31-MAY is celebrated as World No Tobacco Day.

World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) is observed around the world every year on May 31. It is intended to encourage a 24-hour period of abstinence from all forms of tobacco consumption around the globe. The day is further intended to draw attention to the widespread prevalence of tobacco use and to negative health effects, which currently lead to nearly 6 million deaths each year worldwide, including 600,000 of which are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke. The member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) created World No Tobacco Day in 1987. In the past twenty years, the day has been met with both enthusiasm and resistance around the globe from governments, public health organizations, smokers, growers, and the tobacco industry.

31-MAY-2006 :- Death Of Raymond Davis , Nobel Prize winner.

Raymond (Ray) Davis, Jr. 

(October 14, 1914 – May 31, 2006) was an American chemist, physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics.

Davis spent most of the war years at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah observing the results of chemical weapons tests and exploring the Great Salt Lake basin for evidence of its predecessor, Lake Bonneville.

Upon his discharge from the army in 1946, Davis went to work at Monsanto's Mound Laboratory, in Miamisburg, Ohio, doing applied radio chemistry of interest to the United States Atomic Energy Commission. In 1948, he joined Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was dedicated to finding peaceful uses for nuclear power.

Davis reports that he was asked "to find something interesting to work on," and dedicated his career to the study of neutrinos, particles which had been predicted to explain the process of beta decay, but whose separate existence had not been confirmed. Davis investigated the detection of neutrinos by beta decay, the process by which a neutrino brings enough energy to a nucleus to make certain stable isotopes into radioactive ones. Since the rate for this process is very low, the number of radioactive atoms created in neutrino experiments is very small, and Davis began investigating the rates of processes other than beta decay that would mimic the signal of neutrinos. Using barrels and tanks of carbon tetrachloride as detectors, Davis characterized the rate of the production of Argon as a function of altitude and as a function of depth underground. He deployed a detector containing chlorine atoms at the Brookhaven Reactor in 1954 and later one of the reactors at Savannah River. These experiments failed to detect a surplus of radioactive argon when the reactors were operating over when the reactors were shut down, and this was taken as the first experimental evidence that neutrinos causing the chlorine reaction, and anti neutrinos produced in reactors, were distinct. Detecting neutrinos proved considerably more difficult than not detecting anti neutrinos. Davis was the lead scientist behind the Homestake Experiment, the large-scale radio chemical neutrino detector which first detected evidence of neutrinos from the sun.

He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 with Japanese physicist Masatoshi Koshiba and American Riccardo Giacconi for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos, looking at the solar neutrino problem in the Homestake Experiment. He was 88 years old when awarded the prize.

31-MAY-1986 :- Death Of Leo James Rainwater , Nobel Prize winner.

Leo James Rainwater 

(December 9, 1917 – May 31, 1986) was an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei.

During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs. In 1949, he began developing his theory that, contrary to what was then believed, not all atomic nuclei are spherical. His ideas were later tested and confirmed by Aage Bohr's and Ben Mottelson's experiments. He also contributed to the scientific understanding of X-rays and participated in the United States Atomic Energy Commission and naval research projects.

Rainwater joined the physics faculty at Columbia in 1946, where he reached the rank of full professor in 1952 and was named Pupin Professor of Physics in 1982. He received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for Physics in 1963 and in 1975 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection".

31-MAY-1976 :- Death Of Jacques Monod , Nobel Prize winner.

Jacques Lucien Monod 

(9 February 1910 – 31 May 1976) was a French biologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and Andre Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis".

Monod (along with François Jacob) is famous for his work on the E. coli lac operon, which encodes proteins necessary for the transport and breakdown of the sugar lactose (lac). From their own work and the work of others, he and Jacob came up with a model for how the levels of some proteins in a cell are controlled. In their model, the manufacture of proteins, such as the ones encoded within the lac (lactose) operon, is prevented when a repressor, encoded by a regulatory gene, binds to its operator, a specific site on the DNA next to the genes encoding the proteins. It is now known that repressor bound to the operator physically blocks RNA polymerase from binding to the promoter, the site where transcription of the adjacent genes begins.

