Nucleic acids are biopolymers, macromolecules, essential to all known forms of life. They are composed of nucleotides, which are the monomer components: a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base. The two main classes of nucleic acids are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA). If the sugar is ribose, the polymer is RNA; if the sugar is deoxyribose, a version of ribose, the polymer is DNA.
1953 (MCMLIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1953rd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 953rd year of the 2nd millennium, the 53rd year of the 20th century, and the 4th year of the 1950s decade.
Deoxyribose, or more precisely 2-deoxyribose, is a monosaccharide with idealized formula H−(C=O)−(CH2)−(CHOH)3−H. Its name indicates that it is a deoxy sugar, meaning that it is derived from the sugar ribose by loss of a hydroxy group. Discovered in 1929 by Phoebus Levene, deoxyribose is most notable for its presence in DNA. Since the pentose sugars arabinose and ribose only differ by the stereochemistry at C2′, 2-deoxyribose and 2-deoxyarabinose are equivalent, although the latter term is rarely used because ribose, not arabinose, is the precursor to deoxyribose.
Reinhold Andreas Messner is an Italian mountaineer, explorer, and author from South Tyrol. He made the first solo ascent of Mount Everest and, along with Peter Habeler, the first ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen. He was the first climber to ascend all 14 peaks over 8,000 metres (26,000 ft) above sea level and he also did it without supplementary oxygen. Messner was the first to cross Antarctica and Greenland with neither snowmobiles nor dog sleds and also crossed the Gobi Desert alone. He is widely considered as the greatest mountaineer of all time.
Zimbabwe Rhodesia, alternatively known as Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, also informally known as Zimbabwe or Rhodesia, was a short-lived sovereign state that existed from 1 June 1979 to 18 April 1980, though lacked international recognition. Zimbabwe Rhodesia was preceded by another state named the Republic of Rhodesia and was briefly under a British-supervised transitional government sometimes referred to as a reestablished Southern Rhodesia, which according to British constitutional theory had remained the lawful government in the area after Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965. About three months later, the re-established colony of Southern Rhodesia was granted internationally-recognized independence within the Commonwealth as the Republic of Zimbabwe.
Nanga Parbat, known locally as Diamer, is the ninth-highest mountain on Earth, its summit at 8,126 m (26,660 ft) above sea level. Lying immediately southeast of the northernmost bend of the Indus River in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Nanga Parbat is the westernmost major peak of the Himalayas, and thus in the traditional view of the Himalayas as bounded by the Indus and Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra rivers, it is the western anchor of the entire mountain range.
Unequal treaty is the name given by the Chinese to a series of treaties signed during the 19th and early 20th centuries, between China, various Western powers, and also with Japan. The agreements, often reached after a military defeat or a threat of military invasion, contained one-sided terms, requiring China to cede land, pay reparations, open treaty ports, give up tariff autonomy, legalise opium import, and grant extraterritorial privileges to foreign citizens.
"Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" was the first article published to describe the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, using X-ray diffraction and the mathematics of a helix transform. It was published by Francis Crick and James D. Watson in the scientific journal Nature on pages 737–738 of its 171st volume.
Alexander Rawson Stokes was a British physicist at Royal Holloway College, London and later at King's College London. He was most recognised as a co-author of the second of the three papers published sequentially in Nature on 25 April 1953 describing the correct molecular structure of DNA. The first was authored by Francis Crick and James Watson, and the third by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling.
Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene was a Russian-born American biochemist who studied the structure and function of nucleic acids. He characterized the different forms of nucleic acid, DNA from RNA, and found that DNA contained adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, deoxyribose, and a phosphate group.
A deoxyribonucleotide is a nucleotide that contains deoxyribose. They are the monomeric units of the informational biopolymer, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Each deoxyribonucleotide comprises three parts: a deoxyribose sugar (monosaccharide), a nitrogenous base, and one phosphoryl group. The nitrogenous bases are either purines or pyrimidines, heterocycles whose structures support the specific base-pairing interactions that allow nucleic acids to carry information. The base is always bonded to the 1'-carbon of the deoxyribose, an analog of ribose in which the hydroxyl group of the 2'-carbon is replaced with a hydrogen atom. The third component, the phosphoryl group, attaches to the deoxyribose monomer via the hydroxyl group on the 5'-carbon of the sugar.
Odile Crick was a British artist best known for her drawing of the double helix structure of DNA discovered by her husband Francis Crick and his partner James D. Watson in 1953.
National DNA Day is a United States holiday celebrated on April 25. It commemorates the day in 1953 when James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin and colleagues published papers in the journal Nature on the structure of DNA. Furthermore, in early April 2003 it was declared that the Human Genome Project was very close to complete, and "the remaining tiny gaps were considered too costly to fill."
Günther Messner was an Italian mountaineer from South Tyrol and the younger brother of Reinhold Messner. Günther climbed some of the most difficult routes in the Alps during the 1960s, and joined the Nanga Parbat-Expedition in 1970 just before the beginning of the expedition due to an opening within the team.
Xeno nucleic acids (XNA) are synthetic nucleic acid analogues that have a different backbone than the ribose and deoxyribose found in the nucleic acids of naturally occurring RNA and DNA.
The 2013 Nanga Parbat massacre was a terrorist attack that took place on the night of 22 June 2013 in Gilgit–Baltistan, Pakistan. About 16 militants, reportedly dressed in Gilgit−Baltistan Scouts uniforms, stormed a high-altitude mountaineering base camp and killed 11 people; 10 climbers and one local tourist guide. The climbers were from various countries, including Ukraine, China, Slovakia, Lithuania and Nepal. A Chinese citizen managed to escape the assailants, and a member of the group from Latvia happened to be outside the camp during the attack. The attack took place at a base camp on Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain on Earth. The mountain is popular among trekkers and mountaineers, and is typically toured from June to August because of the ideal weather conditions during these months.
The following events occurred in July 1953:
The Mazeno Ridge is an arête, a long narrow ridge, and part of the Nanga Parbat massif in Gilgit–Baltistan, Pakistan, in the Himalayan range. The ridge is the longest of any ridge on the eight-thousander peaks in the Himalayas. A series of eight subsidiary peaks form the ridge, the highest being Mazeno Peak at 7,120 metres (23,360 ft). All eight subsidiary peaks have been climbed, but a complete traverse of the ridge and ascent of Nanga Parbat was only successfully achieved in 2012, and as of 2019, no other expedition has reached the summit of Nanga Parbat via the Mazeno Ridge.
Soviet involvement in regime change entailed both overt and covert actions aimed at altering, replacing, or preserving foreign governments. In the 1920s, the nascent Soviet Union intervened in multiple governments primarily in Asia, acquiring the territory of Tuva and making Mongolia into a satellite state. During World War II, the Soviet Union helped overthrow many puppet regimes of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan, including in East Asia and much of Europe. Soviet forces were also instrumental in ending the rule of Adolf Hitler over Germany.
On the 1953 German–Austrian Nanga Parbat expedition Hermann Buhl succeeded in making the first ascent of Nanga Parbat, the ninth highest mountain in the world. He reached the top on 3 July 1953 and this was and remains the only time an 8,000-metre summit was first reached by someone climbing alone. The expedition was led by Karl Herrligkoffer who went on to lead a long series of attempts to climb eight-thousanders in the Himalaya and Karakoram.
