Show them the money: The winners of the Kavli Prizes have been announced, and the eight scientists will split a total of $3 million in prize money.

No, these aren’t the Nobels. The Kavlis are a relatively new award created to award scientists whose fields don’t get much recognition in Stockholm:

These are only the second ever recipients of Kavli Prizes, the biennial awards launched in 2008 by Fred Kavli. Recipients in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience and nanoscience each receive a scroll, a gold medal and (perhaps most importantly) a share of the $1 million pot for each discipline [Nature].

1. Astrophysics

The prize recognized three men—Jerry Nelson, Roger Angel, and Raymond Wilson—not for finding new phenomena deep in the cosmos, but for engineering the telescopes to make those searches possible. Nelson and Angel are renowned for their prowess in casting the mirrors for the largest telescopes on Earth; Nelson’s work will go into the Thirty Meter Telescope, for which Mauna Kea in Hawaii was just chosen as the preferred location.

Dr. Wilson pioneered the use of a technology known as active optics, in which computer-controlled supports correct the shapes of telescope mirrors to cancel the distortions caused by gravity, wind and temperature, allowing astronomers to build mirrors that are thinner and lighter [The New York Times].

2. Nanotech

Nadrian Seeman of New York University and Donald Eigler of IBM shared the recognition for nanotech.

Seeman discovered that DNA — the genetic material of living creatures — could be used to construct an assortment of molecule-sized devices and machines. In a recent study published in the science journal “Nature,” Seeman and others showed how they built from DNA a functioning assembly line of molecular robots [AP].

Eigler, more than two decades ago, became the first person to accurately move atoms from place to place. Famously, he used 35 xenon atoms to spell out “IBM”—perhaps nanotechnology’s version of a marching band spelling out its college’s name on the football field.

3. Neuroscience

This prize went for communication across the brain, and Thomas Suedhof, Richard Scheller, and James Rothman shared the accolades. Rothman, of Yale, investigated the vesicles in the brain that move neurotransmitters between cells. Suedhof and Scheller discovered much of the genetics that underlie these structures.

“These three people took the study of communication between synapses and brought it from a physiological to molecular level,” neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University and member of the Kavli committee [San Jose Mercury News].

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Image: Thirty Meter Telescope Observatory Corp; IBM; iStockphoto

The latest episode of Point of Inquiry has just gone up. My guest this week is Naomi Oreskes, science historian and author (with Eric Conway) of the new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. You can stream the eposide here, and download/subscribe here. Here's part of the write up: Through extensive archival research, Oreskes and Conway have managed to connect the dots between a large number of seemingly separate anti-science campaigns that have unfolded over the years. It all began with Big Tobacco, and the famous internal memo declaring, “Doubt is our Product.”
Then came the attacks on the science of acid rain and ozone depletion, and the flimsy defenses of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program. And the same strategies have continued up to the present, with the battle over climate change.
Throughout this saga, several key scientific actors appear repeatedly—leaping across issues, fighting against the facts again and again. Now, Oreskes and Conway have given us a new and unprecedented glimpse behind the anti-science curtain. Once again, you can stream the eposide here, download/subscribe here--and order Merchants of Doubt here.

How do you hunt for extraterrestrial life? You visit other planets, you find new planets, you study our own planet, or you listen.

All four methods came together last night at the World Science Festival when four speakers took part in a conversation called, simply, “The Search for Life in the Universe.” When you put four lively scientists with four different ways of thinking on a stage together, consensus isn’t the first thing to emerge. But the panel could agree on one thing: If you yearn to know whether we’re alone in the universe, it’s a hell of a time to be alive.

1. Mars

Steve Squyres of Cornell University is one of the project leads on the Mars rovers, those endurance robots Spirit and Opportunity that continue sending back Martian data. Spirit may be stuck, but in this week’s edition of the journal Science, Squyres’ team has published a new study based on information the rover found at a rock outcropping called Comanche about four years ago.

Spirit found evidence of carbonates that would have formed in the presence of water. The rover had done that before, but what’s exciting now, Squyres says, is that the chemistry of these new carbonate finds show they formed in water of a more neutral pH, rather than the more acidic circumstances that would have formed prior carbonate finds.

That water no longer flows on the martian surface, but “this points to more life-friendly conditions” billions of years ago, he said.

2. A Second Earth?

Humans have long imagined faraway planets around other stars, Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau said. “We are all alive at this magical moment when we have the technical ability to find those planets.”

The count of known exoplanets now stands at greater than 400, and astronomers have found most of those by one of two methods. There’s the wobble, in which astronomers spy a star jostled ever so slightly by its planet’s gravity. It’s like watching a dance, Charbonneau said, “it’s just that one of the dance partners is 1,000 times heavier than the other.” Secondly, there’s the transit method, in which a planet passes in front of its star and dims the star slightly, giving away its presence.

Charbonneau is also a member of the Kepler Space Telescope team. It launched last year with the express purpose of exoplanet hunting, and at the World Science Festival he predicted it would find a truly Earth-like world in two to three more years (he’s gotten close already). Plus, in 2014, exoplanet hunters will get another assist from this bad boy, the James Webb Space Telescope, a full-scale replica of which is currently on display in Battery Park.

