#'Asian Nobels'will bring prize-giving up to date Taiwanese tycoon Samuel Yin stunned the world on 28 january with the announcement of the Tang Prizes:
awards that will offer bigger winnings than the Nobel prizes. Yin contributed 3 billion Taiwanese dollars, the equivalent of roughly US$100 million,
to set up the Tang Prize Foundation. The prizes are named after the Chinese Tang Dynasty (ad 618-907.
They will be awarded every two years starting in 2014, to global leaders in the fields of sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, Chinese studies and the rule of law.
Each prize will consist of 40 million Taiwanese dollars (US$1. 34 million) as well as a 10-million-Taiwanese-dollar research grant.
Yin, head of the Taipei-based Ruentex business empire, is known for his generous donations to education in Taiwan and Mainland china.
Forbes magazine estimates his worth at around US$3 billion. He has an undergraduate degree in history and a doctorate in business management,
and made his fortune in property, finance and retail investment. He talks to Nature about his vision for the Asian Nobel prizes.
I have pledged to give most of my assets away, and setting up the Tang Prize has been one of my biggest dreams.
The world was a very different place when the Nobel prizes were established more than a century ago.
I wanted to found a prize to reflect the new challenges faced by humanity#such as climate change, energy shortages, emerging diseases, clashes of cultures and ideas,
and shifting world orders. I hope that the prize will encourage more research to meet those challenges
promote Chinese culture and make the world a better place. It targets areas that have become increasingly important in modern society
but are covered not by the Nobel prizes and other prestigious awards. In addition to the originality of the research, we will place significant emphasis on its contribution to wider society, with the ultimate goal of improving human life.
Finally, most prizes offer just cash awards, but winners of the Tang Prize#either individuals or institutions#will not only get the 40-million-Taiwanese-dollar prize money,
but also receive 10 million Taiwanese dollars for their areas of research. The Tang Dynasty was renowned for its sophisticated cultural and scientific achievements.
It was a time when the fusion of different cultures#Western and Eastern#and the exchange of ideas gave rise to enormous prosperity and self-confidence,
The international committee in each prize category will consist of two dozen or so world-leading experts.
Even in the category of Chinese studies, Chinese scholars may not have an advantage. There are a lot of excellent sinologists in Europe and the United states.##
###I am a firm believer in higher education and scientific development. I set up the Kwang-Hua Education Foundation,
which since the 1990s has offered scholarships to about 120,000 students, including science majors. I am also a key donor to the Kwang-Hua Science and Technology Foundation,
which has a number of prizes for research and engineering excellence. There will be new projects to support studies in life sciences and civil engineering.#
#Overharvesting leaves Himalayan Viagra fungus feeling short Yarsagumba, the world s most expensive medicinal fungus, is in serious decline in Nepal because of over-harvesting,
researchers warn in a study due to appear in the journal Biological Conservation1. Known as Himalayan Viagra'because of its supposed libido-boosting powers,
the fungus can fetch as much as US$100 per gramme on the Chinese market, making it pricier than gold.
and as the country s economy has boomed, the fungus"has enjoyed unprecedented popularity, says one of the study s co-authors, Kamaljit Bawa, a conservation biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
Based on estimates of the volume of trade2 and average retail prices, Uttam Babu Shrestha, the study's lead author, puts the global market at betwen $5 billion and $11
billion per year. The high price and rising demand are driving a fungus gold rush in poverty-stricken rural communities in Himalayan countries,
but the impact on biodiversity and ecosystems has received little attention until now, says Bawa. Native to the meadows of The himalayas and Tibetan plateau at 3
000-5, 000 metres above sea level, yarsagumba (Ophiocordyceps sinensis) is prescribed in traditional Chinese and Tibetan medicine for a wide range of conditions including impotence, asthma and cancer.
The peculiar life cycle of the fungus has earned also it the names'winter worm, summer grass'and'caterpillar fungus'.
India and Bhutan, says Liu Xingzhong, a mycologist in the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Microbiology in Beijing.
On the Tibetan plateau, for instance, the fungus harvest per unit area has dropped by 10-30%compared with three decades ago.
