Wheeler Island, which is considered the most advanced missile testing site in India, will be renamed after Late Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. For the man who was fondly called the “Missile Man”, this seems like a fitting tribute.
It has been over a month since we lost our beloved Missile Man, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. And every now and then, we keep finding different ways to pay tribute to him and to keep him alive in our memories.
This time it is the Odisha government which has paid an extra ordinary tribute to Dr. Kalam, by naming the Wheeler Island after him.
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik made an announcement about the decision on Monday. He said that the move will inspire youngsters to work passionately and dedicatedly in the field of science. The 2km long and 390 acres big island will now be known as Abdul Kalam Island. The island is located off the coast of Odisha and is approximately 150km from Bhubaneswar.
This is a fitting tribute to the great man since the island is considered to be the country’s most advanced missile testing site.
Wheeler Island was named after an English commandant, Lieutenant Wheeler and has been used to test many successful missiles of India including Akash Missiles, Agni Missiles, Astra Missile, BrahMos, Nirbhay, Prahaar Missile, Prithvi Missiles, Shaurya Missile, Advanced Air Defence (AAD), and Prithvi Air Defence.
Here are a few of them:
Akash Missile Launch from Integrated Test Range (ITR), Wheeler Island
This 13-year-old’s heartfelt and simple answer has touched a nerve around the world. Source: Supplied
WHEN 13-year-old Kinan Masalmeh was asked what to do about the migrant crisis in Europe, his answer summed it up perfectly.
“Please help the Syrians. The Syrians need help now,” he said from outside a train station in Budapest, which has been the scene of chaos in recent days after officials blocked trains out of the country. “Just stop the war and we don’t want to stay in Europe. Just stop the war.”
The simple sentiment — that people don’t want to have to leave their home — cuts to the heart of Europe’s “migrant crisis” that has dominated headlines in recent months, prompting extra spending on security and emergency talks between leaders.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have called it the “biggest challenge” facing Europe today, while European Commission’s vice-president Frans Timmermans said it’s an “unprecedented humanitarian and political crisis”.
However, human rights and migration experts warn the dramatic images beamed across our screens and heated emotional debate mask a key fact that is often overlooked — that although the number of refugees and migrants is higher than in previous years, it’s still not beyond Europe’s capacity to cope.
“From the images we see and the number of people we see it seems like the whole world is knocking on the door of Europe,” said the International Organisation for Migration’s Brussels communications manager Ryan Schroeder. “But this is not the case.”
“Comparatively the European Union has the size, the population, the wealth and the resources to handle these increased flows. If Turkey and Lebanon are managing, one would think the EU as a whole can do that as well.”
Aylan Kurdi, left, and his brother Galib Kurdi were found dead on a Turkish beach after the boat they were in sank. They drowned along with their mother Rehan. Picture: Tima Kurdi /The Canadian Press via AP.Source: AP
More than 300,000 refugees and migrants have crossed the Mediterranean Sea into Europe this year, with 200,000 landing in Greece and another 110,000 in Italy, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
It’s a significant increase from the 219,000 recorded in the whole of 2014 and is the largest displacement of people since World War II. However Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said Europe’s “migrant crisis” is a problem “of politics, not capacity”.
“This ‘wave of people’ is more like a trickle when considered against the pool that must absorb it. The European Union’s population is roughly 500 million. The latest estimate of the numbers of people using irregular means to enter Europe this year via the Mediterranean or the Balkans is approximately 340,000. In other words, the influx this year is only 0.068 per cent of the EU’s population. Considering the EU’s wealth and advanced economy, it is hard to argue that Europe lacks the means to absorb these newcomers,” he wrote online.
Comparing Europe to the US, where 11 million undocumented migrants make up 3.5 per cent of the population, he said “fear-mongering” over the dilution of culture has led to the rise of right wing parties, but this shouldn’t detract from the facts of the debate.
“Those moving toward Europe, though numerous, are manageable. The real question confronting Europe’s political leadership is what Europe stands for. What are the values that will guide Europe in a world whose people are not standing still?” he said.