3. Science Staycation

“This is my favorite planet, I have to say.”

Michael J. Russell is the most Earth-focused of the four panelists who spoke last night. And he might be the most convinced that Earth is not alone in harboring life. As someone who studies the emergence of life on our homeworld, especially the possibility that it emerged in the pressure cooker of deep-sea vents, Russell is impressed by the reach and expansion of life here. And that’s a good sign for life elsewhere in the universe.

What can Earth tell us about life on distant worlds? Life, Russell says, leaves evidence of itself in the waste it leaves behind. It accelerates chemical reactions—through photosynthesis, for example. Says Russell: “The question isn’t, ‘What is life?’ What we should ask is, ‘What does life do?’”

4. SETI

Zeta rays. Zeta rays are the key.

OK, I don’t know what zeta rays are, and neither does Jill Tarter, longtime member of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The point is that we’re using technologies and weird physics that we didn’t know about a half-century ago when SETI was founded. Given our location in the galaxy, she says, any civilization that might like to contact us probably has had more time to mature. “We can be fairly confident that we are the youngest,” she said.

Thus, we use the methods we know—like optical and radio signals—to search for alien intelligences. But they might be trying to reach us with zeta rays, or some other crazy thing we haven’t discovered yet. That, plus the great vastness of the galaxy, tells Tarter that 50 years of nothing but silence doesn’t mean SETI is a failure. It means they’re just getting started.

[Read more about SETI's first 50 years in the feature "Call Waiting" in the July/August issue of DISCOVER, on newsstands soon.]

So what if it’s out there?

“First of all, I’m going to take a drink of champagne,” Tarter said.

In case you were worried, SETI does have a plan in place for its response to an alien signal. Tarter says the scientists won’t attempt to respond themselves, but would rather tell the world and try to reach a global consensus for our planet’s next move.

Right… “global consensus.” Tarter concedes that this sounds great on paper and is probably impossible to achieve. But in a socially connected world, maybe we can just take a vote on whether or not we want to tell E.T. we’re here.

That plan, of course, would apply only if we found intelligent life. But if we detected even “pond scum,” Squyers said, the achievement would be monumental. He’s willing to accept that habitable environments proliferate throughout the galaxy. Even in our own solar system, promising locales for life like the moons Europa and Titan lie outside what we would call the “Goldilocks Zone.” But finding that life independently arose twice just in our own tiny solar system would mean to him that the universe is “teeming with life.”

I hope it is.

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A couple of weeks ago we heard news that the Tevatron at Fermilab, soon to be superseded by the LHC at CERN as the world’s cutting-edge high-energy particle accelerator, might not be completely out of surprises just yet. The D0 experiment released results that seemed to indicate an asymmetry between the properties of matter and antimatter, at a level just a smidgen above what you need to claim a statistically significant result. Blogs started chattering right away, of course, but this was big enough news to be splashed across the front page of the New York Times.

The measurement concerns the decay of B mesons — particles consisting of one bottom (b) quark and one lighter antiquark, or vice-versa. If the other quark is a down, the corresponding meson B_d is electrically neutral, as is its antiparticle. They can therefore practically indistinguishable, and can oscillate back and forth between each other. The one difference is that the meson and anti-meson decay a little bit differently; this has been studied in great detail at B-factories, with results that have been very useful in determining values of parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

The new D0 results use a different kind of particle — the B_s meson, in which a strange quark rather than a down quark is stuck to the bottom quark. They measured the relative rate of decay of the B_s and its antiparticle, and found a discrepancy that appears inconsistent — barely — with the Standard Model. In particular, they looked at decays that produced muons or anti-muons.

You would expect that a single collision would produce one B_s and one anti-B_s, and that one would decay into a muon and the other into an anti-muon. But because the neutral B mesons can oscillate into their own antiparticles, sometimes you will get decays into the same kind of particle — both muons, or both anti-muons. If matter and antimatter were completely symmetric, each possibility should happen equally often; 50% of the time you’d get two muons, and 50% of the time you’d get two anti-muons. But you don’t; D0 reports that they see muons more often than anti-muons. That breaks the symmetry between matter and antimatter, and in a way that doesn’t seem compatible with the Standard Model. If the only thing going on was ordinary Standard Model interactions, the discrepancy should be too small to be observed by the experiment. That’s what all the excitement is about.

Like most just-barely-significant results, this one is very likely to ultimately go away once more data are obtained. Indeed, the competing CDF experiment at Fermilab has already indicated that they don’t see the effect. But you never know.

And after that lengthy introduction, what I actually wanted to say is: I find the way that exciting results about matter/antimatter asymmetry are marketed to be somewhat annoying. (I know you are fascinated to hear about my pet peeves.)

In technical jargon, what’s actually being measured is CP violation. Built into the framework of quantum field theory, which is the basis for all of modern particle physics, are three different “reflection” symmetries — transformations with the property that, if you do them twice, you come back to where you started. One is time reversal, labeled T; one is parity or mirror symmetry, labeled P; and one is “charge conjugation”, or matter-antimatter exchange, labeled C. Every one of them was originally believed to be a symmetry, i.e. that the behavior of matter stayed the same under these transformations; in every case, we were wrong and Nature chooses to violate them. We still believe that the combination of all three, labeled CPT, is a good symmetry, but by now we’re a bit more open-minded.

