♦ The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to South Korean author Han Kang on October 10. She got this award "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life."
♦ Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1970. She is widely known for her novel The Vegetarian, which was written in three parts. She is the first South Korean writer to win the award.
♦ Kang began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society. Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection Love of Yeosu, followed soon afterwards by several other prose works, both novels and short stories.
♦ The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
Posted Date: October 10, 2024Awards
♦ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar was honoured with Fiji's highest civilian award ‘Honourary Officer Of The Order of Fiji’. President of the Republic of Fiji, Ratu Wiliame M. Katonivere gave this title to Sri Sri. He got this award for his tireless contribution to the upliftment of the human spirit and connecting diverse communities in peace and harmony.
♦ Fiji has become the sixth country to confer the highest civilian award upon Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, recognising the vast scope of his humanitarian work globally through his ‘The Art of Living Foundation’.
♦ ‘The Art of Living Foundation’ was set up by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in 1981 with the purpose of spreading happiness and harmony through its multifarious service initiatives in areas of mental health, education, environment, women and youth empowerment, and stress relief and meditation programmes.
♦ Assam's eminent conservation scientist Bibhab Kumar Talukdar was awarded ‘The Harry Messel Award’ for Conservation Leadership by the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
♦ The award was presented to him at the 5th IUCN SSC Leaders' Meeting that is underway in Abu Dhabi.
♦ The award has been presented for Talukdar's contribution to species Conservation on the ground and through leadership, as part of the work of the Species Survival Commission.
♦ He has been associated with IUCN SSC since 1991 and became the Chair of the Asian Rhino Specialist Group in 2008.
♦ He was also a member of the Standing Committee of the National Board of Wildlife, Government of India from July 2007 until May 2010 a member of the Project Elephant Steering Committee, during 2010-12, and the Committee for the Formulation of National Wildlife Action Plan for 2017-2031.
Posted Date: October 29, 2024♦ Indian actor Darasing Khurana was honored with the Mahatma Gandhi Leadership Award for his work towards raising awareness around mental health issues as the 'Commonwealth Year of Youth Champion'.
♦ He received the award at the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.
♦ Khurana also served as the keynote speaker at the Global Mental Health Summit 2024 at the Oxford University’s historic Oxford Union before heading over to Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).
Posted Date: October 24, 2024♦ Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) was awarded with SHRM - HR Excellence Awards at the SHRM India Annual Conference 2024 held in New Delhi.
The company received accolades in two significant categories:
♦ ‘Excellence in Inclusion, Equity & Diversity’ and ‘Excellence in Managing the Distributed Workforce.’
♦ SAIL was established on 24 January 1973. It is the largest government-owned steel producer and one of the Maharatnas of the country’s Central Public Sector Enterprises. It is under the ownership of the Ministry of Steel.
Posted Date: October 24, 2024♦ President Droupadi Murmu conferred the 5th National Water Awards 2023 in New Delhi on 22 October 2024. The awards were presented to 38 winners in nine categories.
♦ This includes Best State, Best District, Best Village Panchayat, Best Urban Local Body, Best Water User Association and Best Civil Society.
♦ Uttar Pradesh has been conferred with the National Water Award for its outstanding work in water management and conservation, securing second place in the country. Odisha bagged the first prize, while Gujarat and Puducherry shared the third spot.
Posted Date: October 23, 2024♦ Renowned humanitarian and spiritual leader, Mohanji was honored with a special recognition for his global humanitarian leadership at the 9th Conscious Companies Awards held on September 19, 2024, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
♦ The Conscious Companies Awards are dedicated to recognizing individuals and organizations that promote ethical behavior and sustainable practices, fostering leadership that not only prioritizes profits but also enhances the well-being of people and the planet.
♦ Mohanji is a globally recognized humanitarian and philanthropist who has devoted his life to guiding people from selfishness to selflessness. His mission is to awaken kindness in the hearts of people and inspire them to embrace the highest values of human potential--compassion, kindness, and non-violence.
♦ Mohanji's global outreach includes founding several charitable organizations such as the Mohanji Foundation, ACT Foundation, and Ammucare Charitable Trust. His humanitarian initiatives have a presence in over 90 countries, with registered foundations in more than 20 countries across six continents.
♦ Aditi Anand was honored with the prestigious Emerging Illustrator award at the Victoria and Albert Museum's Illustration Awards in London. She received the award at a recent ceremony for her artwork ‘Marigolds’, which poignantly addresses the theme of child labour in India.
♦ Her artwork will be displayed at the V&A Museum until September 2025, having been selected from over 2,000 entries nationwide.
♦ Anand's work, inspired by Indian flower markets, explores the dichotomy of beauty and bleakness through vibrant illustrations that tell a compelling story.
