AWARDS OCTOBER 2016

AWARDS OCTOBER 2016

• Award for doctors: Two doctors each from the AIIMS and Sir Ganga Ram Hospital (SGRH) in Delhi have been selected for the prestigious Dr BC Roy Award for excellence in the field of medicine. Randeep Guleria, Head of Pulmonology and CS Yadav of department of orthopaedics from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences have been chosen for the award.
  
  Chairman of Board of Management at SGRH DS Rana and Arvind Kumar have also been chosen for the coveted award. The awards will be given by the President in 2017. The Bidhan Chandra Roy Award was instituted in 1976 in the memory of renowned physician and freedom fighter BC Roy by Medical Council of India.
  
• Indian documentary wins at CAM International Film Festival
  Indian Documentary film "Daughters of Mother India", directed by Vibha Bakshi, has won at the 6th CAM International Film Festival in Cairo. The film won the first prize in the documentary section of the festival. The festival was organized by the Arabic Egyptian Society for Culture, Media and Arts (CMA) from October 8-13th.
  
  Daughters of Mother India" portrays India's story of resolve, hope and courage in the fight against gender violence. CAM International Film Festival is organized annually to promote cinema as a means of combating ignorance, poverty and terrorism.
  
  2016 year's edition featured around 92 films from 33 countries in three categories: Short Fiction, Documentary and Animation. India was the Guest of Honor in the Film Festival with 12 entries.
  
• Man booker prize
   Paul Beatty: Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout, a blistering satire about race in America, won the Man Booker Prize, marking the first time a U.S. writer has won the award. Still, with its outrageous premise and unabashed skewering of racial stereotypes, The Sellout is an audacious choice for the judges, who oversee one of the most prestigious awards in literature.
  
• Award for Yazidi women: Two Yazidi women, who escaped sexual enslavement by Islamic State in Iraq, have won Europe's top human rights award, the Sakharov prize.
  
  Nadia Murad Basee and Lamiya Aji Bashar were among thousands of Yazidi girls and women abducted by IS militants and forced into sexual slavery in 2014. But, both survived and now campaign for the Yazidi community. The freedom of thought prize is awarded annually in memory of Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet scientist and dissident. The two women were nominated by the liberal Alde group in the European Parliament. European Parliament President, Martin Schulz, said it was a very symbolic and significant decision to support these two survivors who came to Europe as refugees.
  
• Oliver Hart, Bengt Holmstrom win Nobel prize in economics
  UK-born Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom of Finland have won the Nobel Economics Prize for work on contract theory.
  
  Judges said their work laid an intellectual foundation for policies in areas such as bankruptcy legislation and political constitutions. The pair will receive 8 million Swedish kroner from the committee. It comes after Nobel prizes for physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry and peace were awarded.
  
  The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that Mr Hart and Mr Holmstrom's work was valuable to the understanding of real-life contracts and institutions. It also said it could identify potential pitfalls in contract design.
  
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  Swayam Shikshan Prayog
  An Indian NGO, Swayam Shikshan Prayog, has bagged a UN climate award for 2016. The NGO, which trains women to become clean energy entrepreneurs across Maharashtra and Bihar, is one of the 13 projects to be recognised at the forthcoming UN climate summit in Marrakesh, Morocco, in November.
  
  The UNFCCC, the nodal UN climate body, has applauded the project for building a rural distribution network of 1,100 women entrepreneurs facilitating access to clean energy, water and sanitation products and services in several communities.
  
  Prema Gopalan, co-founder of Swayam Shikshan Prayog, who has worked for 10 years in the clean energy sector, told that many of the women in her NGO hail from the Marathwada drought-hit areas and have attained a new identity as a result of their entrepreneurial work.
  
• Yoshinori Ohsumi wins 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine
  Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine on 3rd October for discoveries related to the degrading and recycling of cellular components. The Karolinska Institute honoured Ohsumi for "brilliant experiments" in the 1990s on autophagy, the machinery with which cells recycle their content.
  
  Disrupted autophagy has been linked to various diseases, including Parkinson's, diabetes and cancer. Ohsumi's work has led to a better understanding of how the human body adapts to starvation, infection and other conditions.
  
  Though the concept has been known for more than 50 years, its "fundamental importance in physiology and medicine was only recognized after Yoshinori Ohsumi's paradigm-shifting research in the 1990s," Karolinska said in its citation. Ohsumi was born in 1945 in Fukuoka. He is currently a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. It was the 107th award in the medicine category since the first Nobel Prizes were handed out in 1905. The Nobel Prize is worth the equivalent of about $1.224 million Cdn (eight million kronor).
  
• David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz get Nobel in Physics
  British scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz have won the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics. The three, who are affiliated with U.S. universities, were honored for their work on “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.”
  