Last year, 51 per cent of refugees were under 18 — the highest figure for more than a decade, the UN reports. Above, a child crosses the Greek-Macedonian border. Picture: AFP.Source: AFP
UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced today Britain has a “moral responsibility” to help refugees, saying they would accept “thousands more” Syrians direct from refugee camps and provide an extra $219 million in aid to Syria.
“We will continue with our approach of taking them from the refugee camps. This provides them with a more direct and safe route to the UK, rather than risking the hazardous journey which has tragically cost so many lives,” he said in Portugal, adding the country will act with “head and heart” to provide refuge.
Leaders in Europe have been scrambling to formulate a response to the situation that has prompted an outpouring of public emotion after pictures of the bodies of young children Aylan and Galip Kurdi were found on a Turkish beach and beamed around the world.
UNHCR estimates there are 19.5 million refugees worldwide. One in every four of these is Syrian which has recently overtaken Afghanistan as the largest source of refugees.
Medicines Sans Fronteirs has warned European leaders need to come up with an improved system for accepting and assisting people before more deaths occur.
The organisation recorded their busiest day ever for search and rescue yesterday with 1658 people rescued in six operations in the water including many women and children.
MSF Emergency Coordinator on the Bourbon Argos Lindis Hurum said they included a young woman who was eight months pregnant and went into labour straight after being rescued.
“Like any father to be, excited and nervous about the birth of his first child, her husband Joseph did not leave her side. The young couple was medically evacuated to allow Senait to deliver her baby safely in Italy. Our team is now anxiously awaiting news of the baby’s arrival.”
Venus appears as a crescent for the same reason the moon does. It’s because, at times like now, its lighted side – or day side – is facing mostly away from us
Maximus Photography kindly granted us permission to publish his daytime image of the planet Venus, taken on August 30, 2015. He wrote:
On a short trip to Targoviste [a city in Romania], where I was hopefully going to catch the ISS in transit over the disc of Venus (transit duration: 0.02seconds!)
I had the luck of some very good seeing conditions for a short imaging session with Venus.
Unfortunately the ISS transit was a total failure due to technical problems (hard drives, focusing…) despite perfectly clear skies, and good seeing conditions.
Too bad about ISS, but the Venus image is wonderful! Thank you, Max.
Why does Venus appear as a crescent now? It’s because it recently passed more or less between the Earth and sun, in the course of its smaller, faster orbit. This inner world’s inferior conjunction, when it passed 8 degrees S. of the sun as seen from Earth, was August 15. Now the day side of Venus is still facing mostly away from us. We’re mostly seeing Venus’ night side. And thus this world appears through telescopes as a crescent, which will wax larger in the months ahead, as Venus flies ahead of Earth in orbit.
Ujiyaro Bai, a tribal woman from Pondi village in Madhya Pradesh will be addressing the UN World Forestry Congress in South Africa. Ujiyaro has been the force behind leading a movement against tree logging in MP since the past 7 years. Here’s more.
Ujiyaro Bai, a tribal woman from Madhya Pradesh has spent several years working for the conservation of forests in the state. She has been leading the residents of Pondi village, inspiring them to do their bit in making sure that the green covers around them do not recede.
And finally her hard work is getting the recognition it deserves. Ujiyaro has been invited to attend the World Forestry Congress (WFC) to be held from September 7 to 11 in Durban, South Africa.
Ujiyaro, who belongs to the Baiga tribe, started her fight to save forests, seven years back. This was after she saw markings on some trees during her regular visit to the village for collecting leaves. Disturbed by the fact that the trees will be logged, she waited at the location and raised an alarm when some contractors started logging. She called in all the villagers. Since then she has dedicated her life to preserve the natural forests around the Baiga Chakka belt.
Her efforts soon picked up pace when other women got inspired by her work and started an awareness drive to save the trees and warn people about forest fires.
The 2015 WFC will bring many foresters and forest supporters together from around the world, and Ujiyaro will get a chance to share her views with them. The theme this year is Forest and People which will focus on “investing in a Sustainable Future”.Here’s more about the event.
