Political stalwarts Sharad Pawar, Murli Manohar Joshi and the late Lok Sabha Speaker P A Sangma, cricketer Virat Kohli and Bollywood singer Anuradha Paudwal were among the 39 people who conferred this year?s Padma awards.

The Von Hippel Award, the Materials Research Society's highest honor, recognizes those qualities most prized by materials scientists and engineers?brilliance and originality of intellect, combined with vision that transcends the boundaries of conventional scientific disciplines. The Von Hippel Award is named after Arthur von Hippel (1898-2003), who was a pioneer in the study of dielectrics, semiconductors, ferromagnetics and ferroelectrics.

Eminent Scientist and Bharat Ratna Prof C.N.R. Rao was awarded 2017 Von Hippel Award. He is first Indian and first Asian to win this honour. The award will be presented to Prof Rao for his interdisciplinary contributions to development of novel functional materials, including nanomaterials, graphene, superconductivity, 2D materials and colossal magnetoresistance at Boston in November 2017.

David Grossman has become the first Israeli author to win the 2017 Man Booker International prize for his novel ?A Horse Walks Into a Bar?. The novel was translated by Jessica Cohen and is published in Britain by Jonathan Cape. The book is an ambitious high-wire act of a novel that shines a spotlight on the effects of grief, without any hint of sentimentality. Since 2016, the Man Booker International Prize awards both the winning author and translator £25,000. To be considered for the prize, books had to be translated into English and published in the UK between May 1, 2016 and April 30, 2017.

The Dronacharya Award, formally known as Dronacharya Award for Outstanding Coaches in Sports and Games, is sports training honour of the Republic of India. The award is named after Drona, often referred as "Dronacharya" or "Guru Drona", a character from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata of ancient India.