The winners of the Breakthrough Prize have been announced

Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science

A ceremony was held in California to announce the winners of the Breakthrough Prize. Billionaire innovators gave away about $ 25 million for breakthrough work in the field of fundamental science.

On December 4, NASA's Ames Research Center hosted a ceremony more like an Oscar: a red carpet, musical numbers from the biggest stars and host Morgan Freeman. Against this almost glamorous background, the Breakthrough Prize was presented, which has been supported by major Silicon Valley investors since 2012, including Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Sergey Brin from Google and co-owner Mail.ru Group of Yuri Milner.

The award in the field of fundamental physics did not become an intrigue this time: a few months ago it became known that the $1 million prize will be shared by Ronald Drever and Kip Thorne from the California Institute of Technology, as well as their colleague from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Rainer Weiss – the key leaders of the LIGO project. Another 2 million physics prizes were distributed among the other 1012 participants in the work of the LIGO detector, which at the beginning of the year managed to register gravitational waves for the first time.

Another 3 million for fundamental physics was received by major researchers of black holes, theories of quantum gravity and superstrings – Joseph Polchinski from the University of California, as well as Andrew Strominger and Kamran Vafa from Harvard. But 3 million in the Mathematics category went entirely to Jean Bourgain from Princeton University – for his huge contribution to the development of matanalysis, combinatorics, higher geometry and number theory.

Five $3 million prizes were distributed among outstanding researchers from the field of life sciences:

• Stephen Elledge from Harvard University received an award for studying the mechanisms of repair – "repair" of damaged DNA in a cell – and their possible role in the development and treatment of cancer;
• Harry Noller from the University of California is noted for creating modern ideas about the "RNA world" as a key stage in the development of life before the appearance of full-fledged cells and organisms;
• Roeland Nusse from Stanford – for the discovery of the Wnt signaling pathway, which plays a key role in triggering cell division processes;
• Huda Zoghbi from Baylor College of Medicine – for studying the genetic and biochemical mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases
• Yoshinori Ohsumi from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who has already received a Nobel Prize this year for his work on the study of cellular apoptosis, has also earned another prize for this research.

In addition, another 100 thousand dollars were distributed among three young physicists and three mathematicians who shared the award in the nomination "New Horizons". A separate award was given to schoolgirls – in the Breakthrough Junior Challenge nomination, the participants of which are invited to show their own understanding of the basic concepts of science in an educational video, 18-year-old Antonella Masini from Peru and 17-year-old Deanna See from Singapore won.

Antonella spoke about the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, and Dinna – about the problem of antibiotic resistance. In addition to 250 thousand for training, high school students won 50 thousand teachers who worked with them on these projects, as well as complete equipment of laboratories for their schools worth 100 thousand dollars.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  05.12.2016