Teachers should regard their vocation as a sacred duty. They have the responsibility to mould the future generations of young students by what they teach, referencing practical examples from the lives of illustrious leaders. Teachers should inspire, and be an example by the way they live outside the classroom. Educational institutions have the responsibility to give to society well educated persons who are competent, who possess integrity and who can be relied upon to serve society with devotion and competence. What gives education its true value and significance is its moral and spiritual content. If teachers dedicate themselves to this noble cause, students will not go astray. I hope teachers will devote themselves to their duties with greater vigour and enthusiasm, and bring about a transformation in the students so that they become useful and worthy citizens.
I once saw a high school teacher lead a simple, powerful exercise to teach his class about privilege and social mobility. He started by giving each student a scrap piece of paper and asked them to crumple it up.
Then he moved the recycling bin to the front of the room.
He said, “The game is simple — you all represent the country’s population. And everyone in the country has a chance to become wealthy and move into the upper class.”
“To move into the upper class, all you must do is throw your wadded-up paper into the bin while sitting in your seat.”
The students in the back of the room immediately piped up, “This is unfair!” They could see the rows of students in front of them had a much better chance.
Everyone took their shots, and — as expected — most of the students in the front made it (but not all) and only a few students in the back of the room made it.
He concluded by saying, “The closer you were to the recycling bin, the better your odds. This is what privilege looks like. Did you notice how the only ones who complained about fairness were in the back of the room?”
“By contrast, people in the front of the room were less likely to be aware of the privilege they were born into. All they can see is 10 feet between them and their goal.”
“Your job — as students who are receiving an education — is to be aware of your privilege. And use this particular privilege called “education” to do your best to achieve great things, all the while advocating for those in the rows behind you.”
This view combines information from two instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to map color-coded composition over the shape of the ground in a small portion of the Nili Fossae plains region of Mars’ northern hemisphere.
This site is part of the largest known carbonate-rich deposit on Mars. In the color coding used for this map, green indicates a carbonate-rich composition, brown indicates olivine-rich sands, and purple indicates basaltic composition.
Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on early Mars reacted with surface rocks to form carbonate, thinning the atmosphere by sequestering the carbon in the rocks.
An analysis of the amount of carbon contained in Nili Fossae plains estimated the total at no more than twice the amount of carbon in the modern atmosphere of Mars, which is mostly carbon dioxide. That is much more than in all other known carbonate on Mars, but far short of enough to explain how Mars could have had a thick enough atmosphere to keep surface water from freezing during a period when rivers were cutting extensive valley networks on the Red Planet. Other possible explanations for the change from an era with rivers to dry modern Mars are being investigated.
This image covers an area approximately 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) wide. A scale bar indicates 500 meters (1,640 feet). The full extent of the carbonate-containing deposit in the region is at least as large as Delaware and perhaps as large as Arizona.
The color coding is from data acquired by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), in observation FRT0000C968 made on Sept. 19, 2008. The base map showing land shapes is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. It is one product from HiRISE observation ESP_010351_2020, made July 20, 2013. Other products from that observation are online at http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_032728_2020.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been using CRISM, HiRISE and four other instruments to investigate Mars since 2006. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, led the work to build the CRISM instrument and operates CRISM in coordination with an international team of researchers from universities, government and the private sector. HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson, and was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colorado.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the orbiter and collaborates with JPL to operate it.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL/Univ. of Arizona
Jyoti is a thalassemia patient. But, she says, she is more than an illness—she believes in her identity as a novelist, a blogger, a speaker, and a woman.
Jyoti’s childhood was different in many ways. She remembers reading books under a small lamp while her sisters slept. She also remembers going for regular blood transfusion while her friends went to school.
Jyoti Arora was three months old when she was detected with thalassemia, which was long before she understood the full meaning of her ailment. Her parents, though shell shocked, wanted Jyoti to have a happy and fulfilling childhood.
