My Science School

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker known for exploring subconscious imagery. Arguably, his most famous painting is The Persistence of Memory (1931), depicting limp melting watches.

"More than 100 years after his birth, the art world cannot quite figure out if Spanish Surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-89), was a genius or a madman!

He was just 14 when his works were first exhibited. At 17, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, but was expelled after four years for defying his teachers.

The French Surrealists were then trying to apply the theories of Sigmund Freud to painting and writing. Dali knew of Freud's study of dreams and was fascinated with capturing them in paint.

International acclaim was not long in coming.  In 1933, he put up solo exhibitions in Paris and New York City. He became Surrealism's poster boy.

In addition to Freudian imagery - staircases, keys, dripping candles - he also used his own symbols. His most famous painting "The Persistence of Memory", features three 'melting' watches, and a fourth covered by a swarm of ants. One of the watches is draped on a strange form that is meant to be Dali's deflated head!

As his fame grew, Dali diversified into jewellery, clothes and furniture design, painted sets for ballets and plays, wrote fiction, produced a dream sequence for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller "Spellbound" and set up displays for store windows.

He cut an extremely eccentric figure, with his dashing clothes and moustache. He once showed up for a Paris lecture in a Rolls Royce stuffed with cauliflowers. For a book promotion in New York, he dressed in a golden robe and lay on a bed!

In 1974, Figueres in Catalonia, Spain, opened the Dali Theatre-Museum with works donated by him.

PROFILE OF TIME

In Dali's paintings, the concept of time is different, it melts. Everything is fluidic. The Profile of Time, a sculpture by Dali, has the soft watch hanging and drooping from the branch of a tree. The watch appeared for the first time in Dali's 1931 painting ‘The Persistence of Memory'. The watch can be seen to be melting and finishing off as a huge drop.

APPARITION OF FACE AND FRUIT DISH ON A BEACH

The painting by Dali works on illusion. He called them 'double images'. In this, there are three simultaneous images at work in a single painting. Dali's double image paintings had a huge fan following. It is more like a puzzle. Here, one can see an illusion of a face, the image of a dish full of fruits, that of a dog.

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E.C.G. Sudarshan was an Indian-American physicist and author. A professor at the University of Texas, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize nine times!

He was born in Kottayam, Kerala. He had his college education in CMS College, Kottayam and Madras Christian College, Chennai. He got his PhD from the University of Rochester.

His most important discovery was the Sudarshan-Glauber quantum representation of light. Glauber was infamously awarded the Nobel Prize for this. According to Sudarshan's own words, "The 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for my work, but I wasn't the one to get it."

He challenged even Einstein's theory that nothing can travel faster than light. This is the case of Tachyons, which are hypothetical particles and which travel faster than light. His other discoveries include the quantum Zeno effect, non- invariance groups, positive maps of density matrices and computation.

ECG Sudarshan was awarded the Padma Bhushan, in 1976. He also received the CV Raman Award. The Padma Vibhushan came to him in 2007.

In 2005, when the Physics Nobel Prize was denied to him, there was a hue and cry. Many physicists wrote to the Swedish Academy, to show their protest that Sudarshan was not awarded a share of the Prize.

Though side-lined by the Nobel Prize committee, he kept his humour alive. He was also keen on the Vedanta philosophy and often gave lectures on this.

E.C.G. Sudarshan died on 13 May 2018.

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Surrealism is a movement in art and literature pioneered in France in the early 1920s. Read on to know more about it.

Surrealism is a movement in art and literature that seeks to portray the workings of the unconscious mind as manifested in dreams and aims at expressing visions free from conscious rational control. It was pioneered in France around 1924 under the leadership of French poet and critic Andre Breton. Surrealists were influenced by the theories on dreams and the subconscious mind as explained by Sigmund Freud, the Austrian father of psychoanalysis.

