the Chief Minister Oommen Chandy's message sent for the 24th Kerala Science Congress which began today at the Rubber Research Institute, Kottayam. The government would also set up an advanced institute for mathematics in the name of Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was one of India's greatest mathematical geniuses. The institute will be called 'Srinivasa Ramanujan Institute for Basic Sciences'.The decision came as part of the state level inauguration of the National Mathematical Year-2012 celebrations in the state. Link:http://www.kscste.kerala.gov.in
30 January 2012: In a study by Yale and Columbia Universities, India has the world's most toxic air, when compared to the 132 nations in terms of air quality with regard to its effect on human health.India scored 3.73,lagging far behind the next worst performer, Bangladesh, which scored 13.66. European nations of Switzerland, Latvia and Norway are at the other end of the scale.The Index report was presented at the World Economic Forum currently taking place in Davos. The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia's Center for International Earth Science Information Network have brought out the Environment Performance Index rankings every two years since 2006.Link: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu
31 January 2011: This month marks the 25th anniversary of the discovery of Mitochondrial Eve, a common ancestor of all humanity lived in Africa some 150,000-200,000 years ago.The original paper, "Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution", appeared in the January 1987 issue of the scientific journal Nature. It was the work of three scientists Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson, who sadly died in 1991 at just 56. Wilson was one of the earliest scientists to use molecular biology and genetic markers to probe the origins of humanity, which culminated in the discovery of Mitochondrial Eve.Despite all the criticisms, the central conclusion of the study remains unchanged that the human mtDNA ancestor lived in Africa.Link:http://www.nature.com
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