My Science School

Multiple words, extraordinary creatures, cracking adventures, and quantum physics – welcome to Philip Pullman’s universe. It’s a world you may be familiar with world you like reading fantasy novels. Now, a previously unseen “His Dark Material” story written by Pullman over a decade ago, which he never intended to publish, will be released this month. Are you ready to dive into Pullman’s universe?

Early life

In 1956, Pullman, along with his stepfather, visited the area affected by the River Murray floods in Australia. The swelling floodwaters had devastated entire towns in three States, leaving an immense grey mass as far as the eye could see. Everything was submerged under water. It inspired him to pick up the pen. These memories helped him write “His Dark Materials” – trilogy and “La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust.”

What’s the new book about?

The new book called “Serpentine”, is a novella set after the end of the trilogy “His Dark Materials”, but before the start of Pullman’s recent book, “The Secret Commonwealth.” The story sees Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon return to Trollesund, the remote town where she first met the armoured bear lorek Byrnison and aeronaut Lee Scoresby in “Northern Lights”

Pullman wrote the story for a charity auction in 2004, at the request of Nicholas Hytner, then director at the National Theatre, during the company’s production of “His Dark Materials.”

Who is Lyra?

Lyra is the main character in Philip’s trilogy of books called “His Dark Materials.”

First released in 1995, the books have now sold more than 17 million copies around the world, and been turned into a film and TV series.

He also wrote a follow-up series called the “Book of Dust”, which tells the story of Lyra as a baby, and as an adult.

Pullman is currently writing the final book in the “Book of Dust” trilogy which will perhaps be the last on Lyra’s story.

Oh Really?

• On September 1, 2020, he ignited a debate on Twitter on punctuation, saying: “apparently young people feel that full stops are threatening or angry and messages are friendlier without them bunch of wimps”.


• Popular singer Ed Sheeran is a fan of Pullman. Sheeran has named his newborn daughter Lyra, after the heroine of his favourite “His Dark Materials” series.


• While writing “La Belle Sauvage”, Pullman had vowed not to cut his hair until it was finished. Judith, his wife of 47 years, finally chopped off his ponytail after he completed the book.


• Pullman writes only three pages a day. The rituals sacred and he has been following it since he started writing.

 

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About the site

The Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California in north-eastern Mexico is a serial property comprising 244 islands, islets and coastal areas. Spread across 18,37,194 hectares, one quarter of the area is terrestrial and the remainder marine.

Once dubbed the ‘Aquarium of the World’, the Gulf is known for its biodiversity, containing 39% of the world’s marine mammal species and a third of the world’s marine cetacean species. Today, however, sharp decline in the numbers of certain marine species is clouding the Gulf’s prestigious tag as the Aquarium of the World. Despite this, the biodiversity here is rich and diverse. It is home to 695 bascular plant species, and 891 sicculents in the region, including some of the world’s tallest cacti which are over 25m in height. When it comes to birds, migratory birds found here. Some of the small islands of the Gulf of California host a majority of the global population of heermann’s gulls, blue-footed booby, and black storm petrel. Meanwhile, one can find sea lions thronging the coast as well as vaquitos, totoabas, grey whales and marine turtles such as the leatherback, olive ridley and loggerhead, swimming in the open ocean.

The rugged islands as well as the coast, most of which are part of the Sonoran Desert, of the Gulf of California are as striking as the pristine turquoise waters. The islands and islets in the region are mostly of volcanic origin.

In danger

In June 2019, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed The Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California on the List of World Heritage in Danger. This was due to the concern of the imminent extinction of the vaquita, a porpoise endemic to the Gulf of California. The vaquita is one of the characteristic features that made UNESCO include The Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California in the World Heritage list.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the vaquita is the most endangered marine mammal species in the world. When it was scientifically discovered and given a formal description in 1958, the vaquita was already not very abundant. It was difficult to spot and observe the species properly. Its status however has continued to deteriorate since then, due to the use of mail nets in the illegal fishing of totoaba, another species endemic to the Gulf of California. The fishing of totoaba was banned in 1975, however, due to the high price the dried totoaba swim bladder (used in traditional medicine) commands in China, illegal fishing continues to date. Since the totoabas are large in size, the nets used to capture them are capable of trapping the voquitas as well. And once a vaquita is caught, it drowns within minutes.

While Mexico has taken measures such as creating a refuge for the surviving vaquitas and prompting alternatives to gillnets, which cause death by asphyxiation of marine mammals, the number of the species continues to drop. If conservation efforts are not improved, the species may soon becomes extinct, and the Gulf of California will not be the same.

