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What are cloud forests?

Cloud forests are usually found in tropical rainforests of South America, Southeast Asia and Africa.

A cloud forest is constantly enveloped by dense clouds that penetrate right through the ground. This creates some unique conditions- very moist and misty environment, thick vegetation with a lot of moss growth, boggy forest floors, constant sounds of water dripping (from fog that condenses and falls off the leaves) and very low visibility.

Cloud forests are usually found in tropical rainforests of South America, Southeast Asia and Africa. These forests are also referred to as fog forests, or moss forests. Cloud forests attract researchers who like to study the abundant species of water-loving plants, animals and birds that are found there. They are a source of pure fresh water.

A large percentage of the biodiversity contained within these forests is yet to be catalogued. Species thought to be extinct have been discovered in these forests.

Some of the cloud forests have become popular travel destinations. The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve is referred to as one of the “seven wonders of Costa Rica” and it attracts about 70,000 tourists annually. It is known to contain the largest number of orchids in the world. Cloud forests are now a concern for conservationists and The Cloud Forest Agenda Report of the UNEP and UNESCO seeks to initiate action to preserve cloud forests.

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Science and tech to nature’s rescue

Of course, human technology can never completely replace nature. But, along with science, technology can help our world in several ways.

It is easy to presume our planet will recover with gentle human care alone. But, in reality, it would require a lot of supprt from various other quarters as well. For instance, science and technology. These two areas play a huge role in keeping our natural world going-now more than ever as we grapple with climate change.

Of course, human technology can never completely replace nature. But, along with science, technology can help our world in several ways. We require the science of data gathering simply to understand where we stand today – be it assessing the number of wildlife lost to wildfires in a region or the amount of glacial ice a mountain is losing every year or the next eruption of a dormant volcano. As for technology, everything from as simple as a camera trap to advanced mechanisms such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can help us track wildlife, crucial for conservation measures.

Data gathering and tracking wildlife are among the many ways in which science and technology help. If technically advanced systems can alert officials concerned about poaching or illegal tree-felling real-time, they can go a long way in grave loss. And, tools such as social media are powerful enough to cause positive changes through information sharing and collective demand for action.

As we start to run out of time to save our planet, it is imperative that we dip into every possible resource available to us, and keep working on improving such resources for the future too.

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What are the achievements of Ritabrata Munshi?

Ritabrata Munshi is a mathematician specialising in number theory. He is affiliated to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Number theory is a branch of mathematics that studies properties of positive integers or whole numbers that do not have a fraction or decimal part. Munshi made significant contribution to the number theory, in that he linked arithmetic geometry, representation theory and complex analysis in many ways. For this, he was awarded the Ramanujan Prize which is given for mathematicians under the age of 45 from a developing country.

Ritabrata Munshi did his doctoral studies at Princeton University in the U.S with Sir Andrew Wiles, a famous mathematician. After a few post-doctoral years in the U.S, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India.

He has received many awards for his work, including the Infosys Science Foundation’s 2017 award in mathematical sciences, the Birla Science Prize (2013) and the ISI Alumni gold medal. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2015. He was also awarded the ICTP Ramanujan Prize in 2018.

Munshi was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2016. Munshi was awarded the Swarna-Jayanti fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. He was also elected a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2016.

In 2018 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). He was elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2020.

He is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society and the Hardy-Ramanujan Journal.

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Why is Charusita Chakravarty a remarkable woman?

Charusita Chakravarty was an Indian academic and scientist. She was a professor of chemistry at IIT – Delhi. She was also an Associate Member of the Centre for Computational Material Science, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru.

When she started her career, women were not taken very seriously in the field of science. Dr Charusita Chakravarty was determined to excel in her field. She raised her voice against the gender bias in the STEM fields. (STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine). She encouraged other women also to enter these fields.

She was born in Massachusetts in the US as her parents were leading economists there. However, she was raised in Delhi. Being a single child and growing up in a liberal environment gave her the courage to defy boundaries from an early age. She was also keen on poetry and music.

She topped the Delhi Higher Secondary Board and also Delhi University in her B. Sc Chemistry from St. Stephens College. She did a Natural Science Tripos from Cambridge and then her PhD, on quantum scattering and spectroscopy. She did her post-doctoral studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Her fields of interest also included theoretical chemistry and chemical physics, the structure and dynamics of liquids, water and hydration, nucleation and self-assembly. Her articles have come in national and international journals.

She received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology and also the B.M. Birla Science Award. Sadly, on 29 March 2016, Chakravarty passed away after a long and arduous battle with breast cancer.

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Why is Samir K. Brahmachari an important figure on the scientific stage in India?