Although surrealism was embraced by various kinds of artists like poets, writers, film-makers and photographers, it had its strongest impact in the field of painting. Surrealist artists used techniques like automatism (used by Freud for his patients) which refers to creating art without conscious thought. They believed in the spontaneity of expression, uninhibited by societal limitations. They would paint scenes that make no rational sense. For example, in one of his paintings, Belgian artist Rene Magritte showed a normal table setting that includes a plate holding a slice of ham, from the centre of which stares a human eye.

Surrealists hailed from different nations but Paris remained the centre of the movement. It petered off with the onset of World War II although many critics still consider it a relevant cultural force.

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Narendra Krishna Karmarkar a famous Indian mathematician is the one behind Karmarkar's algorithm. An algorithm is a step-by- step solution to a problem. You can call it a recipe book for mathematics.

Karmarkar's algorithm helped to solve problems in linear programming in a novel way. He found this method and published the results while working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

Karmarkar did his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay and M.S. from the California Institute of Technology. He then took Ph.D. in computer science the University of California, Berkeley.

After that, Karmarkar joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He continues to work on new architecture for supercomputing. The digital library, IEEE Xplore, has published some of his works.

He received the prestigious Paris Kanellakis Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 2000. The Prime Minister of India also presented him the Srinivasa Ramanujan Birth Centenary Award for 1999.

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The Phansad Wildlife Sanctuary in Maharashtra was in the news recently for setting up a ‘food centre' with carrion to revive vulture population. Such measures are important because birds are integral to a healthy and balanced ecosystem. Let's look at a few successful programmes taken up in the country for the conservation of birds-both residents and migrants.

Amur falcon

Even as our country battled the horrific second wave of the pandemic in April 2021, Tamenglong, a town in Manipur, found a reason for excitement tracking two radio-tagged migratory Amur falcons (named Chiulon and Irang) flying over the Arabian Sea. Amur falcons cover 20,000 km between their wintering grounds in Africa and breeding grounds in China. And, thanks to the radio-tagging of two of those birds back in 2019. people were tracking this historic journey and hoping for the birds to reach their town safely later. However, about a decade earlier, the story in neighbouring Nagaland was completely different. For years, lakhs of these raptors have stopped in India's northeastern regions such as Nagaland during their long migration. But what was a stopover for rest and recuperation turned into a death trap for them-in 2012, more than one lakh birds were said to have been hunted for meat. Following this decimation, the Nagaland Wildlife and Biodiversity Conservation Trust swung into action-went door-to-door talking with villagers and engaged with village about the need to protect the birds. And those earnest efforts paid off. The killings stopped in what is seen as one of the most telling changes in people's attitude towards wildlife conservation. Recently, there have been reports of increasing Amur falcon numbers not just in Nagaland, but also in neighbouring States such as Assam. Meghalaya, and of course, Manipur where people waited with bated breaths for the return of raptors named Chiulon and Irang.

Great Indian bustard

Recently, four female great Indian bustards at the Desert National Park (DNP) in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, made headlines for laying two eggs each. Critically endangered, these bustards are known for laying only one egg at a time. Turns out this time was different because, thanks to excessive rains in the region, the grass in which the birds laid their eggs was abundant. In addition, the moisture and humidity led to an increase in insect population, which made for the birds hearty meals.

Experts believe one of the other reasons for the two-egg clutch is also the conservation efforts. The first major initiative for saving the species came about in 2013 with the Rajasthan government setting up Project Great Indian Bustard at DNP, which included increased protection for the birds and less human presence in the region. Further, a breeding centre for the birds was set up at DNP in 2019.

Endemic to India, great Indian bustards were once seen across several States. Due to hunting, habitat loss, and accidents caused by windmills and overhead lines, their numbers kept dwindling. With only about 150 birds remaining today, two egg clutches and conservation initiatives hold promise for the bird's future.

