“Os cientistas da lista
Nature’s 10 de 2016 são um grupo diverso, mas todos desempenharam papéis
importantes em grandes eventos científicos neste ano, com o potencial de levar
a mudanças em escala global”, disse Richard Monastersky, um dos editores da Nature.
Gabriela
Gonzalez: Gravity spy - envolvida na descoberta de ondas
gravitacionais e porta-voz do Observatório de Ondas Gravitacionais por
Interferômetro Laser (Ligo)
Demis
Hassabis: Mind crafter - Demis Hassabis, cofundador da empresa de
inteligência artificial DeepMind, cujo computador AlphaGo venceu um grande
mestre do jogo de estratégia Go. Esse feito que revela a crescente capacidade
da inteligência artificial
Terry
Hughes: Reef sentinel - alertou sobre uma catástrofe iminente na
Grande Barreira de Corais Australiana
Guus
Velders: Cooling agent - Guus Veleerds, por criar as bases para um
acordo internacional que obrigará países a pararem de usar gases poluentes
conhecidos como HFCs
Celina
M. Turchi: Zika detective – Brasiliera, por seu trabalho para o
estabelecimento da relação entre o vírus zika e a microcefalia em bebês
Alexandra
Elbakyan: Paper pirate - cujo web-site Sci-Hub desafiou grandes
editoras científicas ao disponibilizar gratuitamente mais de 60 milhões de
artigos científicos
John
Zhang: Fertility rebel - John Zang, especialista em fertilidade que
recebeu críticas e elogios ao anunciar uma técnica de substituição mitocondrial
que mistura o DNA de três pessoas para produzir um bebê saudável
Kevin
Esvelt: CRISPR cautionary - alertou sobre os perigos de uma técnica
que ele mesmo ajudou a inventar, que usa a manipulação genética para criar um
gene que se espalha de modo mais rápido em uma população.
Guillem
Anglada-Escudé: Planet hunter – astrônomo que descobriu um planeta de
tamanho parecido ao da Terra próximo a Alpha Centauro
Elena
Long: Diversity trailblazer - chamou a atenção para a discriminação e
para os obstáculos enfrentados por cientistas lésbicas, gays, bissexuais ou
transgêneros
CELINA TURCHI : brasileira, pesquisadora na Fiocruz PE é
eleita uma das 10 personalidades do ano na ciência pela revista britânica Nature por
seu trabalho para o estabelecimento da relação entre o vírus zika e a
microcefalia em bebês.
Por: André Costa (Agência
Fiocruz de Notícias)
A revista diz que Turchi
integrou uma rede de epidemiologistas, pediatras, neurologistas e biólogos que
levou a resultados "formidáveis". Lembrando que, quando Turchi e seus
colegas começaram suas pesquisas, o conhecimento sobre o zika era extremamente
limitado, a revista afirma que a médica ajudou a produzir uma quantidade
suficiente de evidências para demonstrar o vínculo entre o vírus e malformações
fetais.
"Nem em meu maior
pesadelo como epidemiologista eu havia imaginado uma epidemia de microcefalia
neonatal", disse Celina à Nature. “Quando começamos, não havia
nenhum livro a seguir”.
Celina encara o fato de ser
relacionada entre as 10 personalidades do ano pela revista Nature como
um reconhecimento do trabalho de um grupo e não apenas dela. “Estou grata e
entendo que esse foi o reconhecimento de um trabalho coletivo, não só de nós
pesquisadores, mas por todos profissionais de saúde envolvidos. Foi fruto
também da oportunidade de poder contar com grupos experientes e qualificados de
laboratório, clínica, neurologia e com apoio da instituição”, declarou.
A physicist helped to catch the first direct signs of
long-sought gravitational waves.
By Davide Castelvecchi
By Davide Castelvecchi
William Widmer/Redux/eyevine
A year ago, Gabriela Gonzalez was struggling to
contain the biggest secret of her life. Two giant detectors in the United
States had picked up signs of
gravitational waves —
wrinkles in space-time imagined by Albert Einstein but never before directly
witnessed. It was Gonzalez’s job to help lead more than 1,000 scientists in
their careful efforts to verify the discovery before announcing it to the
public.
News like that doesn’t stay under wraps for long, but
the discovery was so momentous that the research team took nearly five months
to analyse data
from the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)
detectors in
Washington state and Louisiana. As spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific
Collaboration, Gonzalez was one of the key people coordinating the analysis by
groups scattered around the world, including researchers at the Virgo
interferometer near Pisa, Italy, which pools its data with LIGO.
The role of shepherding this massive effort made use
of Gonzalez’s multidimensional talents. Most physicists know early on whether
they will be a theorist or an experimentalist. But Gonzalez started her
graduate studies as a theoretical physicist and only later switched to
experimental work, when she showed uncommon aptitude. “It was the thing that
set her up as a first-class scientist,” says Rainer Weiss, a physicist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and one of the founders of
LIGO.
Throughout her career, Gonzalez has done “a bit of
everything” at LIGO, she says. For a while, she took on the crucial task of
diagnosing the performance of the interferometers to make sure that they
achieved unparalleled sensitivity — which is now enough to detect length
changes in the 4-kilometre-long arms of the interferometers to within one part
in 1021, roughly equivalent to the width of DNA compared with the
orbit of Saturn. She has helped to lead the teams that analyse the data. And
she nudged gravitational-wave researchers and dozens of their colleagues in
conventional astronomy into signing pacts of cooperation. Together, they will
look for phenomena that emit both gravitational and electromagnetic waves, in
what has been called the coming age of multimessenger astronomy.