Samir K. Brahmachari is a biophysicist who is among the first in utilizing computational tools for genome analysis. He has developed many bioinformatics tools. His research led to the creation of the genetic profile of Indians known as the Indian Genome Variation Project. This was later extended to include all East Asian countries.

He was the first to market the novel, globally competitive bio-informatics software products from CSIR. He has 12 patents, 23 copyrights and 155 research publications to his credit.

Brahmachari did BSc and MSc in chemistry from the University of Calcutta. He earned a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. He did post-doctoral research at Paris Diderot University. Then he was a visiting scientist at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

He worked as a Professor in Indian Institute of Science and also served as a Visiting Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.

Then he became the Director General of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) and Secretary, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Government of India. He was the Founder Director of Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi and the Chief Mentor of Open Source for Drug Discovery (OSDD) Project.

The J.C Bose Fellowship Award is one among the many honours that he has received.

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Who is Naveen Garg?

Naveen Garg is a Professor of Computer Science at IIT-Delhi. He is interested in the design and analysis of algorithms. An algorithm is a set of rules which can solve a problem in mathematics or computer science.

Naveen Garg completed his graduation and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT- Delhi. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Max Planck Institute for Informatics and also was a research scientist there. Then he joined IIT – Delhi and now he is Janaki and K.A. lyer Cnair Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and also the Dean, AAIP (Alumni Affairs and International Programs). He is also the co-director of the Indo-German Max-Planck Center for Computer Science (IMPECS).

Naveen Garg has secured the Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany in 2001. He won the Career Award for Young Teachers instituted by All India Council for Technical Education in 2004. The Indian National Academy of Engineering presented him with the Young Engineer Award in 2005 and Indian National Science Academy awarded him the Young Scientist Medal in 2006. Also, he was elected as a Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2014 and 2020 respectively.

He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2016.

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Which are the major contributions of Sankar Ghosh?

Sankar Ghosh is an Indian-origin immunologist who has won several awards. He is the Silverstein and Hutt Family Professor of Microbiology and Chair of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

He is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He is interested in finding out the ways by which a cell controls the conversion of DNA to RNA. This helps us understand the immune system better. His team recently found new ways to diagnose critical conditions like sepsis faster. Sepsis is when the immune system starts attacking the organs in the body as a response to an infection.

Ghosh’s research has been published in the top scientific journals.

Ghosh was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April 2021. He was advisor for the Board of Scientific Counsellors of the National Cancer Institute, the Scientific Review Board of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and the Scientific Review Council of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. He was also member of the Board of Management of the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru and in scientific advisory boards of Centre for Life Sciences (CLS) for Peking University and Tsinghua University, China, Shanghai Institute of Immunology, China, and Max-Planck Institute, Freiburg, Germany.

He is on the editorial board of journals including Immunity, Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He was also on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2011.

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What’s in Shakespeare’s first folio?

Published seven years after William Shakespeare’s death in 1616, the first folio is credited with sustaining the legacy of the playwright and ensuring that generations could enjoy the bard’s plays.

What is a folio?

A folio is a large book made by folding sheets of paper in half, with each sheet forming four pages. This format was usually reserved for weighty historic or religious subjects. Shakespeare’s first folio was the first of its kind published in England devoted exclusively to plays.

Shakespeare’s first folio Published in 1623, the full title of Shakespeare’s first folio is Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.

The word folio refers to its considerable size. Plays prior to this were considered too trivial to be printed in such a large format. Assembled and edited by the playwright’s friends and fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, the first folio contains 36 Shakespearean plays, 18 of which had never been printed before. Were it not for their appearance in the folio, they would most probably have been lost forever – they include As You Like It. The Tempest, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth.

It is believed that 800 copies of the first folio were produced, out of which 233 still exist. Each copy is said to be unique because the manuscripts were proofread and corrected while the printing was in progress.

Sold for a pound

The original selling price for a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio was one pound and like most books of that era, it was sold unbound so the buyers needed to have it bound in leather. Today, an original copy of this book can fetch more than two million pounds. It is easily the most important collection of plays ever published and valued throughout the world.

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Who is Arun Majumdar?

Dr.Arun Majumdar rose to fame when President Barack Obama nominated him as the Under Secretary for Energy.

A graduate from IIT – Mumbai, he is the Jay Precourt Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, and has served in many top positions in the U.S. His research mostly involves nano-scale materials, energy conservation, transport and storage and biomolecular analysis. His current work includes creating a sustainable future through thermal management, waste-heat recovery and applying Al to solve energy and climatic issues.

He was previously the Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was also Professor at University of California, Berkeley, and the first director of the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Before joining Stanford, he was Vice President for energy at Google. He is a member of National Academy of Sciences (2020) and a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (2014).

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