The Breakthrough Prizes 2014

 The breakthrough prizes for fundamental physics and life sciences for 2014  were announced at a ceremony at the NASA, Hangar One building, at the NASA Ames Research Centre  in Mountain View, California, on December 12, 2013. This was the second function for the Milner fundamental physics prize -the first one was held on March 20th at the   Geneva International conference Centre, where the first nine 2012 awardees, Stephen Hawking, 6 CERN scientists ( for their role in the discovery of the Higgs particle)  and Polyakov were honored.  For the life sciences, this was the first function and hence, besides the 6  2014 breakthrough prizes in life sciences, and the 2014 breakthrough prize in fundamental physics (Michael Green and John Schwarz), the 11 initial  winners of the 2013 life sciences prizes were also honored.

The function was hosted by Kevin Spacey and had several other celebrities  from the American movie and TV industry including Conan O Brien, Glenn Close, Michael Hall, Anna Kendrick, Rob Lowe and Lana Del Rey. More of interest than the U.S. centric performances, (as compared to the Geneva show hosted by Morgan Freeman), were the Internet innovators and entrepreneurs - the charming and baby-faced Mark Zuckerberg  (of the Facebook  fame) and his wife Priscilla Chan,  Sergey Brin ( the Google co-founder) and his wife Anne Wojcicki, Larry Page (Google co-founder) and Jimmy Wales ( co-founder of Wikipedia), and of course, Yuri Milner, the founder of the Fundamental prize.

The format of the function this time, included  a fancy sit-down dinner, catered by Chef Thomas Keller and The French Laundry, for about 5000 invitees. Re the food, as a vegetarian and not a great connoisseur, I will not attempt to describe the food other than saying that it was fancy, but the  menu   should give an idea!

This was different from last time, when the guests had to go round Geneva in a state of semistarvation (refer Sunil Mukhi's blog). The composition of the invitees was also quite different. Last time, there were many scientists from CERN and from other places in Europe,

whereas this time, the invitees were mainly  Silicon valley entrepreneurs, besides the laureates and their families. The aim seems to be fund-raising for fundamental science and who better than silicon valley entrepreneurs to know the value of fundamental research?

This time, the new horizons prize in physics, awarded to promising junior researchers went to Shiraz Minwalla from TIFR, along with two others. These prizes were awarded at a lunch hosted by Mark Zuckerberg at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto. With no prior notice, the three awardees were given 2 minutes each to describe their work to a mixed audience including biologists, physicists and their family members.  The sartorial splendor of the scientists had to be seen to be believed, and shocked those used to their normal attire. Here you see Ashoke Sen and Shiraz Minwalla, in their full plumage.

The function ended with the announcement by Milner and Zuckerberg of a new three million dollar breakthrough prize in mathematics, whose details will be announced later.

Tailpiece:
A personal highlight for me was meeting Lucy Hawking. I am a fan of her children's science books co-authored with her father and came to know that she is finishing a new one on quantum computers very soon.

This blog post is by Sumathi Rao.

26/11

Lest we forget
What they were dying for
Lest we forget
What they were killing for
Lest we forget
What  the hell it was for

What do we forget when we remember…

Owen Griffiths


This blog post by Neelima Gupte and  Sumathi Rao.

The Mars Orbiter Mission: The Mangalyaan

Right after the Diwali rockets, a real rocket did take off, with a crackerjack payload. The PSLV took off on November 5th  with the Mangalyaan on board. The Mangalyaan, or the Mars craft weighs a compact 500 kilos and reached the last but one stage of its orbit raising manouevures today. There were six orbit raising operations, (including a back up manouevure to compensate for the fact that the fourth orbit raising manoevure did not raise the trajectory sufficiently), with today's operation raising the  orbit to one with an apogee of 192,000 kms and a perigee of 252 km, where it will stay till December 1st, when a final firing will send MOM (as ISRO fondly calls it) into an interplanetary trajectory. The Mangalyaan hopes to enter into a Mars orbit on September 2014, almost at the same time as NASA's MAVEN orbiter, after travelling for nearly 11 months, with a cruise phase of 300 days.

The mission costs Rs 454 crores. Since the earth Mars distance is about 400 million kms, there has been a bit of discussion of how this works out to just over Rs 11 per km, cheaper than auto fares in most Indian cities (especially Chennai). This is actually even less, considering that the Mars Orbiter actually traverses 780 million kms, and also that the satellite costs 153 crores and the rest of the budget has been attributed to ground stations and relay upgrades that will be used for other ISRO projects. Given that the mission is intended to be a technology demonstrator for the design, planning and implementation of an interplanetary mission, this discussion of cost may not even be a relevant discussion. However, the ISRO scientists have had to answer the usual `must we have a Mars craft before there is drinking water in all Indian villages', `what will this mission do that other Mars missions don't' etc questions. They have done an admirable job with their answers. If the mission works well, ISRO hopes to attract contracts for a variety of space related jobs, including the launching of satellites, where they are already considered a reliable agency. As far as the utility of space technology to day to day life is concerned,  the string of satellites that ISRO has launched played a very crucial role in the early warning before the recent cyclone Phailin, due to which the loss of life was minimal in India, unlike in earlier cyclones. As far as the scientific aspects of the mission are concerned, the mission hopes to identify whether the atmosphere of Mars contains methane, as well as to map the Mars terrain. However, the real gains of a mission like this lie in its intangibles, the fillip to science and technology, the capturing of public imagination, the celebration of interplanetary travel. Is this going to be `the little ship that could'? We hope so, good luck, little ship!