Vultures

In October 2020, when eight critically endangered, captive-bred, white-rumped vultures were released into the wild in Haryana, it was a first for our country. The release was the result of a two-decade conservation programme that saw the setting up of four vulture conservation breeding centres - one each in Haryana, West Bengal, Assam, and Madhya Pradesh. The centres were set up by the Bombay Natural History Society (a wildlife research organisation), in association with the Government of India. State Forest Departments, and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Launched to conserve three species of vultures-oriental white-backed vulture (also known as white-rumped vulture), long-billed vulture, and slender billed vulture- these centres have together reared hundreds of these birds. Since 2020, many more birds have been released into the wild.

It is believed that "India was home to 40 million vultures in the 1980s”. Their number plunged by over 97% in the 1990s, largely due to the drug diclofenac used to treat cattle-whose carcass vultures mainly fed on. With a ban on diclofenac in place and the setting up of these breeding centres (along with creating Vulture Safe Zones in several parts of the country), there's much hope for these birds today.

VISIONARY PERSPECTIVE PLAN (2020-2030)

• In 2020, the government came out with a 10-year plan "for conservation of avian diversity, their ecosystems, habitats & landscapes in the country".
• It aims to initiate steps for the protection of migratory birds, conservation of wetlands, and focus on birds in urban areas.
• It also plans to undertake detailed ecological studies of rare, endangered, and threatened bird species of India and their habitats and to develop and implement conservation measures and Species Recovery Plans.

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Yes, Kanak Saha is a famous Indian astrophysicist and he did receive the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize.

Do you know what Kanak Saha and his team discovered? They found that a galaxy which is 9.3 billion light years away from the Earth was emitting ultra violet light! His team used AstroSat, India's first multi-wavelength satellite to observe this galaxy. It took them two years to analyze the data and to verify it.

This is an important clue to the origins of the universe, its dark ages and how light originated.

Kanak Saha was born on 04 February 1977 in Cooch Behar, West Bengal. He graduated in Physics from the Scottish Church College in 1998. For Masters, he went to Banaras Hindu University and completed his Ph.D from the Indian Institute of Science in 2008.

He is now working as associate professor of astrophysics at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune. He studies the dynamics of galaxies using cluster computer simulation.

He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2021.

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Debdeep Mukhopadhyay is a cryptographer and Computer Science professor at IIT, Kharagpur. He is interested in Hardware security, Cryptographic Engineering, Design Automation of Crypto- systems, and VLSI of Crypto- systems.

Mukhopadhyay was born on 31st October, 1977 in Howrah, a twin town of Kolkata. He was interested in computers from a young age and was inspired by his father, himself a computer professional. He was a student of IIT Kharagpur from his graduation till Ph.D. His Ph.D. thesis won the Techno-Inventor Award (for the best Ph.D.), from the Indian Semi- conductors Association in 2008.

He worked at IIT, Madras as Assistant Professor from 2007-8. Then he again joined his alma mater in 2008 and is a professor in the Department of Computer Science. He has worked as visiting faculty at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and New York University Shanghai, China. He was also a visiting scientist at the CYSREN, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Debdeep won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize for his contribution to cryptographic engineering in 2021.

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Dr. Sunil Mukhi is an Indian theoretical physicist who has greatly contributed to the string theory and the quantum field theory. We have already dealt with the string theory. The quantum field theory studies the behaviour of subatomic particles in different kinds of force fields.

Dr Mukhi took a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1981. Then he did postdoctoral studies at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, Italy. He came back to India and joined the Theoretical Physics Group at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai in 1993.

He joined as head of the Physics department of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune in 2012. He rose to become the Dean after 7 years.

He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and the Indian National Science Academy. He has received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award for Physical Sciences, 1999, and the J.C. Bose Fellowship, 2008. He was named a Fellow of TWAS, (The World Academy of Sciences) in October 2014.

He is also the editor of the Journal of High Energy Physics since its start.