Study of the control of expression of genes in the lac operon provided the first example of a transcriptional regulation system. He also suggested the existence of mRNA molecules that link the information encoded in DNA and proteins. Monod is widely regarded as one of the founders of molecular biology. Monod's interest in the lac operon originated from his doctoral dissertation, for which he studied the growth of bacteria in culture media containing two sugars.

31-MAY-1963 :- Birth Of Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary.

Viktor Mihály Orbán
(born 31 May 1963) is the Prime Minister of Hungary and the president of the national conservative ruling party Fidesz. He was a vice chairman in the Liberal International from 1992 to 2000, a Vice President in the European People's Party from 2002 to 2012 and the Prime Minister of Hungary from 1998 to 2002. Since 2010, Orbán has been the Prime Minister of Hungary with a two-thirds majority of the seats in the Parliament of Hungary, which his party received in both the 2010 and the 2014 elections. After a 2015 by-election, the party lost its two-thirds super majority needed for changing the Constitution, while still retaining a simple majority.

At the age of 14 and 15, he was a secretary of the communist youth organisation (KISZ) of his secondary grammar school. In 1988, Orbán was one of the founding members of Fidesz. The first members were mostly students who opposed the Communist regime. On 16 June 1989, Orbán gave a speech in Heroes' Square, Budapest, on the occasion of the reburial of Imre Nagy and other national martyrs of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In his speech he demanded free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The speech brought him wide national and political acclaim. In summer 1989 he took part in the Opposition Roundtable.

Three years later, he became leader of Fidesz. Under his leadership, Fidesz transformed from a radical student organization to a center-right people's party. In September 1992, he was elected vice chairman of the Liberal International. In November 2000, however, Fidesz left the Liberal International and joined the European People's Party. During the time, Orbán worked hard to unite the center-right parties in Hungary. At the EPP's Congress in Estoril in October 2002, he was elected Vice President.

31-MAY-1945 :- Birth Of Laurent Gbagbo , President Of Ivorie.

Laurent Gbagbo

(born 31 May 1945) was the President of Côte d'Ivoire from 2000 until his arrest in April 2011.

A historian by profession, as well as an amateur chemist and physicist, Gbagbo was imprisoned in the early 1970s and again in the early 1990s, and he lived in exile in France during much of the 1980s as a result of his union activism. Gbagbo founded the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) in 1982 and ran unsuccessfully for President against Félix Houphouët-Boigny at the start of multi-party politics in 1990. He also won a seat in the National Assembly of Côte d'Ivoire in 1990.

Gbagbo claimed victory after Robert Guéï, head of a military junta, barred other leading politicians from running in the October 2000 presidential election. The Ivorian people took to the streets, toppling Guéï. Gbagbo was then installed as President.

Following the 2010 presidential election, Gbagbo challenged the vote count, alleging fraud. He called for the annulment of results from nine of the country's regions. Alassane Ouattara was declared the winner and was recognized as such by election observers, the international community, the African Union (AU), and the Economic Community of West African States. However, the Constitutional Council, which according to Article 94 of the Ivorian Constitution both determines disputes in and proclaims the results of Presidential elections, declared that Gbagbo had won. After a short period of civil conflict, Gbagbo was arrested by backers of Alassane Ouattara, supported by French Forces of "Operation Unicorn". In November 2011, he was extradited to the International Criminal Court, becoming the first head of state to be taken into the court's custody.

31-MAY-1941 :- Birth Of Louis Ignarro , Nobel Prize winner.

Louis J. Ignarro 

(born May 31, 1941) is an American pharmacologist. For demonstrating the signaling properties of nitric oxide, he was co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert F. Furchgott and Ferid Murad.

Currently, he is professor of pharmacology at the UCLA School of Medicine's department of molecular and medical pharmacology in Los Angeles, which he joined in 1985. Before relocating to California, he was a professor of pharmacology at Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, for 12 years. Ignarro has also previously worked as a staff scientist, research department, for the pharmaceutical division of CIBA-GEIGY Corporation in New York.