Posted Date: October 19, 2024♦ Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman, S Somanath was awarded the prestigious International Astronautical Federation (IAF) World Space Award 2024. The award was given in recognition of ISRO’s successful Chandrayaan-3 mission, a historic milestone in lunar exploration of the South Pole, making India one of the few countries to do so. The award ceremony took place in Milan, Italy on 14 October 2024.
♦ The IAF World Space Award is presented to individuals for outstanding contributions in space science, space technology, space medicine, space law, or space management that have had exceptional impact on the world’s progress in astronautics.
Posted Date: October 14, 2024♦ The 2024 Nobel Economics Prize was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson for research into differences in prosperity between nations on 14 October 2024. The three economists “have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
♦ The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.
Posted Date: October 14, 2024♦ The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo on 11 October 2024. It is a Japanese organisation representing survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It got this award “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”
♦ The Nobel Peace Prize 2023 was awarded to Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi.
Posted Date: October 11, 2024♦ U.S. Scientists David Baker and John Jumper and Britain’s Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on 9 October 2024. They got this award for their work on understanding the protein structures.
♦ Half the prize was awarded to Baker “for computational protein design” while the other half was shared by Hassabis and Jumper “for protein structure prediction”, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
♦ Baker is a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, while Hassabis is CEO of Google DeepMind, the AI research subsidiary of Google, where Jumper also works as senior research scientist.
♦ Hassabis and Jumper utilised artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, while Baker learned how to master life’s building blocks and create entirely new proteins.
♦ The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
♦ Last year’s (2023) Chemistry award went to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Aleksey Ekimov for their discovery of tiny clusters of atoms known as quantum dots, widely used today to create colours in flat screens, light emitting diode (LED) lamps and devices that help surgeons see blood vessels in tumours.
Posted Date: October 9, 2024♦ The President of India, Droupadi Murmu presented the 70th National Film Awards in various categories in New Delhi on 8 October 2024). She also conferred the Dadasaheb Phalke Lifetime Achievement Award for the year 2022 to Mithun Chakraborty.
♦ Among the awardees were the Best Feature Film “Aattam (The Play)”, a Malayalam film directed by Anand Ekarshi; Best Non-Feature Film “Ayena (Mirror)”, directed by Siddhant Sarin; Rishab Shetty as Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in “Kantara” (Kannada); and Nithya Menen for her portrayal in “Thiruchitrambalam” (Tamil) and Manasi Parekh for “Kutch Express” (Gujarati) jointly as Best Actress in a Leading Role. The Best Direction award went to Sooraj R. Barjatya for Hindi film “Uunchai”.
♦ Some of the other award winners included “Brahmastra - Part 1: Shiva” in the Best Film in Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming & Comic category; “Kantara” for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment; and “Kishore Kumar: The Ultimate Biography” for Best Book on Cinema.
♦ Pavan Raj Malhotra won the Best Supporting Actor award for “Fouja” (Haryanvi) and Neena Gupta the Best Supporting Actress Award for “Uunchai: Zenith” (Hindi) in the Feature Films category. “Fouja” was also adjudged the best in the Debut Film category.
♦ A. R. Rahman got the Best Music Director (background music) award for Mani Ratnam’s “Ponnyin Selvan-Part 1” (Tamil), which has also been selected as the best Tamil film and for Best Cinematography (Ravi Varman) and Best Sound Design (Anand Krishnamoorthi); and Pritam the Best Music Director (songs) award.
Posted Date: October 9, 2024♦ U.S. scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics on 8 October. They got this award for discoveries and inventions that laid the foundation for machine learning, the award-giving body said.
♦ Machine learning based on artificial neural networks is currently revolutionising science, engineering and daily life.
♦ Hopfield, a professor at Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Hinton works as a professor at University of Toronto, invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and carry out tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.
♦ The award comes with a prize sum of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million), which is shared between the winners if there are several. The physics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
♦ Last year’s (2023) Physics prize was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for their work in creating ultra-short pulses of light that can give a snapshot of changes within atoms, potentially improving the detection of diseases.
Posted Date: October 9, 2024♦ The American biologists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology 2024. The Nobel Academy at the Karolinska Institutet announced this on 7 October 2024. They were awarded the prestigious prize for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.
♦ Victor Ambros was born in 1953 in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. He is currently works at the Programme in Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts in the U.S. Gary Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, USA in 1952. He is a professor of genetics at the Harvard Medical School and researches microRNA and RNA interference mechanisms at the Ruvkun Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital.
♦ Ambros and Ruvkun found the first miRNA gene in C. elegans. It was called lin-4. They confirmed its role by modifying the miRNA to result in different parts of the worm’s developmental process to be thrown out of sync. By studying a second miRNA gene they found seven years later, called let-7, they confirmed miRNAs are actually present across the animal kingdom.
♦ The prize includes a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (around Rs.8.3 crore), part of a bequest from the prize's founder, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
♦ Winners will receive their awards on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.