 

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1817 – The first practical bicycle

The first verifable claim for a practical bicycle was made by German Karl von Drais, a civil servant. Drais invented the Laufmaschine (German for running machine) and patented the design in 1818. Commonly called draisine, the steerable, wooden, human-propelled machine was the first commercially successful bicycle.

1860s – Bicycles get pedals

The bicycle received an upgrade when pedals were added to it. This made it easier for people to propel the vehicle. Ernest Michaux and Pierre Lallement invented a vehicle known as the velocipede, also dubbed the boneshaker due to the rough ride it offered without brakes.

1870 – The high wheel cycle

The penny-farthing was the first machine to be called a bicycle. Extremely popular in the 1870 and 80s, it got its name from the British coins penny and farthing – penny indicating the large font wheel, and farthing depicting the tiny back wheel. It allowed users to ride faster. Frenchman Eugene Meyer was the first to invent it in 1869.

1885 – ‘Safety’ first

Apart from the speed, the penny-farthing was a risky ride for many due to its high front wheel and seating. Hence, in 1885, Englishman John Kemp Startley came up with the ‘rover safety bicycle’ which had similar sized wheels and a chain drive. This was followed by developments in brakes and tires. The rover is regarded as the first modern bicycle. It also started Golden Age of bicycles.

1888 – The ride got comfortable

John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish inventor created the pneumatic tyre, an inflatable tyre filled with air. This made cycling far more comfortable than before. It also made the cycle much lighter in weight.

1890 – In tandem

The first publicised bicycle for two was created by Danish inventor Mikael Pederson. Tandem bicycle or twin bicycle is a bike meant for two people. The term ‘tandem’ refers to the seating arrangement for riders, one behind the other.

1890s – Advent of the electric bicycle

Ogden Bolton Jr. was issued a U.S. Patent for a battery-powered bicycle without gear. The motor could draw up to 100 amperes of power from a 10-volt battery.

1900s – The rise and fall

Bicycles rose in popularity and came to be mass produced. While the basic design remained similar to the safety cycle, several upgrades were made. Bicycles were touted to have had a direct influence on the introduction of the automobiles. Soon, the popularity of bicycles began to wane. However, in the 1960s, many started seeing the bicycle as a non-polluting and non-congesting means of transportation. Some even began using the bicycle for recreation.

1970s – BMX and Mountain Bikes

BMX (bicycle motocross) bikes became popular in the U.S. around the 1970s. These are off-road bicycles used for stunt riding and racing. Today, BMX races have grown into an international sport.

Mountain bikes became popular with their mass production in 1981. These bikes are meant for off-pavement riding on a variety of surfaces.

2000s – Hybrid and commuter cycles

In the last two decades, several designs modifications have been made to the bicycle. Since number of people using the bicycle for commuting, casual and recreational purposes has gone up, manufactures are coming out with hybrid bicycles which combine elements of bike racing and mountain bikes.

There have also been attempts at mass producing solar-powered bicycles which will derive power from the sun’s rays and help riders travel without having to pedal for some distance at least.

 

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Narayan won numerous awards during the course of his literary career. His first major award was in 1958, the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Guide. When the book was made into a film, he received the Filmfare Award for the best story. In 1964, he received the Padma Bhushan during the Republic Day honours. In 1980, he was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the (British) Royal Society of Literature, of which he was an honorary member. In 1982 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times, but never won the honour.

Born to a schoolteacher father, he took the name R. K. Narayan at the suggestion of his close friend and another great author, Graham Greene. He learnt Tamil and English in school. He did his initial studies at the residence of his grandmother and eventually moved to Mysore with his parents, when his father got appointed as headmaster of the Maharaja’s High School in Mysore.

R. K. Narayan earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Mysore and went to the United States in 1956 at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation. His literary career began with his short stories, which appeared in ‘The Hindu’ newspaper. He began to work as the Mysore correspondent of ‘Justice’, a Madras-based newspaper. When he could not get his first novel ‘Swami and Friends’ published, a mutual friend showed the draft to Graham Greene who agreed to arrange for its publication.

 

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Neena Bhandari Sydney, May 29 (PTI) Prominent novelist and human rights activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.

"Arundhati Roy is a distinguished world citizen. She is an outstanding communicator who writes with great clarity and grace. At a time of terrible disregard for human life, we need to hear from citizens like Arundhati Roy", Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, Professor Stuart Rees said.

The prize, the only international peace prize awarded in Australia, was announced by the Foundation's Chairman Alan Cameron last night.

