Category: Life & Style

Pioneer in water treatment Va Tech Wabag has won the prestigious Global Water Award for its 45 MLD (million litres a day) Tertiary Treatment Reverse Osmosis (TTRO) Plant at Koyambedu, Chennai. The TTRO plant bagged the distinction award under ‘waste water project of the year’ category. The plant was built by a consortium comprising Wabag and IDE Technologies for Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board and is one of the largest and technologically most advanced water reuse plants in India. The Tertiary Treatment Reverse Osmosis (TTRO) plant uses a multistage treatment scheme, including Rapid Gravity Sand Filters, Ultrafiltration, Reverse Osmosis, and Ozonation.

It will help Chennai endure and sustain as a result of the city’s consistent problem of drought & water scarcity. Water treated from the plant caters to the requirements of the Industrial hub of South Chennai. The TTRO will supply 16 million3 treated freshwater each year to Chennai’s more than 10 million people. With this, it makes Chennai India’s first city to reuse more than 20 percent of its treated wastewater.

Va Tech Wabag is currently managing more than 65 operations and maintenance contracts globally. The Koymbedu TTRO plant will further strengthen the Wabag’s position as a proven global leader in the recycle & reuse segment that has the highest growth potential in the next few years.

The UEFA Champions League 2019-20 trophy was lifted by Bayern Munich. Bayern Munich defeated Saint-Germain by 1-0 to lift the trophy in Lisbon. The European football club was crowned as champions for a record sixth time in history when it defeated first-time finalists Saint-Germain of Paris at the Estadio da Luz, Lisbon. In this season, the football club made it 11 out of 11 in the competition and become the first team ever to do so. The 59th-minute header from Kingsley Coman created the difference that resulted in a historic victory. The victory came in the second half when Bayern dominated the possession and converted an opportunity when an accurate Joshua Kimmich cross was put in the back of the net by the former Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) forward, Kingsley Coman. PSG tried to equalize through Robert Lewandowski but was twice denied in the first half and through Neymar & Kylian Mbappe, but was denied by the gigantic Manuel Neuer. Bayern Munich has become the first team to keep a clean sheet against PSG since Manchester City in April 2016. It has ended PSG’s 34 successive scoring games in the competition. The 2019-20 trophy is the third trophy of Hansi Flick, the team’s football manager since last November. He had earlier managed the Bavarians to the Bundesliga 2019-20 title.

Google recently launched a new education tool for teachers and students to facilitate learning in the virtual education space. It is going to roll out the new tool through its existing Google’s various products such as Meet, G-Suite, Classroom, & Assignment. A few of the features will be launched in the coming months while the rest will be available later this year. The Assignment is an app for educators to distribute, analyze, and grade student work, and will be part of the learning management system (LMS). It brings the shared power of G Suite into your LMS. With this, one can automatically create and distribute tailored copies of the schoolwork into each students’ respective Drive folder. Educators can integrate G Suite productivity tools with it and can make with Google Docs, Google Slides & Drive compatible with it. They can also allot tailored G Suite templates & worksheets and grade the classwork.

The first World Solar Technology Summit (WSTS) was held virtually and was organized by International Solar Alliance (ISA) along with the Federation of Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI). It served as a convenor of ISA Global Leadership Taskforce on Innovation and to focus on new technologies and innovation in the field of solar power.

The summit was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the session was addressed by luminaries such as Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, Union Commerce and Industry Minister & Railways Minister Piyush Goyal, President of the ISA Assembly, and India’s Power and New & Renewable Energy Minister Raj Kumar Singh, and K Vijay Raghavan, principal scientific adviser to the Government of India.

The virtual summit witnessed more than 26000 registered participants from 149 countries and is expected to feature highly sustainable and affordable clean energy by showcasing innovative nextgeneration technology in solar power.

The ISA was given a mandate of nodal agency for implementing for India’s global electricity grid plan. For this, the summit also initiated the tripartite agreement between the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, the World Bank, and ISA.

The inaugural addresses were followed by the Global CEOs session that witnessed the head of the world’s largest corporations that contribute towards the promotion of solar energy integration with other renewable and storage energy solutions.

The state-run NTPC also signed a partnership agreement with ISA for helping India’s largest power generation utility to secure solar projects in 47 least developed and small island developing ISA member countries.

The Nobel Foundation has announced the names of winners of 2019 Nobel Prizes.

The Nobel Prizes for 2019 in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economic sciences, peace, and literature have been announced. The awards are recognition of work that advances each of the respective fields. A medal, certificate and a cash award of about $ 900,000 are given to the winners.

Some of the winners include the following:

2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology is bestowed upon William G. Kaelin Jr., Sir
Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza. The trio won the prize for identifying molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen.

2019 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. James Peebles receive half of the award for his work on theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology. The remaining half is shared between Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery of an exo-planet orbiting a solar-type star.

2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is shared between John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino. They won the prize for developing and advancing lithium-ion batteries.