They sent her to the same school that all the neighbourhood children went to. Her school was disrupted often, and for days together, when she had to be admitted to the hospital.
This continued for a few years and when Jyoti was in Class 7, she had to drop out of school. This was a huge setback. But Jyoti was not going to let her illness win over her. She not only completed her school through correspondence but also got a Master’s in English and Applied Psychology.
Jyoti loved reading. Books were her best friends and she devoured every genre; she would submerge herself in classics that were written hundreds of years ago. She would dream about stories, about writing stories, about other children reading her stories. While thalassemia stunted her growth and regular blood transfusions increased the iron content in her body, what did not change was her love for books. She started nurturing a dream, a dream to write her own book.
Jyoti started her professional career as an English tutor, while simultaneously writing articles for a couple of magazines. After that, she worked for a few years as a freelance writer and content developer. Her primary role was to abridge classics and make them suitable for pre-teens to read. She also wrote fiction/adventure books for children. After working in the freelancing space, Jyoti took up full time employment with a US-based recruitment firm where she was awarded the best employee of the year award for 2014.
The battle with thalassemia continued. However, there was no stopping Jyoti. She was convinced that her soul lies in writing and her first novel — Dream’s Sake — was published in the year 2011. –
The novel is based on the psychological conflict of physically challenged people. She went on to self-publish her second novel — Lemon Girl — in the year 2014. The theme of Lemon Girl is women’s abuse and oppression. Both her novels have garnered positive reviews from readers as well as critics. While her love for reading and writing is second to none, she is fascinated by technology too, and writes about various gadgets and products at http://www.technotreats.com.
Jyoti’s undefeatable grit and go-getter attitude have won her many laurels. She was recently invited to be a speaker at an event on World Thalassemia Day on May 8, 2015, which incidentally is also her birth date.
Jyoti used that platform as an opportunity to talk about thalassemia, and today advocates awareness about thalassemia on various other forums. –
Jyoti feels that even today, awareness about thalassemia and its prevention is minimal. Thalassemia is a genetically inherited disease, is not infectious, and cannot be passed on from one individual to another through personal or any other contact. In India, about 3.9 percent of people are carriers. Thalassemia Major patients require life long blood transfusions and costly medicines for their survival. Often, the blood transfusion needs to be carried out on monthly or even fortnightly basis.
Apart from regular blood transfusions and costly medicines, thalassemia patients are also given Desferal injections that need to be infused over a period of several hours. This means that the patient has to keep the injection and the infusion pump attached to the body over a period of ten-twelve hours, several days a week. The only treatment available for this disease is a bone marrow transplant, which is very expensive and risky.
While the treatment of thalassemia can get complicated and expensive, the best solution is to prevent the occurrence of the disease. In fact, a child can be Thalassemia Major only when both parents are Thalassemia Minors. The probability of the child being a Thalassemia Major in such a case is 25 percent and can be detected during the early stages of pregnancy.
Jyoti feels that society at large needs to accept and assimilate people like her in the mainstream. She is not sick or feeble or unintelligent just because she is a thalassemia patient. She, in fact, advocates the importance of considering herself equal to one and all. Jyoti feels that she is more than an illness—she believes in her identity as a novelist, a blogger and a woman.
About the author: Neha Dua is a graduate from St Stephen’s College, Delhi and completed her MBA degree from MDI, Gurgaon. She is currently working with a large Indian MNC bank. She is an avid reader, dance enthusiast and likes to write. Her personal blog can be accessed at: http://www.allexpressions.blogspot.com. In her pursuit to write beyond her personal experiences, she has volunteered to be a writer of happy and inspiring stories of The Better India. –
Earth’s thin atmosphere stands out against the blackness of space in this photo shared on Aug. 31, 2015, by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly on board the International Space Station. The station’s solar panels can be seen in darkness at the right of the image.
Kelly, in the midst of a year-long stay on the orbital outpost, shared the photo in a tweet: “Day 157. At the end of the day, #sunrise will come again. Good night from @space_station! #YearInSpace.”
Take off with Natarajan 