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi  Rao.

Update:  MoM's gearing to enter it's MARS orbit, right behind MAVEN
The Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft's main engine was successfully reignited  for four seconds as a trial at 2.30 pm (IST) before the final firing to get into the red planet's orbit early on Wednesday.(22/09/2014)

Pondicherry Reprise

We wandered to the pleasant town of Pondicherry again for a weekend, making the usual excuse, viz. out of town guests. The itinerary followed the good old routine, viz. leave in the morning, shore temple and Arjuna's penance and a good Mahabalipuram lunch, and trickle down to Pondi by evening. The guests got fascinated by all the Mahabs bric a brac, despite reassuarances that Pondi bric a brac was far better (but of course far more expensive!).


Pondicherry delivered as promised. The French quarter was elegant and well maintained. The ashram was serene and beautiful. The samadhi had a peaceful and meditative atmosphere, and a large collection of worshippers, even in the late evening. The ashram had its beautiful champa trees, now supplemented by a spectacular rock garden. The beach was cool at night, but a couple of sights were disturbing, is every kind of tourism a good thing?

 The next morning was a new experience, the Matrimandir at Auroville, with prior permission acquired due to the enterprise of the visitors and the presence of gracious Pondicherry hosts. The Matrimandir is a beautiful place of meditation, where the contemplative vision of the Mother has been encapsulated by the architectural vision of Roger Angier, in a remarkable piece of modern architecture. The Matrimandir is a squashed Cosmic egg, or to the less philosophical, a golden geodesic dome. The interiors are white marble, impeccably maintained, thanks to watchful guardians, all French on the day we visited. A spiral staircase leads to the central dome, with twelve pillars which represent the verities. The pillars are not structurally necessary, the French construction engineer who was our principal guide told us, but were a part of the Mother's vision. Natural light from a skylight falls on a crystal globe, and goes down to a meditation area below, with another receptacle at the centre of a beautiful marble lotus. The meditatively inclined felt the vibrations of the place (guess whose theta waves would not budge?).  The Matrimandir is encircled by twelve small meditation rooms, and is meant to be surrounded by twelve gardens, of which three are presently developed. There's an old banyan tree outside, and green lawns enveloped by a fledgling forest, a far cry from the sea of red mud that we saw when we visited last. Auroville originates in a dream, a dream of world unity, that seems to be developing slowly but surely, an oasis in the chaos and cacophony of the external world. It is a place to see, at least once!


This blog post by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.
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Piṟanta Nāḷ Vāḻttukkaḷ

Madras, that is Chennai, turned 374 today. In 1639, on this day, the British administrators Francis Day and Andrew Cogan, acquired a stretch of land from the Vijaynagar empire which went on to progress from the villages of Madraspattinam and Channapattinam to become Madras, nowadays known as Chennai. While 374 sounds like a respectable age for a city, strictly speaking Madras is much older than that. The temples of Triplicane, Mylapore and Thiruvanmiyur (the Parthasarathy, and Kapaleeswar and Marundeeswar temples) all date from the 8th century. Fort St. George, which was named in 1640 is a spring chicken in comparison.  Either way, good wishes are in order. So happy birthday, Chennai (that is what the header says, thanks Google translator, and we hope it got it  right). We hope to greet you again next year, when you turn 375, when you will hopefully be in better shape (don't start us off on the topic of the current potholes).

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The Pensieve

Aficionados of the Harry Potter series of books will recall the pensieve, the physical receptacle of memories, that sits in Professor Dumbledore's office, with silvery memories darting around on a smoky background, like koi fish in a pond, ready to be plucked out at will, or locked away. However, in our every day unmagical Muggle world, neuroscientists have long grappled with the question of the existence of a physical location of memories, and even more intriguingly with the basis of false memory, viz. the remembrance of incidents that never occurred. In a series of important papers, the most recent of which was published in the 25th July issue of Science, a group of scientists at the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics, have established the existence of networks of neurons that form memory traces (or emgrams) for each experience we have, succeeded in activating them via optical techniques, and also in implanting memory associations of incidents that never occurred.