Each year the prize is awarded to an organisation or individual who has made significant contributions to global peace, including improvements in personal security and steps towards eradicating poverty and other forms of structural violence.

Roy, author of the 1997 Booker Prize winning `The God of Small Things', will deliver the City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture in Sydney on November 3.

 

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Born in 1952 in Calcutta, India, Vikram Seth was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Stanford University and Nanjing University.

He has travelled widely and lived in Britain, California, India and China. His first novel, The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986), describes the experiences of a group of friends living in California. His acclaimed epic of Indian life, A Suitable Boy (1993), won the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book). 

Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.



During the course of his doctorate studies at Stanford, he did his field work in China and translated Hindi and Chinese poetry into English. He returned to Delhi via Xinjiang and Tibet which led to a travel narrative From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986) was his first novel describing the experiences of a group of friends who live in California. A Suitable Boy (1993), an epic of Indian life set in the 1950s, got him the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

 

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For the second time, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie has been judged the best ever winner of the Booker prize. The Best of Booker award, which has been announced at the London literature festival this afternoon, marks the prize's 40th anniversary. A similar contest - the Booker of Bookers - was held in 1993 to coincide with its 25th birthday, and came to the same conclusion.

Midnight's Children is a teeming fable of postcolonial India, told in magical-realist fashion by a telepathic hero born at the stroke of midnight on the day the country became independent. First published in 1981, it was met with little immediate excitement. It was an unexpected winner, but went on to garner critical and popular acclaim around the world. The novel's popularity, very unusually for a literary award, is what has secured the prize, having been picked from the shortlist by an online public vote that drew just over 7,800 votes. The shortlist itself was selected by a panel of judges - the biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning; writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and John Mullan, professor of English at University College London.

 

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In a first, recognition for an English writer, Amitav Ghosh has been announced as 2018's Jnanpith Award winner for "outstanding contribution towards literature".

Ghosh's work, though fiction, finds an interconnection between the historical disturbances and the human distress spread across cultures and races. His academic background as a historian and a social anthropologist enable him to go to depths, not everyone can go.

Amitav Ghosh has explored Indian protagonists ranging across a wide international field, including Bangladesh, England, Egypt and Myanmar in both his fictional and discursive writings.

Born in Kolkata in 1956 to a Bengali Hindu family, the 62-year-old author currently lives in New York with his wife Deborah Baker.

Amitav Ghosh, who spent his formative years in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. Ghosh is also recipient of the Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi Award.

The Jnanpith Award is an Indian literary award for individual contributions to literature. It was instituted in 1961 by the cultural organization Bharatiya Jnanpith to honour the best creative literary writing in any of the 22 "scheduled languages'.

The winner gets a cash prize along with a citation and a bronze replica of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning.

 

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Anushka Ravishankar is an award-winning author of children's books, and co-founder of Duckbill Books, a publishing house. Ravishankar sent her first few stories to Tinkle, a comic book published by Amar Chitra Katha. When two of these stories won a contest organised by the magazine, the publisher of Tinkle offered her a job, but Ravishankar could only freelance for Tinkle as she was staying home to care for her young daughter. When her family moved to Chennai in 1996, she was hired to be an editor at Tara Books, a children's publishing house in the city. There she authored Tiger on a Tree, a book of nonsense verse that was translated to Japanese, Korean and French. While the book only sold about 2500 copies in India, it sold over 10000 copies in the United States and over 7000 copies in France. She also worked as Publishing Director at Scholastic India.

She founded the Duckbill Publishing House in 2012 with Sayoni Basu.

She is sometimes called the Indian Dr. Seuss.

Ravishankar was born in Nashik, and graduated in mathematics from Fergusson College, Pune in 1981. While at college, she was influenced by the works of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Edward Gorey. After completing her post-graduation in operations research, Ravishankar worked with an IT firm in Nashik for a while. She became a full-time writer after the birth of her daughter.

 

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Indian playwright and journalist Annie Zaidi was announced the winner of the 2019 Nine Dots Prize for her essay Bread, Cement, Cactus.

The Nine Dots Prize is a book prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary societal issues. Entrants for the prize are asked to respond to a question in 3,000 words and the winner receives $1,00,000 to write a short book expanding on the essay’s idea. The question this year was “Is there still no place like home?”

Zaidi said she had been working towards a similarly themed project for a while, but she did not “have the financial, or even mental, bandwidth to do it justice”. “The Prize will allow me to dedicate time to the examination of this question, which is of critical importance in the modern world – and it will help fund the necessary research trips, which, as a freelancer, is something I appreciate hugely.”