Ignarro has published numerous research articles. He received the Basic Research Prize of the American Heart Association in 1998. This was in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advancement of cardiovascular science. That same year, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and the following year, into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Because nitric oxide is indirectly involved in the action of this drug, he is sometimes referred to as the "Father of Viagra".

He is the founder of the Nitric Oxide Society, and founder and editor-in-chief of Nitric Oxide Biology and Chemistry. Ignarro holds a B.S. in pharmacy, Columbia University, 1962, and a Ph.D. in pharmacology, University of Minnesota, School of Medicine, 1966. He also received a postdoctoral fellowship in chemical pharmacology from National Institutes of Health in 1968. He is a member of the scientific committee of Nicox, a French pharmaceutical company, a member of the Board of Directors of Antibe Therapeutics, a Canadian drug discovery company, a member of the Board of Directors of Operation USA, a non-profit organization, and a member of the Nutritional Advisory Board for Herba life, a for-profit nutrition and weight-management company.

31-MAY-1935 :- Birth Of Jim Bolger , Prime Minister Of New Zealand.

James Brendan "Jim" Bolger
(born 31 May 1935) was the 35th Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1990 to 1997. Bolger was elected on the promise of delivering a "Decent Society" following the previous Labour government's economic reforms, known as Rogernomics. Shortly after taking office, his government was forced to bail out the Bank of New Zealand and as a result reneged on a number of promises made during the election campaign. His term in office saw the introduction of the MMP electoral system in 1996.

Bolger entered politics in 1972 as the New Zealand National Party Member of Parliament for King Country, a newly created electorate in the rural western portion of North Island. This electorate is traditional National territory, and Bolger won easily. He represented this electorate, renamed Taranaki-King Country in 1996, until his retirement in 1998. In 1975 he was made a cabinet minister under Prime Minister Rob Muldoon, first as New Zealand's Minister of Fisheries and Associate Minister of Agriculture (1977), later as Minister of Labour following the 1978 election.

After the defeat of National at the 1984 general elections, Bolger and deputy leader Jim McLay challenged Muldoon for the leadership of the party. McLay succeeded and named Bolger as deputy leader. However, in 1986 Bolger successfully challenged McLay's leadership. Following an unsuccessful election in1987, National under Bolger capitalized on anger at the Labor government's neoliberal reforms (Rogernomics) to win the biggest majority government in New Zealand history in1990. As a result, Bolger became Prime Minister at the age of 55.

31-MAY-1932 :- Birth Of Jay Glenn Miner , Developing Multimedia Chips.

Jay Glenn Miner 

(May 31, 1932 – June 20, 1994) was an American integrated circuit designer, known primarily for developing multimedia chips for the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit family and as the "father of the Amiga". He received a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1959.

Miner started in the electronics industry with a number of designs in the medical world, including a remote-control pacemaker.

31-MAY-1931 :- Birth Of John Robert Schrieffer , Nobel Prize winner.

John Robert Schrieffer 
(born May 31, 1931) is an American physicist and, with John Bardeen and Leon N Cooper, recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing the BCS theory, the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity.

31-MAY-1911 :- Birth Of Maurice Allais, Nobel Prize winner.

Maurice Félix Charles Allais 
(31 May 1911 – 9 October 2010) was a French economist, and was the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources."

Born in Paris, France, Allais attended the Lycée Lakanal, graduated from the École Polytechnique in Paris and studied at the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris. His academic and non-academic posts have included being Professor of Economics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (since 1944) and Director of its Economic Analysis Centre (since 1946). In 1949 he received a Doctor-Engineer title from the University of Paris, Faculty of Science. He also held teaching positions at various institutions, including at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

As an economist he made contributions to decision theory, monetary policy and other areas. He was reluctant to write in or translate his work into English, and many of his major contributions became known to the dominant anglophone community only when they were independently rediscovered or popularized by English-speaking economists. For example, in one of his major works, Économie et Intérêt (1947), he introduced the first overlapping generations model (later popularized by Paul Samuelson in 1958), introduced the golden rule of optimal growth (later popularized by Edmund Phelps) or described the transaction demand for money rule (later found in William Baumol's work). He was also responsible for early work in Behavioral economics, which in the US is generally attributed to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Allais attended the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, but alone among the attendees, refused to sign the statement of aims due a disagreement over the extent of property rights.

