Eknath blogs

                                        CLIMATE CHANGE Our world is always changing, so is our climate. Some changes are apparent, others not so much. Climate change is an important issue of concern in the twenty first century. Climate, if it changes at all, evolves so slowly that the difference cannot be seen in a human lifetime (Wearth, 2014). Mostly all scientists predicted that it would take thousands of years for the planet to warm up due to emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels called greenhouse gases. But in the past 200 years, things began to change. The rate and the amount of warming that is happening on this planet is unprecedented. Wearth says, “People did not grasp the prodigious fact that both population and industrialization were exploding in a pattern of exponential   Global warming is a measure of climate change, and is a rise in the average global temperatures.” Climate change is caused by natural factors such as solar variability and human factors such

                                                          DALAI LAMA   Dalai Lama  Tenzin Gyatso  shortened from Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, born Lhamo Thondup, 6 July 1935) is the current  Dalai Lama . Dalai Lamas are important  monks  of the  Gelug  school, the newest school of  Tibetan Buddhism  which is formally headed by the  Ganden Tripas . From the time of the  5th Dalai Lama  to 1959, the central government of Tibet, the  Ganden Phodrang , invested the position of Dalai Lama with temporal duties. The 14th Dalai Lama was born in  Taktser  village,  Amdo ,  Tibet  and was selected as the  tulku  of the  13th Dalai Lama  in 1937 and formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama at a public declaration near the town of Bumchen in 1939.   His enthronement ceremony as the Dalai Lama was held in Lhasa on 22 February 1940, and he eventually assumed full temporal (political) duties on 17 November 1950, at the age of 15, after  the People's Republic of Ch

                        VENKATRAMAN  "VENKI" RAMAKRISHNAN   Venkatraman  " Venki "  Ramakrishnan   born 1952 is an American and British  structural biologist  of Indian origin. He is the current  President of the Royal Society , having held the position since November 2015. In 2009 he shared the  Nobel Prize in Chemistry  with  Thomas A. Steitz  and  Ada Yonath , "for studies of the structure and function of the  ribosome ". Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the  Medical Research Council  (MRC)  Laboratory of Molecular Biology  (LMB) on the  Cambridge Biomedical Campus , UK, where he is also the Deputy Director. Ramakrishnan was born in  Chidambaram  in  Cuddalore district  of  Tamil Nadu , India to C. V. Ramakrishnan and  Rajalakshmi Ramakrishnan  in a Tamil family. Both his parents were scientists, and his father was head of the Department of Biochemistry at the  Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda . At the time of his birth, Ra

                             HAR GOBIND KHORANA   Har Gobind Khorana  9 January 1922 – 9 November 2011, was an  Pakistani American  biochemist who shared the 1968  Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine  with  Marshall W. Nirenberg  and  Robert W. Holley  for research that showed how the order of  nucleotides  in  nucleic acids , which carry the  genetic code  of the cell, control the cell’s synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the  Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize  from  Columbia University  in the same year. Khorana was born in  Raipur , British India (today Tehsil  Kabirwala ,  Punjab, Pakistan ). He served on the faculty of the  University of British Columbia  from 1952-1960, where he initiated his Nobel Prize winning work. He became a  naturalized citizen  of the  United States in 1966, and subsequently received the  National Medal of Science . He co-directed the Institute for Enzyme Research, became a professor of biochemistry in 1962 and was named Conra

              RABINDRANATH TAGORE Rabindranath Tagore also written Ravīndranātha Thākura   7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941   sobriquet  Gurudev,  was a  Bengali   polymath    who reshaped  Bengali literature  and  music , as well as  Indian art  with  Contextual Modernism  in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of  Gitanjali  and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the  Nobel Prize in Literature  in 1913.  Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.  He is sometimes referred to as "the  Bard  of Bengal". A  Pirali Brahmin  from  Calcutta  with ancestral  gentry  roots in  Jessore , Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.  At the age of sixteen, he released  his first substantial poems  under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by lit

                   MOTHER TERESA Mother Teresa 26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997), was an  Albanian - Indian         Roman Catholic   nun  and  missionary . She was born in  Skopje  (now the capital of the  Republic of Macedonia ), then part of the  Kosovo Vilayet  of the Ottoman Empire. After living in Macedonia for eighteen years she moved to Ireland and then to  India , where she lived for most of her life. In 1950 Teresa founded the  Missionaries of Charity , a Roman Catholic  religious congregation  which had over 4,500 sisters and was active in 133 countries in 2012. The congregation manages homes for people dying of  HIV/AIDS ,  leprosy  and  tuberculosis ;  soup kitchens ; dispensaries and mobile clinics; children's- and family-counselling programmes;  orphanages , and schools. Members, who take vows of  chastity, poverty, and obedience , also profess a fourth vow: to give "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor". Teresa received a number of

            CHANDRASEKHARA VENKATA RAMAN   Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman 7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970 was an Indian physicist born in the former  Madras Province  in  India  presently the state of  Tamil Nadu , who carried out ground-breaking work in the field of  light scattering , which earned him the 1930  Nobel Prize for Physics . He discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes  wavelength . This phenomenon, subsequently known as  Raman scattering , results from the  Raman effect . In 1954, India honoured him with its highest civilian award, the  Bharat Ratna . Raman's father initially taught in a school in Thiruvanaikovil, became a lecturer in mathematics and physics in Mrs. A.V. Narasimha Rao College,  Visakhapatnam  (then Vishakapatnam) in the Indian state of  Andhra Pradesh , and later joined  Presidency College  in Madras (now  Chennai ). At an early age, Raman moved to the city of Visakhapatnam and studie