Some noteworthy aspects of the Nobel prize winners in chemistry

The Nobel prizes in Chemistry were awarded last week for discoveries that enabled scientists to speed up the process of evolution and thus produce treatments for various diseases.

For thousands of years, humans have been selectively breeding crops and animals to tinker with the genetic makeup of their future generations in humankind’s favor. The three new laureates have used modern molecular-based methods to re-create this process in the laboratory and therefore speed the process up considerably.

“This year’s prize in chemistry rewards a revolution based on evolution. Our laureates have applied the principles of Darwin in test tubes and used this approach to develop new types of chemicals for the greatest benefit of humankind,” said Claes Gustafsson, chairman of the Nobel committee for chemistry 2018 and a professor at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden.
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Why worry? We’re doomed anyway

It has become an article of faith among many conservatives in the US that fears of global warming are a hoax perpetrated on the world by a cabal of scientists who are using fake climate models and manufactured data in order to spread alarm and thus get money for grants or some such reason. The Trump administration seems to be fully invested in this belief. But then there was this curious news item about an environmental impact statement issued by the government that predicts that global warming will be even worse than some of the scenarios.
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Dogs as a danger to wildlife

Domesticated dogs tend to be widely loved as companions and I am no exception to this feeling. Hence I was startled to learn that feral and free-roaming dogs may be responsible for the extinction of a large number of animal species.

There are now an estimated 1 billion domestic dogs across their near-global distribution.

Domestic dogs include feral and free-ranging animals (such as village and camp dogs), as well as those that are owned by and completely dependent on humans (pet dogs).
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The strange academic career ladder

In a BBC interview that was brought to my attention by Matt, this year’s co-winner of the Nobel prize in physics Donna Strickland was asked why she was still an associate professor and had not been promoted to full professor, something that I had noted in my earlier post, and she replied that she had never applied for promotion to full professor. Matt asked me to explain the weird academic rank system, so here it is.
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This year’s Nobel prize in physics

The award was announced today and went to three people: Arthur Ashkin (b. 1922) at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, Gérard Mourou (b. 1944) at École Polytechnique in France, and Donna Strickland (b. 1959) at the University of Waterloo in Canada. The press release announcing the winners provides concise descriptions of the work for which they were recognized.
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Hooray! There is no sexism and racism in physics!

This is according to Prof Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University.

Prof Strumia, who regularly works at Cern, was speaking at a workshop in Geneva on gender and high energy physics.

He told his audience of young, predominantly female physicists that his results “proved” that “physics is not sexist against women. However the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside”.
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“It’s not the heat, it’s the dew point”

We all know that some hot days feel fairly comfortable while others at the same temperature feel clammy and muggy. We tend to identify the difference as caused by the relative humidity and this sentiment is often expressed by the statement “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”. But actually, the humidity is not the best measure to use to measure the level of discomfort. A better measure is the lesser-known ‘dew point’. The National Weather Service explains what ‘dew point’ is and why this is the case.
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Lions in India

Until a few months ago, I had thought that lions had always existed only in Africa. But it turns out that not only were lions once roaming parts of Asia, there are Asiatic lions in India even today. Apparently there had once been lions all across the land connections between Africa and India, which makes sense once you think about it since there is no reason why they should have limited their territory unless forced to do so by climate or terrain. This explains why lion metaphors can be found in places like Afghanistan where the political and military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was called ‘the Lion of Panjshir’.
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Short quiz on evolution

The BBC website has a short quiz consisting of seven true-false questions about evolution that seek to challenge many popular misconceptions. Although I am not a biologist, I do write about evolution from time to time so I took the quiz to see how many misconceptions I had. I got six out of the seven questions right.

But what I want to highlight is the seventh question that I got ‘wrong’. I knew that I would get my response to that one marked wrong even as I answered it. Take a look at the quiz and you will see what I mean.

Fun with numbers!

The integers are one of the most studied areas of mathematics and yet we keep keep learning new things about them. Today comes this bit of knowledge: Any positive integer can be written as the sum of three palindromes. More precisely, this is based on a paper Every Positive Integer Is A Sum Of Three Palindromes by Javier Cilleruelo, Florian Luca, and Lewis Baxter that makes the claim that “For integer g ≥ 5, we prove that any positive integer can be written as a sum of three palindromes in base g.”

Here is an interactive site based on this result. It invites you to write down any number, however large, and then watch as it is given as the sum of three palindromic numbers. Go on, try it!

Numbers are fascinating things. it is not surprising that number theory attracts some of the finest mathematicians.