Charge conjugation C is violated pretty blatantly in the standard model. Fermions — “matter” particles like quarks and leptons, in contrast to bosons that are “force” particles like photons and gluons — come in right-handed and left-handed varieties. These are related by parity; if you have a right-handed particle and you do a P transformation, you get a left-handed particle. The weak interactions of particle physics, as it turns out, only involve left-handed fermions and right-handed antifermions; the right-handed fermions and left-handed antifermions simply don’t feel the weak interactions at all. Charge conjugation would change a left-handed electron, which does feel the weak interactions, into a left-handed positron, which does not. That’s a pretty easy difference to detect, so C is dramatically violated in the Standard Model.

But the combination CP changes a left-handed electron into a right-handed positron, both of which do feel the weak interactions. So this is a good symmetry — almost. It turns out that much more subtle effects do violate CP (including the decays of B mesons). Nobel Prizes were handed out for the experimental discovery in 1980, and for the theoretical background in 2008.

So CP violation is interesting — it’s a deep feature of particle physics, representing a breakdown of a fundamental symmetry, for which Nobel Prizes are handed out on multiple occasions. But that’s doesn’t seem juicy enough to some people. Whenever a new result concerning CP violation is announced, it’s never enough to give the kind of explanation I just did. It’s always couched in terms of “Why are we here?”

The point is that CP violation plays a crucial role in baryogenesis, the mysterious process that accounts for the excess of matter over antimatter in our actual universe. Long ago Andrei Sakharov showed that you couldn’t generate such an imbalance unless you violated CP. And baryogenesis is very important — we wouldn’t be here, blogging, if there were equal numbers of particles and antiparticles in the universe.

So in some general terms, the subject of CP violation and the subject of “Why are we here?” are intertwined. But not that much. The logic seems to be something like this:

1. CP violation has something to do with baryogenesis.
2. This experiment has something to do with CP violation.
3. Therefore, this experiment has something to do with baryogenesis.

I’ll leave it to the trained philosophers in the audience to find the logical flaw in that argument. Try substituting “George Washington” and “cherry trees” for “CP violation” and “baryogenesis.”

The point is that the conclusion doesn’t hold — not everything about CP violation is necessarily related to baryogenesis. We don’t know how baryogenesis actually happened — there are many theories on the market, and any of them or none of them may be right. Therefore, there’s no way of knowing whether any particular manifestation of CP violation is in any way related to baryogenesis. There could be lots of different ways in which CP is violated. In particular, there’s no compelling theoretical reason why the CP violation being studied in the decays of B mesons has anything at all to do with baryogenesis. It’s possible — lots of things are possible. But what’s being studied isn’t baryogenesis; it’s CP violation.

So why isn’t that enough? The answer is obvious — explaining why we are here seems to be something that a wider audience can get excited by more directly than studying the details of a slightly-broken symmetry. The only problem is that it’s not true; these experiments aren’t really studying why we are here.

We can’t blame journalists for this one; here is a case where they are just reporting what the scientists tell them, and the scientists are quite willing to be shameless. I understand the motivation for being shameless — it’s hard to explain the details, and the results are legitimately interesting. But ultimately I don’t think it’s right to say untrue things in the name of getting people excited about true things.

I would therefore like to see particle physicists take a slightly more honest tack about the importance of CP violation. It’s perfectly okay to say that it gives us insight into the difference between matter and antimatter — that’s true. And that should be enough! It’s not okay to say that it gives us insight into the imbalance between matter and antimatter in our observable universe; it’s completely possible (even likely) that such a statement is simply false. If we get people excited about what we’re doing by causing them to misunderstand what that actually is, we’re ultimately not winning.

Stolichnaya or Grey Goose, martinis shaken or stirred: Everybody’s got a preference. Vodka may not taste like much—in industry terms, it’s neutral—but any bartender can tell you about the fierce partisanship its different types inspire. This division among drinkers, a new study suggests, could be a result of slight differences in the vodkas’ molecular structure.

Vodka is about 60 percent water by volume, and 40 percent ethanol, an alcohol. The water and ethanol naturally mingle in such close quarters, and some of the molecules stick together in interesting ways.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Moscow State University compared the chemical composition of five common brands—Belvedere, Grey Goose, Oval, Skyy, and Stolichnaya—to see if those water-ethanol groupings always happen the same way. They found that two of the vodkas had a higher concentration a certain cage-like chemical structure, in which five or so molecules of water surround each ethanol molecule. This difference, the researchers say, might explain our preferences for one brand over another. It’s even possible that the act of shaking a vodka martini breaks up those cage structures.

It’s not clear if such a subtle change in molecular make-up could affect taste, or even that those cage-like structures hold together long enough to have much of an impact at all. So for now, it may be wise to take this explanation with a grain of salt—and, while you’re at it, maybe a few olives.

– by Valerie Ross

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Image: flickr / paPisc