Bawa speculates that other factors may also be contributing to the decline of the fungus#in particular, rising temperatures and less snow in the eastern Himalayas as a result of climate change.
and management plans for sustainable harvest of the fungus. The harvest season, for instance, should be shortened to allow enough fungi to mature
and spread their spores. A rotational system for the harvest should also be implemented, so that the meadow has the chance to recover from human impact,
he says. Without such regulations,"we will soon see the end of the fungus boom,
"It will have devastating consequences for the ecosystems and local economy e
#Coffee rust regains foothold Where there is coffee, there is coffee rust. But the long stalemate between growers and the fungus behind the devastating disease has broken#with the fungus taking the advantage.
As one of the most severe outbreaks ever rages through Central america, researchers are reaching for the latest tools in an effort to combat the pest,
from sequencing its genome to crossbreeding coffee plants with resistant strains. Caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix,
but the Institute of Coffee of Costa rica estimates that the latest outbreak may halve the 2013-14 harvest in the worst affected areas of the nation.
says John Vandermeer, an ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann arbor, who has received"reports of devastation in Nicaragua, El salvador and Mexico.
Vandermeer says that the situation is so bad that the leaves are simply dropping off the plants.
and 30%have no leaves at all. On 22 january, Costa rica enacted emergency legislation to speed up the flow of government money towards fighting the fungus.
Other nations are also stepping up the fight. Last week the Nicaraguan government reportedly declared that it would include coffee rust on a list of special research projects designed to safeguard the country s agriculture.
The fungus first emerged as a significant problem by 1869 in Ceylon#now Sri lanka#before spreading around the world.
Stuart Mccook, a historian at the University of Guelph in Canada who studies the rust,
says that the wet weather in some areas of Ceylon was ideal for the spread of the fungus,
and more than 90%of coffee crops were wiped out in those regions. Faced with an economic catastrophe
The disease is so universal that it"is not going to be eradicated; or the only way to eradicate the disease in practice is to eradicate all of the coffee,
says Mccook. By 1970, the fungus had been detected in Brazil, and severe outbreaks were seen in Costa rica in 1989
a plant pathologist at Costa rica s Tropical Agricultural research and Higher education Center, based in San jos#.#But changes to management practices had brought the disease mostly under control."
"Coffee rust was considered a solved problem by most of the coffee growers and coffee institutes of the region,
"People didn t fear the disease. The outbreak may have taken hold because of patchy use and effectiveness of fungicides.
Nigel Cattlin/FLPAHEMILEIA vastatrix rusts the leaves of coffee plants. And in Africa, Noah Phiri, a plant pathologist working in Nairobi for the not-for-profit development organization CABI,
says that rust has been causing ever-greater problems, although in Kenya, varieties resistant to the rust have held it at bay.
Colombia could be the closest to a solution. Marco Aurelio Cristancho, a researcher at Cenicaf#,the National Centre for the Investigation of Coffee in Chinchin#
has meant that fewer than 10%of plants now need to be treated with fungicide, down from 60%four years ago,
The government has supported also work on the genetics of both the fungus and the plant. Research programmes have started in other countries, too.
At the Federal Rural University of Rio de janeiro in Brazil, Valdir Diola is working to isolate resistance genes in coffee
and to find molecular markers that distinguish between different strains of the pathogen and that could be used to develop tailored strategies for its control.
And in the United kingdom, Harry Evans is working on the genome of H.#vastatrix at CABI in Egham.
In Nairobi, Phiri is using money from the intergovernmental agency the Common Fund for Commodities,
as well as from Kenya, India, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, to screen for resistant coffee plants and to analyse varieties of the pathogen."
"Scientists need to continuously develop resistant varieties in order to keep coffee leaf rust disease at bay, Phiri says."
where it is required to provide local solutions to the epidemics, he says d
#High-flying bacteria spark interest in possible climate effects Ravaged by arid winds and ultraviolet rays,
In one of the first attempts to explore atmospheric microbiology at high altitude, researchers analysed air samples from a six-week hurricane-research mission by NASA in 2010.
A total of 314 different types of bacteria were collected in air masses around 10 kilometres above the Gulf of mexico
bacteria accounted for around 20%of all particles#biological and non-biological#a higher proportion than in the near-Earth atmosphere."
says Ulrich Karlson, an environmental microbiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who was involved not in the study."
"This is clearly a harsh environment.""One of the next challenges is to figure out the role of these organisms,
says Konstantinos Konstantinidis, an environmental microbiologist at the Georgia Institute of technology in Atlanta and one of the study's authors.