2019 Nobel Prize in Literature is shared by Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke for his influential work that, with linguistic ingenuity, has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience, and by Olga Tokarczuk for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.

2019 Nobel Peace Prize is bestowed upon Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for his work to bring an end to a long running border dispute between his country and neighboring Eritrea

In September 2019, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for the first time, started offering tourist visas. It is for the first time that the ultra-conservative country has opened its gates for holidaymakers. This diplomatic move is a part of a push to diversify its economy away from oil.

The initiative of starting tourism is one of the focal points of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 reform program to prepare the biggest Arab economy post-oil-era. The announcement came at a critical time when the country witnessed a devastating attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure.

Ahmed al-Khateeb, the tourism chief of the country stated that ‘Opening Saudi Arabia to international tourists is a historic moment for our country’.

Initially, the country will accept online tourist visa applications from 49 countries and will also ease its extremist and strict dress code for foreign women.

With this move, the government hopes to draw 100 million annual visits by domestic and foreign tourists that in turn will contribute to 10% of gross domestic product.

The Kingdom has splurged billions in its attempt to create tourism industry from scratch and will generate up to one million tourism jobs.

The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the prominent international organization in the field of tourism, is the UN agency accountable for the promotion of responsible and viable tourism, and considers tourism as a dynamic force to foster economic development, inclusive growth and environmental sustainability and offers headship and direction to the sector in promoting knowledge and tourism policies world over.

In the 38 previous editions of World Tourism Day, the focus had been made on Peace and Dialogue, Energy, Accessibility, World Heritage, Water and Tourism and Sustainable Tourism.

To take full advantage of the tourism in maximizing socioeconomic impact, UNWTO promotes tourism to attain the Sustainable Development Goals, aimed at alleviating poverty and promoting inclusive and sustainable development worldwide.

World Tourism Day, launched by the UNWTO, celebrated on 27th September around the world, is a distinctive occasion to raise wakefulness on tourism’s real and potential contribution to sustainable development.

World Tourism Day 2018 will highlight the prospects provided to tourism, by technological and digital advances and innovations including big data, artificial intelligence and digital platforms, for tourism development.

According to the UNWTO website, the programs will commence in the Hilton Budapest Castle, with a number of UNWTO members participating namely, UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili and Zoltan Guller, the government commissioner and GEO, Hungarian Tourism Agency.

The events will take account of tourism-related meetings and discussions, keynote speeches and messages by eminent tourism personalities, tourism-related events and developments, and will come to an end by an invitation-only dinner on the Europa Boat. The event marks the important role played by technology in the hospitality and tourism industry.

Justice Ranjan Gogoi has taken over as the new GJI on October 3, 2018, after succeeding former GJI Dipak Misra, who retired at the mandatory retirement age of 65. Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra recommended Justice Ranjan Gogoi’s name for the post to the government, who took oath in the presence of President Ram Nath Kovind at the Rashtrapati Bhawan. Ranjan Gogoi became 46th Chief Justice of India. His tenure is slated to complete on November 17, 2019, a day before turning 65 years of age. He belongs to Assam and is the son of former Assam CM Keshab Chandra Gogoi. He started practicing as an advocate in 1978 and was appointed as a permanent judge of Gauhati High Court in Feb 2001, where he practiced on constitutional, taxation and company matters. He had sworn at the Supreme Court as a judge on April 2012. He is credited with being the first person from the North-Eastern states to become the Chief Justice of India. He was also one of the four senior most Supreme Court judges who raised the issue of selective assignment of sensitive cases by recent G JIs to certain judges.

Various important cases were handled by the bench led by Justice Gogoi such as the appeals filed by the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case convicts. He also played an important role in upgrading the Supreme Court creche within the court complex.

In 2018,12 new laureates have been awarded Nobel Prize for accomplishments that have done the greatest good to mankind. The award, Nobel Peace Prize, is administered by the Norwegian Nobel Committee and is given by a committee of five people, which is elected by the Parliament of Norway. The Nobel Peace Prize award includes a medal, a diploma, and finances/funds. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel; the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute bestows the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; and the Swedish Academy grants the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 was awarded for path-breaking inventions in the area of laser physics jointly to Arthur Ashkin for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems and to Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their process of generating high- intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018 has been bestowed to James P Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their outstanding efforts in discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation. Their works are considered an important milestone in the treatment of cancer.

The flightless elephant birds of Madagascar, Vorombe titan, have not been a lucky species. Relentless human interference resulted in the extinction of the species in the 17th century. Weighing 1,000 pounds and standing nearly 10 feet tall, the bird’s designation as the largest bird to roam the earth was challenged by the discovery of Dromornis stirtoni, an unrelated Australian giant that vanished over 20,000 years ago. After heavy debate and some recent revelations, however, the vegetarian elephant bird’s title as the largest has been restored. The bird had four species across three genera — Mullerornis, Vorombe, and Aepyornis. While their geographical proximity is closer to the ostrich, their closest known relative is actually the kiwi.