Zaidi’s book based on her Nine Dots Prize-winning essay will be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2020.

The entries for the prize were judged anonymously by 11 members of the Nine Dots Prize Board which comprises academics, journalists and thinkers. The board is chaired by Professor Simon Goldhill, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. “In Annie Zaidi we have found a powerful and compelling voice with a unique insight into what home means for citizens of the world today,” said Goldhill. “We are very excited to see how Annie’s work will develop over the coming year and hope that it will help further current conversations around the concept of belonging worldwide.

 

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In 2015, Nayantara Sahgal returned the Sahitya Akademi Award she received in 1986 for her novel ‘Rich Like Us’.

Nayantara Sahgal is an Indian writer in English. Her fiction deals with India's elite responding to the crises engendered by political change. She was one of the first female Indian writers in English to receive wide recognition. She is a member of the Nehru family (not the Nehru-Gandhi family as she so often points out), the second of the three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.

Sahgal's father Ranjit Sitaram Pandit was a barrister from Kathiawad. Pandit was also a classical scholar who had translated Kalhana's epic history Rajatarangini into English from Sanskrit.[citation needed] He was arrested for his support of Indian independence and died in Lucknow prison jail in 1944, leaving behind his wife (Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit) and their three daughters Chandralekha Mehta, Nayantara Sehgal and Rita Dar.[citation needed]

Sahgal's mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, was the daughter of Motilal Nehru and sister of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Vijayalakshmi had been active in the Indian freedom struggle, had been to jail for this cause and in 1946, was part of the first team representing newly formed India that went to the then newly formed United Nations, along with M.C.Chagla. After India achieved independence, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit served as a member of India's Constituent Assembly, the governor of several Indian states, and as India's ambassador to the Soviet Union, the United States, Mexico, the Court of St. James, Ireland, and the United nations.

Sahgal attended a number of schools as a girl, given the turmoil in the Nehru family during the last years (1935–47) of the Indian freedom struggle. Ultimately, she graduated from Woodstock School in the Himalayan hill station of Landour in 1943 and later in the United States from Wellesley College (BA, 1947), which she attended along with her sister Chandralekha, who graduated 2 years earlier in 1945. She has made her home for decades in Dehradun, a town close to Landour where she had attended boarding school (at Woodstock).

 

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The novelist Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for "The Inheritance of Loss," a novel that examines identity, displacement and the indissoluble bonds of family.

Desai spent seven years writing the novel. The loss in her title is chiefly the loss of faith in India felt among the legions that overstay tourist visas and become illegal immigrants in the US. Her story counterpoints the lives of an embittered old judge, a survivor of British colonial rule, with those of his loyal cook and the cook's son, one of the immigrants who scrabble for subsistence on developing world pay in New York.

Desai has said in interviews that her title "speaks of little failures, passed down from generation to generation.

Announcing the long list of 19 books on August 14, Prof Lee said: "It's a list in which famous established novelists rub shoulders with little known newcomers."

On September 14, when the shortlist of six titles was published, it became evident that she and her fellow-judges had done something rare in the 38-year annals of Booker: they had dumped the famous writers and picked mainly little-known newcomers.

 

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Mahasweta Devi (14 January 1926 – 28 July 2016) was an Indian fiction writer in Bengali and a socio-political activist. Her notable literary works include Hajar Churashir Maa, Rudali, and Aranyer Adhikar. She was a self-recognised communist and worked for the rights and empowerment of the tribal people (Lodha and Shabar) of West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states of India. She was honoured with various literary awards such as the Sahitya Akademi Award (in Bengali), Jnanpith Award and Ramon Magsaysay Award along with India's civilian awards Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan.

Devi wrote over 100 novels and over 20 collections of short stories primarily written in Bengali but often translated to other languages. Her first novel, titled Jhansir Rani, based on a biography of the Rani of Jhansi was published in 1956. She had toured the Jhansi region to record information and folk songs from the local people for the novel.

Mahasweta Devi's specialisation lied in the studies of Adivasi, Dalit and Marginalized citizens with a focus on their women. They were associated as protestor in the face of the oppressive British rule, the Mahajanas and upper class corruption and injustice. She lived in the Adivasi villages in West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh years afer years, befriending them and learning from them. She has embodied their struggles and sacrifices in her words and characters. She had claimed that her stories aren't her creation, they are the stories of the people of her country. Such an example is her work " Chotti Mundi Ebong Tar Tir"

In 1964, she began teaching at Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College (an affiliated college of the University of Calcutta system). In those days Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College was an institution for working-class women students. During that period she also worked—as a journalist and as a creative writer. She studied the Lodhas and Shabars, the tribal communities of West Bengal, women and dalits. In her elaborate Bengali fiction, she often depicted the brutal oppression on the tribal people and untouchables by the powerful authoritarian upper-caste landlords, money-lenders, and venal government officials. She wrote of the source of her inspiration:Postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has translated Devi's short stories into English and published three books Imaginary Maps (1995, Routledge), Old Woman (1997, Seagull), The Breast Stories (1997, Seagull).