Genetic analysis revealed that some microbes in the upper atmosphere are thought related to bacteria to catalyse ice-crystal formation and cloud condensation2.
says Noah Fierer, a microbial ecologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. But Fierer says that more research is needed to understand the relative importance of airborne bacteria,
and after two hurricanes also allowed researchers to study the effects of extreme weather on the atmospheric microbiome.
but 17 types of bacteria formed a core microbiome across all samples. Fierer says that understanding more about the bacterial ecology of the sky represents an exciting new frontier for natural history."
"What s up there, and how does what s up there change across time? These are things we don t know o
#Camera shoots and compresses image in one go Today s cameras take images as'raw'arrays of pixels,
which can take up many megabytes of storage, and then use data-compression algorithms such as JPEG to store the image in a smaller file."
"Why collect that data in the first place? asks John Hunt, an engineer at Duke university in Durham, North carolina,
and a co-author of the study. To design the new device, Hunt and his colleagues used an approach called compressive sensing.
The trick is figuring out what data to acquire, says Richard Baraniuk, an electrical and computer engineer at Rice university in Houston,
Texas."The data-points that matter will be different in a picture of the Eiffel Tower and a picture of your mother,
he says. But it is not possible for a device to know what is important before the data are recorded.
Compressive sensing works by sampling at random##eliminating the need to sift through data ##and it still produces enough information to generate a good image.
In 2006 Baraniuk and his colleagues made the first optical camera that produced multi-pixel images with a single-pixel sensor.
In that device, light is run through a system of micromirrors before reaching the sensor2. But longer, microwave wavelengths#for applications such as airport scanners#require a different approach,
For the latest study, the researchers turned to metamaterials#artificial structures patterned to interact with light in exotic ways.
Whereas a conventional microwave radar system uses a moving dish antenna to collect microwaves reflecting off a moving object
the Duke system uses a stationary metamaterial aperture, a strip that guides microwaves to a single sensor.
But here, the source sequentially sends out microwaves of different wavelengths. The returning waves are collected then by the metamaterial aperture.
As microwaves travel down the metamaterial strip, they interact with patterns etched along its surface.
These patterns prevent light from travelling down the strip depending on the direction it's coming from,
An algorithm compiles data from each wavelength to generate a complete image every 0. 1 seconds.
The group hopes to make a three-dimensional video system by using a metamaterial array rather than a strip.
Today s millimetre-wave airport scanners physically move an array of multiple sensors around a person.
He says that the metamaterial aperture could also be used to simplify radar systems and infrared imaging n
For decades, researchers have suspected that powerful magnetic fields are heating the corona. The Sun's atmosphere is just jam-packed full of magnetic field,
says Cirtain. As the lines of those fields cross and twirl, the theory went, they push and pull the charged gas in the corona, giving it the energy that heats it up.
The problem is that nobody has been able to see the magnetic fields in close up until now. Cirtain and his team have developed the High-resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C
a camera capable of taking pictures of the Sun's corona in fine detail. The imager was placed on board a research rocket at the White sands Missile Range in New mexico
and flown to the edge of space. It took several minutes to fall to Earth, during which time it took a series of pictures of the Sun (see video).
A team member started analysing the data on the drive back from the missile range, and immediately saw evidence of braids in the twists of coronal gas.
The researchers say that their technique could easily be scaled up to store all of the data in the world.
a photo of the researchers'institute and a file that describes how the data were converted.
led by Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, UK, marks another step towards using nucleic acids as a practical way of storing information#one that is more compact and durable than current media such as hard disks or magnetic tape.#"
#"I think it s a really important milestone, says George Church a molecular geneticist at Harvard Medical school in Boston, Massachusetts,
who encoded a draft of his latest book in DNA last year2.""We have a real field now.
For example, CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva, currently stores around 90 petabytes of data on some 100 tape drives.
Goldman s method could fit all of those data into 41 grams of DNA. This information should last for millennia under cold,
as is evident from the recovery of readable DNA from long-extinct animals.""The experiment was done 60,000 years ago
This sometimes led to long stretches of the same letter, which is hard for sequencing machines to read
Goldman s group developed a more complex cipher in which every byte#a string of eight ones
The system encodes the data in partially overlapping strings, in such a way that any errors on one string can be checked cross against three other strings.
Agilent technologies in Santa clara, California, synthesized the strings and shipped them back to the researchers, who were able to reconstruct all of the files with 100%accuracy.