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, an Indian by birth, is a British structural biologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath in 2009, for his research into the atomic structure and function of ribosomes. Ribosomes are tiny particles made up of RNA and proteins.

Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. Both his parents were scientists. He graduated from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda after getting the National Science Talent Scholarship. Then he moved to the U.S. Although Dr. Ramakrishnan started with a career in theoretical physics, he later moved towards molecular biology.

He did his postdoctoral research at Yale University and joined as biophysicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Afterwards he joined the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge in England. The next year, he published a series of ground- breaking scientific papers.

Dr. Ramakrishnan was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004. He was elected a foreign member of the Indian National Science Academy in 2008. Our country then honoured him with the Padma Vibhushan in 2010, and he was knighted by the U.K government in 2012. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2003 and later became the society's first Indian-born president.

He has a dual citizenship of the U.S.A and the United Kingdom.

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Arun Kumar Shukla is a famous structural biologist, who rose to fame with his study on G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR). GPCR are proteins which are permanently attached to the cell membranes. These respond to sensory or other stimuli from outside the cells and also physiologically respond to hormones.

Shukla's team of scientists at IIT, Kanpur designed nanomachines which target certain signalling events. Several marketed drugs work with the use of these techniques.

Dr. Arun Kumar Shukla was born on 01 November 1981 in Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh. He did his PG degree in biotechnology from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Then he did his doctoral studies under the guidance of Hartmut Michel (Nobel Laureate,1988) of the Max Planck Institute of Bio- physics, Germany.

He started his career at the prestigious Duke University as an assistant professor at their department of medicine. He came back to India and joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) at the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering (BSBE). He is a professor and heads the Laboratory of GPCR Biology.

Let us have a look at the many awards that Dr. Shukla received.

• National Bioscience Award for Career Development, 2017-18.
• 2021 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in Biological Science.
• B.M. Birla Science Prize (2017),
• NASI-Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award of the National Academy of Sciences, India (2016),
• CDRI Award (2018),
• Shakuntala Amir Chand Prize of the Indian Council for Medical Research (2018)
• EMBO Young Investigator Award (2017).

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Professor Pulickel Ajayan who hails from Kerala can be called a wizard in the field of nanotechnology. He is armed with the darkest material and the smallest brush. He got into the Guinness Book of World Records twice for these.

The darkest material is out of the wizard book literally - a carpet that reflects only 0.045 per cent of light. It's made of carbon nano-tubes.

Have you heard about the paper battery? This was also the creation of this Professor from Rice University, Houston. The paper battery grabbed the limelight in August 2007. This is basically an energy storage device on a piece of paper.

Pulickel Ajayan has 400 papers on carbon nanostructures. He is concerned about the environment and in 2012, came up with a hybrid material which could remove contaminants from water. He also developed a green battery made of lithium-ion cathode which is environment friendly.

He is currently working on how nanotechnology can be effectively used for energy storage devices.

Prof. Ajayan has won several awards and is on the advisory editorial board of several leading journals. He is also a board member of many nanotechnology companies. He is a visiting professor in many international universities too.

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Bokashi composting provides an effective method of disposing kitchen waste. How is it done? Read on to find out.

Composting is the process of converting organic waste into fertilizer. Bokashi composting is one of the many techniques employed to achieve this.

Bokashi is Japanese for fermented organic matter. This fermenting process needs to be anaerobic, which means there should be no oxygen present during the fermentation.

Organic waste from the kitchen-leftover food, eggs, vegetable peels, even meat- is kept in an airtight container which has a tap at the bottom. A layer of waste is sprinkled with bokashi bran, a dry mixture containing beneficial microbes, and then covered with a plastic/steel plate. Another layer of waste is laid out over it, sprinkled and sealed. The same process is followed until the container is full.

Then the container's lid is closed and it is set aside for a few days for the fermentation to take place. The liquid released during fermentation is drained through the tap at the base.