  The three Laureates’ use of topological concepts in physics was decisive for their discoveries. Topology is a branch of mathematics that describes properties that only change step-wise. Using topology as a tool, they were able to astound the experts. In the early 1970s, Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless overturned the then current theory that superconductivity or suprafluidity could not occur in thin layers. They demonstrated that superconductivity could occur at low temperatures and also explained the mechanism, phase transition that makes superconductivity disappear at higher temperatures.
  
  In the 1980s, Thouless was able to explain a previous experiment with very thin electrically conducting layers in which conductance was precisely measured as integer steps. He showed that these integers were topological in their nature. At around the same time, Duncan Haldane discovered how topological concepts can be used to understand the properties of chains of small magnets found in some materials.
  
  Nayanjot Lahiri: Nayanjot Lahiri, Professor of History at the Ashoka University, has been awarded the 2016 John F. Richards Prize for her book Ashoka in Ancient India . The book has been critically acclaimed for its riveting account of an emperor who spoke to his people through his edicts; his victories and loss that left a legacy that surpassed him.
  
  The Richards Prize is awarded annually by the American Historical Association (AHA) to the best book in South Asian history. The prize will be awarded at the Association’s 131st Annual Meeting in January, 2017.
  
• Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa win Nobel chemistry prize
  Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sauvage, British-born J Fraser Stoddart and Dutch scientist Bernard Feringa won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing molecular machines.
  
  The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the laureates share the 930,000 US dollars prize for the design and synthesis of molecules with controllable movements, which can perform a task when energy is added.
  
• Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize
  Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize on 7th October for his efforts to end a 52-year-old war with Marxist rebels.
  
  The Norwegian Nobel Committee said Santos had brought one of the longest civil wars in modern history significantly closer to a peaceful solution, but there was still a danger the peace process could collapse.
  The award excluded FARC guerrilla leader Rodrigo Londono, better known by his nom de guerre Timochenko, who signed the peace accord with Santos in Cartagena on September 26.
  Millions have been displaced and many beg on the streets of the capital, while economic potential has been held up in the mostly rural nation.
  
  Santos is the first Latin American to receive the peace prize since indigenous rights campaigner Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala won in 1992, and is the second Colombian laureate after writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the literature prize in 1982.
  
  The scion of one of Colombia's most prosperous families, Santos was not thought likely to spearhead a peace process with FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).
  But though he had served as defence minister under hardline ex-president Alvaro Uribe, when the FARC were weakened by a US-backed offensive, Santos used his two terms in office to open negotiations with rebel leadership at four-year-long talks.
  
  His family once owned leading Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, where Santos worked as an editor before turning to politics. He also trained as an economist at the London School of Economics.
  He was finance minister in the 1990s, helping to steer the Andean nation through one of its worst fiscal crises.
  
  The peace talks made bitter enemies of Santos and Uribe, who accused his former protege of betraying FARC victims, and who founded a new right-wing political party and won a Senate seat, in an effort to undermine Santos' peace efforts. The news may anger those Colombians who see Santos' bid for peace with the FARC as selling out the nation as he negotiated terms that they see as an embarrassment.
  But the fact that his rebel foe did not receive the prize alongside him may be a relief to Santos, given the political tension following referendum. On the other hand, it may give Santos the moral upper hand in talks with Uribe.
  
  A joint win may have set back sensitive talks with the opposition as Santos tries to negotiate new terms with the "No" camp and possibly convince the FARC to accept changes to the original accord.
  The "No" vote was a disaster for Santos, who had hoped to turn his focus quickly to other matters including possible talks with the smaller ELN rebel group, tax reform and other economic measures to compensate for a drop in oil income.
  
  The government had hoped peace would lead to a boom in investment by commodities investors, in gold mines, oil and agriculture in Latin America's fourth-largest economy. The Nobel Peace Prize, worth 8 million Swedish crowns ($930,000), will be presented in Oslo on December 10.
  
• Murga' wins first prize at Swachh Bharat Short Film Festival
  Young filmmaker Katyayan Shivpuri, from Maharashtra, won the first prize at the Swachh Bharat Short Film Festival for his work "Murga. Minister of Information and Broadcasting, M Venkaiah Naidu awarded Katyayan with a certificate and a cash prize of Rs 10 lakhs.
  
  The short film promoting the idea of clean India had "Murga" as the metaphor depicting the victims that citizens have made of themselves and of the children by not keeping the surroundings clean.
  The second prize was shared by filmmakers Sudanshu Sharma, KVK Kumar and Akshay Danavale for their films "Nahna Doot," "Chembuku Moodindi" (The Dying Vessel) and "Sarkarmi Rati Wadho." respectively.
  
  The third prize was awarded to six entries. The minister announced that well-known filmmakers like Madhur Bhandarkar, Radhakrishna Jagarlamudi, Prasoon Pandey, Ramesh Sippy and Shoojit Sircar will support the Swachh Bharat initiative by producing films promoting the movement.