Manos Hatzidakis was a Greek composer and theorist of Greek music considered as one of the greatest Greek composers of all time. His legacy and contribution is widespread among the works of contemporary Greek music, through the second half of the 20th and into the 21st century, he was one of the main proponents of the "Éntekhno" form of music. In 1960, he received an Oscar for Best Original Song for his song Never on Sunday from the film of the same name. Manos Hatzidakis was born on 23 October 1925 in Xanthi, Greece to lawyer Georgios Hatzidakis, who came from the village of Mirthios, Agios Vasileios in the Rethymno prefecture in Crete, his musical education began at the age of four and consisted of piano lessons from the Armenian pianist Altunian. At the same time, he learned to play the accordion. After the separation of his parents, Hatzidakis moved permanently to Athens in 1932 with his mother. A few years in 1938, his father died in an aircraft accident; this event, in combination with the beginning of World War II, brought the family into a difficult financial situation.

The young Hatzidakis earned his livelihood as a docker at the port, an ice seller at the Fix factory, an employee in Megalokonomou's photography shop and as an assistant nurse at the 401 Military Hospital. At the same time, he expanded his musical knowledge by studying advanced music theory with Menelaos Pallandios, in the period 1940-1943. At the same time, he studied philosophy at the University of Athens. However, he never completed this course. During this period, he met and connected with other musicians and intellectuals. Among these were Nikos Gatsos, George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, Angelos Sikelianos and the artist Yannis Tsarouchis. During the last period of the Axis occupation of Greece, he was an active participant in the Greek Resistance through membership of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth, the youth branch of the major resistance organisation EAM, where he met Mikis Theodorakis with whom he soon developed a strong friendship, he had made a statement against the entrance of Greece in European Union In the late years of his life he disclaimed his work, written of the Greek cinema His first work was the tune for the song "Paper Moon", from Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire staged by Karolos Koun's Art Theatre of Athens, a collaboration which continued for 15 years.

His first piano piece, "For a Little White Seashell", came out in 1947 and in 1948 he shook the musical establishment by delivering his legendary lecture on rembetika, the urban folk songs that flourished in Greek cities Piraeus, after the Asia Minor refugee influx in 1922 and until had heavy underworld and cannabis use connections and were looked down upon. Hatzidakis focused on the economy of expression, the deep traditional roots and the genuineness of emotion displayed in rembetika, exalted the likes of composers like Markos Vamvakaris and Vassilis Tsitsanis. Putting theory to practice, he adapted classic rembetika in his 1951 piano work, Six Popular Pictures, also presented as a folk ballet. In 1949 he co-founded the Greek Dance Theatre Company with the choreographer Rallou Manou. At this point he began writing immensely popular "pop" songs and movie soundtracks alongside more serious works, such as 1954's The C. N. S. Cycle, a song cycle for piano and voice recalling the German lied in its form, if not in style.

In 1955 he wrote the score for Michael Cacoyannis' film Stella, with actress Melina Mercouri, singing the movie's trademark song "Love that became a double-edged knife". Hatzidakis always maintained that he wrote his serious pieces for himself and his less serious ones to make a living. In 1958, Hatzidakis met Nana Mouskouri, his first "ideal interpreter", a skilled vocalist who shaped the sounds of his music, it was 1960 that brought him international success, as his song "Never on Sunday", from Jules Dassin's film Never on Sunday, won him an Academy Award and became a worldwide hit. In 1962, he produced the musical Street of Dreams and completed his score for Aristophanes' Birds, another Art Theater production which caused an uproar over Karolos Koun's revolutionary direction; the score was used by Maurice Béjart's Ballet of the 20th Century. He wrote the music for a song which Arthur Altman added English lyrics to and gave to Brenda Lee; the song was "All Alone Am I". In 1964 he released the album 15 Vespers with the famous song "Mr Antonis.