 

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You might have read them, but you don’t see them. Sometimes, you would not even know that they exist!

Yes, we are talking about ghostwriters. So just who exactly are these mysterious, shadowy figures lurking between the pages of our favourite book? Don’t be scared, ghostwriters are very much human!

Authors who are paid to write under someone else’s name are called ghost writers. A ghost writer could be an individual or a string of writers, all using the same name. They many complete the entire project or ghostwrite parts of the book.

The main job of a ghostwriter is to seamlessly adapt their writing skills to fit the style of the publicly named author. Ghostwriters also advise on content and style issues when needed.

When are ghost writers used?

Celebrities or political leaders often use ghostwriters to pen their memoirs. This could be because the celebrities themselves do not have the time or flair for writing. Ghost writers may also be behind authors of serialised books or those who produce a large number of books regularly.

Famous books written by ghostwriters:

• “Nancy Drew” series: Here’s a whodunit: who wrote the famous “Nancy Drew” series? The most obvious answer might be Carolyn Keene, of course – the author whose name is stamped upon the cover of every book. Here’s the plot twist: Carolyn Knee is actually multiple ghostwriters. Commissioned by Edward Stratemeyer, the 56 books were written by at least eight ghostwriters. Chief among them was Mildred Wirt Benson.


• “The Babysitter’s Club”: Author Ann M. Martin solely wrote the first 35 books in this series. But it was Peter Lerangis who wrote the subsequent novels.


• Houdini’s illusions: Sure, Harry Houdini could catch a bullet with his teeth and escape a water torture cell in two minutes. But could he write? Well… not really. That’s why H.P. Lovecraft, ended up becoming Houdini’s ghostwriter in 1924. He wrote a short story “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” for Houdini.


• “Animorph”: Author K.A. Applegate did write the first 24 books of this popular YA series, but she ended up only outlining most of the next 27 books in the series. A group of ghostwriters did the actual writing for those books.


• “Jason Bourne” books: When author Robert Ludlum, kept churning out one bestseller after another even after his death in 2001, fans smelled something fishy. No, it was not the doing of rogue secret agents! It was later revealed that Eric Van Lustbader had continued ghost writing the books after Ludlum’s death till 2017.

Oh really?

• Were “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” ghostwritten? Think Alexandre Dumas and the two books that immediately come to mind are the classics “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers”. But there’s a slight chance that he might not have actually written them. There are claims that Dumas wrote these books with Auguste Maquet, who remained uncredited for his contributions.

 

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Now and then we come across photographs of a tree trunk or a leafy branch with a caption that nudges us to spot the creature in it. And only on careful inspection do we discover the bird or the insect in it. They merge so well with their environment that it’s not easy to spot them. This is called camouflage. When we think of camouflage, we often think of prey doing it. However, predators too use this to catch their prey. Also, there are many types of camouflage. Let’s look at a few of them.

Many techniques at play

When animals, birds or insects remain hidden by simply staying in a surrounding that matches their colour, it is called concealing colouration. While snowy owls and polar bears blend naturally with their environment (the Arctic snow), a few fish species can actually change colour to match their background. This is called background matching. Disruptive colouration is exhibited through patterns, spots, stripes, etc. This assists creatures such as leopards to remain hidden behind tall grass as they size up their prey, while it helps a herd of zebras appear as one large mass to the colour-blind and confused lion, which cannot pick and choose just one zebra to make a meal of. Disguise is another type of camouflage where a creature looks startlingly similar to something else in its environment. This is common among insects – think of leaf insect (also called walking leaf!) and stick insect. Mimicry as camouflage is very interesting. It involves creatures that look like some other intimidating, venomous or unappestising ones. For instance, the initial stages of certain types of butterfly caterpillars look just like bird poop, and perhaps do not get as much as a glance from their predators. The hawk moth caterpillar does a classier act –when threatened, it “puffs up its tail which is designed to look exactly like a snake’s head and intimidates its enemies”. Here’s one more example. The owl butterfly has large eyespots on the underside of its wings, which look like owl eyes to predators.

 

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