400 to encode every megabyte of data, and $220 to read it back. However, these costs are falling exponentially.
but that will rarely be accessed, such as CERN s data. If costs fall by 100-fold in ten years,
if you want to store data for at least 50 years. And Church says that these estimates may be too pessimistic,
which is unheard of even in electronics. Goldman adds that DNA storage should be apocalypse-proof.
#Japan s stimulus package showers science with cash Three years ago, the picture for research funding in Japan looked bleak.
Japan s flagship K#supercomputer project narrowly escaped being shut down after auditors questioned whether Japan needed to host the world s fastest computer.
Fast-forward to 2013, and Shinzo Abe, head of the newly elected Liberal Democratic party-led government,
he told reporters after a tour of the supercomputer facility on 11 january. Science is a big winner in the government s massive#10.3-trillion economic stimulus package, approved by the cabinet on 15 january.
The stimulus flags up the new leadership s determination that research should pull its weight in dragging Japan s economy out of recession.
and significant boosts for many big scientific facilities (see Big winners)# including#8. 4#billion for data links between the K supercomputer and Japan s universities.
a satellite that will monitor natural disasters and measure atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The extra cash will keep it on schedule for launch before April next year.
Yoshiki Sasai, who has been wowing biologists and non-scientists alike by growing rudimentary retinas, brain parts and other tissues from stem cells (see Nature 488,444-446;
2012), has long been negotiating with the government for facilities to link basic research at the Center for Developmental biology in Kobe, where he works, with clinics and industry.
The budget includes#3. 8#billion for a new building at Sasai s centre, with planned projects being largely collaborative ventures with Japanese businesses.
An even bigger windfall will benefit work by Shinya Yamanaka, a Nobel laureate who developed the first recipe for ips cells.
The Center for ips Cell Research and Application at Kyoto University which he directs, is to receive#4#billion for a building to house research on reprogramming mechanisms and clinical applications of ips cells.
Another#700#million will pay to create a cell-processing centre at the Foundation for Biomedical Research and Innovation in Kobe,
mainly to support Masayo Takahashi, who works next door at the Center for Developmental biology. Takahashi is planning the first trial of ips cells in humans,
in a clinical study set to start this year on the eye condition known as macular degeneration. Other ministries have jumped also on the ips-cell bandwagon.
with#2. 2#billion the health ministry plans to build two centres to provide training on deriving
#180#billion will go towards translating university research into commercial applications, and most other projects are framed around clinical or industrial applications.
#South korea makes billion-dollar bet on fusion power South korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with the US Department of energy's Princeton Plasma physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New jersey.
the##15-billion (US$20-billion) experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, France, under the auspices of an international collaboration.
K-DEMO is intended to be the next step toward commercial reactors and would be the first plant to actually contribute power to an electric grid."
"It is a very smart strategy to take advantage of the experience gained in constructing ITER
says Stephen Dean, president of Fusion power Associates, an advocacy group in Gaithersburg, Maryland. K-DEMO will serve as prototype for the development of commercial fusion reactors.
According to the PPPL, it will generate"some 1 billion watts of power for several weeks on end,
the South korean Ministry of Education science and Technology announced that developing technologies to build K-DEMO would be a priority for the next 10 years,
There was a financial crisis in Asia right in the middle of the K-STAR project, but the government and fusion scientists were steady and serious about getting the job done,
a research fellow at NFRI and a former chairman of the ITER Management Advisory Committee, says that Korea is need desperately in of the energy that fusion could provide."
"Korea has a lack of energy resources, he says.#"#"The population density is high and the country consumes so much energy,
Lee adds, we have a different perspective on fusion energy compared to the United states. ITER has experienced repeated delays
to generate competitive energy, says Thomas Cochran, a consultant for the Natural resources Defense Council in WASHINGTON DC.
He adds that he believes South korea should spend its resources on technologies that have the potential to provide a nearer-term impact on carbon emissions and climate change.
Lee acknowledges the criticism but says that most of ITER's issues were of a management, rather than a technical nature."
and the investment on the research and development has been made based on the estimation of such risks. Moreover, Lee adds,
#Ceramics surprise with durable dryness Coatings that repel water are found in myriad applications#they keep car windscreens clear in storms, for example,
But they quickly wear away in harsh environments, such as the insides of power-station turbines, where condensation reduces efficiency.