In 1965, his LP Gioconda's Smile was released on Minos-EMI. In 2004, it was re-released, digitally remastered as an audiophile LP and a CD in the EMI Classics collection. In 1966 he travelled to New York City for the premiere of Illya Darling, a Broadway musical based on Never on Sunday, which starred Mercouri, he did not return to Greece until 1972 due to his opposition to Greece's military dictatorship. While in the United States he completed several more major compositions, including Rhythmology for solo piano, his compilation, Gioconda's Smile, the song cycle, Magnus Eroticus, in which he used ancient and modern Greek poems, as well as an excerpt from the Old Testament book "Song of

Nanoco Technologies Ltd. is a UK-based nanotechnology company that spun out from the research group of Prof. Paul O’Brien at the University of Manchester in 2001; the company's development has been driven by Dr Nigel Pickett, Nanoco's Chief Technology Officer, whose pioneering work on the patented "molecular seeding" process has formed the basis of Nanoco's unique technology, Dr Michael Edelman, who joined Nanoco as CEO in 2004, leading the company's growth from a two-man start-up to a publicly traded organisation with more than 120 employees across the globe. Since 2004, Nanoco has focussed its research efforts into the development of quantum dots and other nanoparticles that are free of cadmium and other regulated heavy metals. Nanoco has licensed its technology to Dow, Wah Hong, Merck. Nanoco's head office is in Manchester, UK; the company has a production facility in Runcorn, UK, a US subsidiary in Concord and business development offices in Japan and Taiwan. Nanoco Technologies is unique in the nanomaterials market as a company that manufactures large quantities of quantum dots, in particular cadmium-free quantum dots.

Growing industrial adoption of quantum dot technology by R&D and blue-chip organisations has led to a greater demand for the bulk manufacture of the product. The bulk manufacture of quantum dots provides companies with the platform to develop a wide variety of next-generation products in application areas such as displays, LED lighting, flexible low-cost solar cells and biological Imaging. In January 2013, Nanoco announced a licensing deal with the Dow Chemical Company. Following commissioning of Dow's plant in Cheonan, South Korea, Nanoco received its first royalty payment in 2016. Nanoco has signed further licensing agreements with Wah Merck. At the Consumer Electronics Show 2015, improved backlighting using QDs in LCD television sets was a major topic. South Korean and Japanese TV manufacturers had such TVs on display. From May 2009 the company has been listed on AIM at the London Stock Exchange, but in May 2015 it moved to the main London Stock Exchange market. There is a move towards legislation that restricts or prohibits the use of heavy metals in products such electrical and electronic equipment.

In Europe, the restricted metals include cadmium, mercury and hexavalent chromium. Cadmium is restricted 10-fold more than the other heavy metals, to 0.01% or 100 ppm by weight of homogeneous material. There are similar regulations in place, or soon to be implemented, worldwide including in Norway, China, South Korea and California. Cadmium and other restricted heavy metals used in conventional quantum dots are of a major concern in commercial applications. For QDs to be commercially viable in many applications they must not contain cadmium or other restricted elements. Nanoco has developed a range of CFQD® quantum dots, free of any regulated heavy metals; these materials show bright emission in the near-infra-red region of the spectrum. Nanoco has developed a patented "molecular seeding" method of QD synthesis. Unlike "high temperature dual injection" methods of QD synthesis, the molecular seeding method circumvents the need for a high temperature injection step by utilising molecules of a molecular cluster compound to act as nucleation sites for nanoparticle growth.

To maintain particle growth, further precursor additions are made at moderate temperatures until the desired QD size is reached. The process can be scaled to large volumes, is used to produce Nanoco's CFQD® heavy metal-free quantum dots; the white light LED market is hugely important, with the promise of increased lamp lifetimes and efficiencies paving the way for a revolution in the lighting industry. Colour rendering and efficiency are the two most important criteria for traditional light sources for general lighting; the ability of a light source to illuminate an object's true colour is denoted by its colour rendering index. For example, sodium lamp street lighting has poor colour rendering capability as it's difficult to distinguish a red car from a yellow car. Current white light LED technology utilises a cerium doped YAG:Ce down-conversion phosphor pumped by a blue LED chip; the combination of blue light from the LED and a broad yellow emission from the YAG phosphor results in white light.