Early research in neuroscience in the 1940-s suggested that episodic memories were stored in the hippocampus, an area of the temporal lobe of the brain. Electrical stimulation of the hippocampus, undertaken in the treatment of epileptic seizures, succeeded in triggering episodic memories. However, it was not established that the memory traces were stored in specific cells of the brain. To establish this required new techniques, called optogenetic techniques. In a study carried out by Susumu Tonegawa and coworkers at MIT, mouse hippocampal cells were engineered to express the gene for channelrhodopsin, a protein that activates neurons when simulated by light.  They also modified the gene so that channelrhodopsin would be produced whenever the c-fos gene, necessary for memory formation, was turned on. Last year, the researchers conditioned these mice to fear a particular chamber by delivering a mild electric shock (yes, the cells were in live mice. Neuroscience experiments aren't pretty!). As the memory was formed both the c-fos gene and the engineered channelrhodopsin gene was switched on. Thus, the cells encoding the memory (located in an area called the Dentate Gyrus of the hippocampus) were tagged with the light sensitive protein. When the mice were put in a different chamber, they behaved normally. However, when a light pulse was delivered to the hippocampus, stimulating the optically tagged memory cells, the mice froze in fear as the memory of the shock was activated. Thus a direct contact was established between the memory trace and its storage location.

This was remarkable  in itself, but then the researchers went further. They tried to implant false memories in the mices' brains. First, the mice were allowed to explore a chamber, chamber A where no shocks were given. However, their memory cells were labelled with the optically sensitive gene. The next day, the mice were put in chamber B, where a mild shock was delivered, and simultaneously, the cells encoding the memory trace of chamber A were switched on optically. The third day, the mice were put in chamber A, where they froze in fear, even though they had never been shocked in chamber A. A false memory had been implanted (`incepted'). The mice feared chamber A, because when they were given the shock in chamber B, they were reliving the memory of being in chamber A. The mice also retained the fear of chamber B, where the real shock was given. However, they were not as fearful as those mice who had recieved a shock in chamber B, without having a memory of chamber A activated. A similar result had been achieved by Mark Mayford and coworkers at the Scripps Institute in San Diego, last year, using drug induced stimuli.

Now that we have seen the inception of false memories, what next? Steve Ramirez, who is one of the authors of the Science paper, said, `Now that we can reactivate and change the contents of memories in the brain, we can begin asking questions that were once the realm of philosophy. Are there multiple conditions that lead to the formation of false memories? Can false memories for both pleasurable and aversive events be artificially created? What about false memories for more than just contexts — false memories for objects, food or other mice? These are the once seemingly sci-fi questions that can now be experimentally tackled in the lab.'

It is clear that this line of research opens up a whole new area of brain and memory research, and also has implications for legal and ethical issues. Here comes the brave new world! Let's see how it all turns out.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Sao Paulo Summer

The Sao Paulo summer was winter, really. The city is in the southern hemisphere after all. After the first half of May in Chennai, the cold was bracing and refreshing (the rain wasn't!).

Paulistinos tell you there is nothing special about their city, it is just another big city. However, there is no doubt that it is a metro city which is a metro city, with big, beautiful buildings, ranging from
old fashioned, graceful buildings to glass clad skyscrapers, parks, theaters, wide avenues and boulevards, modern and efficient transport systems, and well known universities and schools. The city resembles the major cities of western Europe, but contributes its own South American charm in the form of its unique vegetation, cozy neighbourhoods and vibrant street paintings.

Weekends  in Sao Paulo have a relaxed flavour. Neighbourhood markets, street singers (the one on Avenue Paulista dresses often as Elvis) and people dressed as statues, who bow and scrape in exchange for a few coins. The Avenue Paulista is the main avenue in Sao Paulo, which witnesses everything from the Gay parade in May, to the current street protests. The beginnings of both were interesting to see, even for nervous spectators from half a world away. The gay parade kicked off with Elvis clones (maybe inspired by the Sunday singer), and drag queens in ostrich feathers, a positive army of policemen and women and a hovering helicopter.

The protests were more frightening, one dark rainy evening we saw a long procession with huge banners followed by an even longer ghostly procession of policemen (wearing fluoroscent paint and glowing in the dark!). This was topped by the evening when the metro staff went on strike in some lines, and commuters emerging from Paulista metro station after a convoluted and crowded commute saw a posse of riot police mounted on magnificent horses. This was highly appropriate, as the protests were triggered off by an increase in transport tickets by 20 cents! Of course, the protests aren't about 20 cents, any more than Taksim square is about the location of a mall. However, it is hard to say what they are about, and they haven't died out after two weeks (the fare hike has been reversed). The Brazilian economy is booming, as is the most of South America (Yes,  Brazil, Peru and Colombia are on the up and up. Sceptics say this boom is excessively based on commodities, such as oil and minerals, but optimists believe there is a genuine upswing based on manufacturing and services). The annoyance is about the  inequalities, and the general perception that the voice of the people is nowhere heard. President Dilma Roussef today has proposed wide reaching changes including the formation of a constituent assembly, and the spending of oil royalties on the expansion of education and health care. This is a far more conciliatory response than that seen in, for example, Turkey. It is hoped that this translates into a lasting change that addresses the root causes of the simmering anger that lies under the surface of a happy go lucky nation. `Brazil should not just be about football and models', said a friend. If the current unrest sets its path towards less evanescent forms of achievement, it will have succeeded in its purpose.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.