As a result, engineers are eager to get their hands on tough materials that are intrinsically hydrophobic.
following the discovery that a well-known family of durable ceramics can repel water. That is surprising because most ceramics are hydrophilic.
When water meets a ceramic such as aluminium oxide the water s oxygen atoms share some of their electrons with vacant electron orbitals on the aluminium atoms,
and the oxygens in the ceramic share their electrons with hydrogen in the water. This binds the two together.
But what if a ceramic failed to accept electrons from water? Then the ceramic might actually be reasoned hydrophobic
Kripa Varanasi, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT) in Cambridge. He looked to the oxides of the lanthanides#the row of metals nestled almost at the bottom of the periodic table, from cerium to lutetium.
The lanthanides'empty orbitals are buried beneath shells of other electrons, which should make them much less attractive to water s oxygen,
thought Varanasi. Proving that sometimes the simplest experiments are the best, he and his colleagues tested the idea by making small ceramic discs of the oxides of all the lanthanides except radioactive promethium.
The team then dropped water onto the pellets and watched what happened. Every single one repelled the liquid.
And cerium oxide#the cheapest and most widely available of the lanthanide oxides#remained hydrophobic even after a two-hour sauna at 1, 000#C,
or a thorough grinding with abrasive silicon carbide. The results are published today in Nature Materials1. Gisele Azimi and Adam T. Paxsona thin film made of a water-repelling ceramic material#here a rare-earth oxide#can help you stay dry.
for example by a student working with Barry Cheung, a materials scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Indeed, most chemists would have failed to spot the hydrophobicity of the lanthanide oxides, Cheung speculates,
Cheung suggests that Varanasi's ceramics were particularly hydrophobic because they had very few oxygen defects-perhaps a consequence of their formation in dry air at high temperatures of around 1,
500#C. Varanasi says that hydrophobic ceramics could improve the efficiency of energy generation. As steam passes through the turbines of a thermal power station
water condenses onto the blades and forms droplets many micrometres across. The rotating blades lose energy as they smash into these droplets, accounting for up to 30%of the inefficiency of the turbine,
he says. A hydrophobic coating made of tough ceramic would prevent films of water forming on the blades,
he says. Another application could be in wind turbines, where films of water on the blades can,
Varanasi is now working with energy and technology companies partnered with the MIT Energy Initiative,
which co-funded his work, to test the ceramics in real-world applications a
#Novel solar photovoltaic cells achieve record efficiency using nanoscale structures Here's how to make a powerful solar cell from indium and phosphorus:
First, arrange microscopic flecks of gold on a semiconductor background. Using the gold as seeds,
grow precisely arranged wires roughly 1. 5 micrometers tall out of chemically tweaked compounds of indium
and phosphorus. Keep the nanowires in line by etching them clean with hydrochloric acid and confining their diameter to 180 nanometers.
A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Exposed to the sun, a solar cell employing such nanowires can turn nearly 14 percent of the incoming light into electricity#a new record that opens up more possibilities for cheap and effective solar power.
According to research published online in Science #and validated at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar energy systems#this novel nanowire configuration delivered nearly as much electricity as more traditional indium phosphide thin-film solar cells
even though the nanowires themselves covered only 12 percent of the device's surface. That suggests such nanowire solar cells could prove cheaper
#and more powerful#if the process could be industrialized, argues physicist Magnus Borgstr#m of Lund University in Sweden,
who led the effort. The promise starts with the novel semiconductor#a combination of indium
and phosphorus that absorbs much of the light from the sun (a property known as its band gap).
Now we absorb 71 percent of the light above the band gap and we can certainly increase that,
Borgstr#m says. The key will be even finer control of the nanowires themselves as they grow as well as the chemical tweaking of the constituent compounds.
At the same time the novel cells could be built into so-called multijunction solar cells#compound devices that incorporate several different types of semiconductor material in layers like a sandwich to absorb as much of the energy in sunlight as possible.
Such multijunction cells have converted more than 43 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity#currently
the highest efficiency photovoltaic devices in the world. More from Scientific American. Such multijunction solar cells are also the most expensive type of photovoltaic,
but they can be made cheaper by combining them with low-cost lenses to concentrate the sunlight onto smaller versions of the cells.
Borgstr#m, for one, suspects that nanowire solar cells will stand on their own once the production process can be simplified,
such as growing the nanowires by applying simple heat and evaporation techniques in future. He explains:
Once large-area structures can be grown, concentration will not be necessary anymore o
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011