This white light appears somewhat blue and is described as "cold" or "cool" white. Quantum dots can be used as LED down-conversion phosphors because they exhibit a broad excitation spectrum and high quantum efficiencies. Furthermore, the wavelength of the emission can be tuned across the visible region by varying the size of the dot or the type of semiconductor material; as such, they have the potential to be used to generate any colour and, more warm whites desired by the lighting industry. Additionally, by using a combination of one to three different types of dots with emission wavelengths corresponding to green and red it is possible to achieve white lights of different colour rendering indexes; because of these attractive features, QD-LEDs are beginning to receive attention from both industrial and academic researchers. In addition to white lighting for general illumination, there are other opportunities for QD-LEDs. For example, green LEDs are not efficient, thus green-emitting QDs on top of an efficient blue LED chip may be a solution.

Amber LEDs suffer from temperature dependencies and thus a QD solution may be applicable. Furthermore, because of the tunable QD emission, it's possible to have near UV-pumped QD-LEDs with combinations

Vasil Zacharka was a Belarusian statesman and the second president of the Belarusian Democratic Republic in exile. Vasil Zacharka was born in a peasant family near Hrodna. In 1895 he became a certified church school teacher and worked at school. In 1898 Zacharka was mobilized to the Russian army and was demobilized in 1902. By that time he was member of a large Belarusian national organization, the Belarusian Socialist Assembly, he was again mobilized in 1904 following the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War and served in the military on several administrative posts till 1917. Vasil Zacharka was an active participant of the Congress of Belarusian West Front Militarymen on October 22, 1917 in Minsk and became secretary of the newly created Central Belarusian Military Council, he was elected member of the Council of the First All-Belarusian Congress that year. After proclamation of the independence on March 25, 1918, Vasil Zacharka held different positions in the government of Belarus. With the Bolshevik invasion of Belarus in 1919, the government of Belarus had to evacuate to Vilnius and to Hrodna.

Zacharka was among the creators of appeals to the League of Nations, Great Britain, France, USA and other countries by the Belarusian government. On June 2, 1920 Zacharka was appointed chief of the Belarusian diplomatic mission to Moscow where he held negotiations with the Russian foreign minister Georgy Chicherin. Zacharka tried to convince the Soviets to recognize the independence of Belarus and to liberate Belarusian political prisoners held in Russian jails. After the Peace of Riga in 1921 the Belarusian government in exile passed resolutions criticizing it and supporting the Slutsk defence action. In 1925 Zacharka managed to prevent the government of the Belarusian People's Republic to abandon its authority in favour of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, despite the fact that many members of the democratic government were advocating this idea. Zacharka served as deputy president of the Belarusian People's Republic Piotra Krecheuski and became president upon his death in early 1928.

As president he protested against the transferral of Vilnius from the Belarusian SSR to the Republic of Lithuania in October 1939. On 20 April 1939 Zacharka sent together with Ivan Yermachenka a seventeen-page memorandum to Adolf Hitler asking him to take into account the interests of Belarus in any future developments. On 28 June 1941 Zacharka telegraphed to Hitler, that he wishes him a quick and decisive victory over the Judeo-Bolshevik regime on all fronts, but when Germans contacted Zacharka during the Second World War, he declined all collaboration with them. Vasil Zacharka died in Prague in 1943 and left a rich archive of documents about the Belarusian Democratic Republic. Галоўныя моманты беларускага руху, Прага, 1926 – захоўваецца ў рукапісе ў Бібліятэцы імя Францыска Скарыны ў Лёндане Беларусь – роля і значэньне на ўсходзе Эўропы. Пратэст Захаркі Прэзыдэнту Летувы – Спадчына №1–1994 Закон аб грамадзянстве БНР ад 14 сьнежня 1919 – Спадчына №1–1994 Галіна Глагоўская "Васіль Захарка – Другі Прэзыдэнт БНР" // Спадчына №1–1994 Васіль Захарка На вернай службе бацькаўшчыне й народу // Спадчына №1–1994