His name is particularly associated with what is commonly known as the Allais paradox, a decision problem he first presented in 1953 which contradicts the expected utility hypothesis.

In 1992, Maurice Allais criticized the Maastricht Treaty for its excessive emphasis on free trade. He also expressed reservations on the single European currency. In 2005, he expressed similar reservations concerning the European constitution.

31-MAY-1887 :- Birth Of Saint John Perse , Nobel Prize Winner.

Saint-John Perse 
(31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.

31-MAY-1883 :- Birth Of Lauri Kristian Relander , President Of Finland.

Lauri Kristian Relander 
(May 31, 1883 – February 9, 1942) was the second President of Finland (1925–1931). A prominent member of the Agrarian League, he served as a member of Parliament, and as Speaker, before his election as President.

After independence, his political career went well. He was a prominent member of his party, and served on a number of parliamentary committees. Relander was elected as Speaker of the Eduskunta for its 1919 session and part of its 1920 session. Later that year he was appointed Governor of the Province of Viipuri. However, in the 1920s he did not have enough support in his own party to become a minister.

In 1925, Relander was nominated as his party's candidate for that year's presidential election – his nomination only being confirmed just days before election day. Relander was only 41 at the time, and his nomination came as a surprise. It was further guaranteed by the fact that some of the party's key figures, such as Santeri Alkio and Kyösti Kallio, declined to stand. Relander was elected in the third ballot of the electoral college, defeating the National Progressive Party candidate Risto Ryti by 172 votes to 109. He was elected largely due to the fact that he attracted less opposition than Risto Ryti. According to some contemporaries, at least the Swedish People's Party electors more eagerly voted for Relander, because his wife happened to be a Finland Swede. This story may be partly apocryphal, because also Ryti had a Finland-Swedish wife. On the other hand, Ryti had campaigned as a "Finnish peasant's son." Strong right-wing opposition to the outgoing Progressive (liberal) President Ståhlberg, Ryti's membership in the same party, and at least some career politicians' desire for a more approachable and less independent President may partly explain Relander's victory. Two other important factors should be mentioned: Relander was an active member of the "Suojeluskunta" (Civil Guard) voluntary military organization and he accepted the right-wing worldview typical of White veterans of the Civil War clearly more wholeheartedly than Ryti did. Also as people, Relander and Ryti were notably different: despite having a doctorate, Relander was a much more talkative and social person than the intellectual and thoughtful Ryti.

31-MAY-1852 :- Birth Of Julius Richard Petri , Inventor Of Petri Dish.

Julius Richard Petri 
(May 31, 1852 – December 20, 1921) was a German microbiologist who is generally credited with inventing the Petri dish while working as assistant to pioneering bacteriologist Robert Koch.

Petri dishes are often used to make plates that are used for microbiology studies. The dish is partially filled with warm liquid containing agar, and a mixture of specific ingredients that may include nutrients, blood, salts, carbohydrates, dyes, indicators, amino acids and antibiotics. After the agar cools and solidifies, the dish is ready to receive a microbe-laden sample in a process known as inoculation or "plating." For virus or phage cultures, a two-step inoculation is needed: bacteria are grown first to provide hosts for the viral inoculum.

Often, the bacterial sample is diluted on the plate by a process called "streaking": a sterile plastic stick, or a wire loop which has been sterilized by heating is used to take the first sample, and make a streak on the agar dish. Then a fresh stick, or a newly sterilized loop, passes through that initial streak, and spreads the plated bacteria onto the dish. This is repeated a third, and sometimes a fourth time, resulting in individual bacterial cells that are isolated on the plate, which then divide and grow into single "clonal" bacterial colonies.