Once the week is up, the contents of the container can be emptied in the garden. But the mixture shouldn't touch the roots of any plant yet. To become an effective fertilizer, the fermented matter needs to mix well with the soil for a couple of days..

Bokashi composting is popular because it takes up less space and provides an effective method of disposing kitchen waste. Also, during fermentation, the mulch in the container does not give out a bad odour.

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Eliza was one of the first computer programs that could convincingly prompt a response from humans, similar to what happens in a normal conversation

It is a tendency to ascribe human behaviour to non-human beings. For example, we have talking animal characters in fables who act, behave and talk like humans. This is called anthropomorphism. In computer science, a similar tendency is called the ELIZA effect.

The effect is named after ELIZA, a chatbot (computer program that conducts conversations) developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. Weizenbaum had intended to prove the shallow nature of interactions between man and machine. But that did not stop people, including Weizenbaum's personal assistant from believing that ELIZA could think and feel like a human.

Following is an excerpt from a transcript of a conversation between ELIZA and a young woman:

ELIZA: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.

Woman: It's true. I am unhappy.

 ELIZA: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?

Woman: I need some help, that much seems certain.

ELIZA: What would it mean to you if you got some help?

Woman: Perhaps could learn to get along with my mother.

ELIZA: Tell me more about your family. The program primarily rephrased the human's lines and repeated them in a seemingly intelligent manner, prompting an emotional response from the human, similar to what happens in a normal conversation.

While communicating with the machine, people tend to forget that it is simply following a computer program. For example, after you withdraw money from an ATM, the ATM displays the words ‘THANK YOU' at the end of the session. A layman may think that the machine is actually expressing thanks when in reality it is only following a pre-programmed coded set of instructions without any emotions.

The ELIZA effect plays an important role in the development of artificial intelligence.

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Prof. C.N.R. Rao is a world-famous Indian scientist specialising in solid state and structural chemistry.

He did research in superconductivity, and his latest research is on the wonder material graphene and artificial photosynthesis.

Prof. Rao was a single child. His father was an Inspector of Schools, but surprisingly, he did not go to elementary school. He was coached at home by his mother. His parents saw to it that he was fluent in both English and his mother-tongue, Kannada.

Rao's passion for chemistry started during his high school years and he chose Chemistry for his higher studies, and went to the Banaras Hindu University for his Master's. Later, he got scholarship offers to do Ph.D. from four foreign universities: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Penn State, Columbia and Purdue. He went to Purdue and completed his Ph.D in 2 years and nine months in 1958. He was only 24!

84 universities have given him honorary doctorates. He has 54 books and around 1,774 research publications.

He is the founder president of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, and was the chairman of the science advisory council to the prime minister for many years. He is also Founding Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences.

Now, have a look at some of the awards and honours received by this great man:

• Marlow Medal
• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology
• Hughes Medal
• India Science Award
• Dan David Prize
• Royal Medal
• Von Hippel Award
• ENI award
• Padma Shri
• Padma Vibhushan

On 16 November 2013, the Government of India selected him for Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India. Thus he became the third scientist after C.V. Raman and APJ. Abdul Kalam to receive the Bharat Ratna.

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Amit Singh is a famous Indian microbiologist. An associate professor at the department of microbiology and cell biology of the Indian Institute of Science, he studied how Mycobacterium causes tuberculosis and is well known for this.

Amit Singh was born on 18 March 1976. After graduating in science from the University of Delhi, he joined IIT, Roorkee for his Master's degree in biotechnology. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Delhi and went to the U.S for post-doctoral studies.

He came back to India in 2010 and joined the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology as a Wellcome Trust-DBT intermediate fellow. After four years, he joined the IISc, Bangalore where he is working now.

He is the head of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research. Research is done there on tuberculosis, AIDS and other chronic or long-lasting not infections.

He has received many prestigious awards. You can specially note these two:

• National Bioscience Award for Career Development - 2017-18

• CSIR- Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award-2021 (for bio-scientific research).

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