Petri plates are sometimes incubated upside down (agar on top) to lessen the risk of contamination from settling airborne particles and to prevent water condensation from accumulating and disturbing the cultured microbes.

Scientists have long been growing cells in natural and synthetic matrix environments to elicit phenotypes that are not expressed on conventionally rigid substrates. Unfortunately, growing cells either on or within soft matrices can be an expensive, labor-intensive, and impractical undertaking

31-MAY-1683 :- Birth Of Jean Pierre Christin , Invented Celsius Thermometer.

Jean-Pierre Christin 

(May 31, 1683  – January 19, 1755) was a French physicist, mathematician, astronomer and musician. His proposal to reverse the Celsius thermometer scale (from water boiling at 0 degrees and ice melting at 100 degrees, to water boiling at 100 degrees and ice melting at 0 degrees) was widely accepted and is still in use today.

Christin was born in Lyon. He was a founding member of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon and served as its Permanent Secretary from 1713 until 1755. His thermometer was known in France before the Revolution as the thermometer of Lyon. One of these thermometers was kept at Science Museum in London.

31-MAY-1469 :- Birth Of Manuel I , King Of Portugal.

Manuel I
( 31 May 1469 – 13 December 1521), the Fortunate, King of Portugal and the Algarves was the son of Infante Ferdinand, Duke of Viseu (1433–70) by his wife, Infanta Beatrice of Portugal. His name is associated with a period of Portuguese civilization distinguished by significant achievements both in political affairs and the arts. In spite of its small size and population in comparison to the great land powers of Europe, it was able to acquire an overseas empire of vast proportions and with a global dimension, for the first time in history, during Manuel's reign.

31-MAY-1981 :- Burning Of The Jaffna Library.

The burning of the Jaffna library 
was an important event in the Sri Lankan civil war. An organized mob of Sinhalese origin went on a rampage on the nights of May 31 to June 1, 1981, burning the Jaffna Public Library. It was one of the most violent examples of ethnic biblioclasm of the 20th century. At the time of its destruction, the library was one of the biggest in Asia, containing over 97,000 books and manuscripts.

31-MAY-1970 :- The Ancash earthquake in Peru.

The 1970 Ancash earthquake (also known as the Great Peruvian earthquake) occurred on May 31 off the coast of Peru in the Pacific Ocean. Combined with a resultant landslide, it was the worst catastrophic natural disaster ever recorded in the history of Peru. Due to the large amounts of snow and ice included in the landslide and its estimated 66,794 to 70,000 casualties, it is also considered to be the world's deadliest avalanche.

31-MAY-1962 :- The West Indies Federation dissolves.

The West Indies Federation, also known as the Federation of the West Indies, was a short-lived political union that existed from 3 January 1958 to 31 May 1962. Various islands in the Caribbean that were colonies of the United Kingdom, including Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, and those on the Leeward and Windward Islands, came together to form the Federation, with its capital in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The expressed intention of the Federation was to create a political unit that would become independent from Britain as a single state—possibly similar to the Canadian Confederation, Australian Commonwealth, or Central African Federation; however, before that could happen, the Federation collapsed due to internal political conflicts. The territories of the federation eventually became the nine contemporary sovereign states of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada,Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago; with Anguilla, Montserrat, the Cayman Islands, and Turks and Caicos Islands becoming British overseas territories. British Guiana (Guyana) and British Honduras (Belize) held observer status within the West Indies Federation.

31-MAY-1910 :- The Union Of south Africa Created.

The Union of South Africa is the historic predecessor to the present-day Republic of South Africa. It came into being on 31 May 1910 with the unification of four previously separate British colonies: Cape Colony, Natal Colony, Transvaal Colony and Orange River Colony. Following World War I, the Union of South Africa was granted the administration of the German South-West Africa colony as a League of Nations mandate and it became treated in most respects as if it were another province of the Union.

The Union of South Africa was founded as a dominion of the British Empire. It was governed under a form of constitutional monarchy, with the British monarch represented by a governor-general. The Union came to an end when the 1961 constitution was enacted. On 31 May 1961 the nation became a republic, under the name Republic of South Africa.