In the hectic months before announcing the LIGO
discovery, Gonzalez and her colleagues struggled to make sure that they had
iron-clad evidence. They knew that history had not been kind to those who had
previously reported gravitational waves. Most recently, in early 2015, an international
collaboration had to retract its claims that a telescope at the South Pole had
discovered indirect signs of the long-sought vibrations.
To add to the pressure on the LIGO team, rumours of a
discovery began to leak within a week of the initial finding, and reporters
started to call. Throughout the long analysis period, Gonzalez says, she never
made an important decision without consulting colleagues. But others laud her
leadership. “What Gaby did is, she managed to get us through this period,”
Weiss says.
Gonzalez is based at Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge, close to the LIGO interferometer in Livingston. In 2008, she
became the first woman to receive a full professorship in her department. She
says that she has never experienced outright sexual harassment or
discrimination during her career, but “I had to prove myself perhaps more than
other people”.
Gonzalez has said that after her current term as LIGO
spokesperson ends in March 2017, she will not run again. She plans to go back
to full-time research. The field of science she helped to create —
gravitational-wave astronomy — has just seen its dawn. “It has always been a
fun ride. And now it’s even better.”
An AI developer beat one of the best at Go. Next up,
solve global problems.
By Elizabeth Gibney
By Elizabeth Gibney
Souvid Datta
For veteran gamer Demis Hassabis, March brought the
toughest match of his life — and he wasn’t even playing. Hassabis had
to watch from the sidelines as his team’s creation, the computer program
AlphaGo, took on Lee Sedol, a top-ranked champion in the strategy game Go. The
computer won, marking a huge victory for the field of artificial intelligence
(AI) and another in a series of triumphs for Hassabis.
As co-founder of DeepMind, the London-based firm that
developed AlphaGo, Hassabis was both elated and relieved. “It felt like our
moonshot, and it was successful,” he says.
But the win was about much more than Go. Hassabis
wanted to show the world the power of machine-learning techniques, which he
hopes to someday harness in a human-like, general AI capable of solving complex
global problems.
Related stories
Hassabis had sketched this vision out as a precocious
youth. A chess prodigy, he began designing innovative, multimillion-selling
video games while in his teens and started his own company in his early 20s.
After completing a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, he founded DeepMind in 2010.
Google bought the company 4 years later for a reported £400 million (more
than US$650 million at the time).
At the firm, researchers apply inspiration from neuroscience
to eye-catching AI tasks, from synthesizing speech to navigating the
London Underground. Each
algorithm builds complexity on to the last, says Hassabis, and weaves in
capabilities that have historically been developed separately in AI. DeepMind
AIs have gone from learning how to see, and acting on that vision, to using it
to plan and reason. In terms of real-world problem-solving, the team used
machine learning to cut power usage in Google’s data centres by 15%, something
that Hassabis hopes to apply on a much grander scale.
Although the company’s researchers do publish, their
work-in-progress is kept under wraps, which irks some academics. And some
data-privacy advocates have concerns over Google DeepMind’s plans to
collaborate with the UK National Health Service. Scientists, however, have been flocking to
work at the company.
In person, Hassabis is unassuming but eager. He has a
knack for swaying others to his passion, says Eleanor Maguire, his former PhD
supervisor at University College London. “Once he gets talking about something
he’s interested in, it’s infectious,” she says. Fitting research alongside
running the company now means saving science for the small hours of the
morning, something Hassabis says he doesn’t mind. “It’s a very important
mission that we’re on, and I think it’s worth the sacrifice.”
A coral researcher sounded the alarm over massive
bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef.
By Daniel Cressey
By Daniel Cressey
Andrew Rankin for Nature
When Terry Hughes flew over the Great Barrier Reef in
March, his heart sank at the sight of telltale pale patches just below the
surface, where corals were dead or dying.
Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council’s
(ARC’s) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Townsville, says that he
and his students wept after looking at the aerial surveys of the damage. The
bleaching hit nearly all of the reef, with initial surveys showing 81% of the
northern section suffering severely. It was the most
devastating bleaching ever documented on the Great Barrier Reef — and part of a wider event that was harming
corals across the Pacific.
The trigger for this year’s coral troubles in the
Pacific was a strong
El Niño warming pattern in the tropical part of that ocean. Abnormally
high water temperatures prompt corals to expel the symbiotic zooxanthellae
algae that provide them with much of their food — and their colour. Some
corals can recover after bleaching, but others die. Follow-up studies in
October and November found that 67% of shallow-water corals in the
700-kilometre northern section of the Great Barrier Reef had died.
When the massive El Niño reared up in the Pacific in
2015, Australian researchers feared that the country’s reefs could be in
danger. So Hughes, one of the world’s leading coral researchers, assembled a
task force ready to survey the reef if bleaching occurred. The group eventually
expanded to 300 scientists. “We put together a very detailed research plan,
hoping of course that it wouldn’t happen,” he says.
Hughes is based close to the central portion of the
Great Barrier Reef. After leading the initial surveys, he became the de facto
spokesperson on the catastrophe. At the height of media interest in the
bleaching, Hughes did 35 interviews in one day.
“In Australia, even people who have never been to the
Great Barrier Reef and might never go there regard it as an icon,” says Bob
Pressey, a fellow researcher at the ARC centre.
The crisis on the reef defied some rules. Conventional
thinking on bleaching events, says Hughes, is that corals die slowly from
starvation after their zooxanthellae leave. But this year, water temperatures
were so high that “we saw a lot of corals die before the starvation kicked in.
They actually cooked.”
Corals throughout the world have struggled in the past
couple of years, as global temperatures have repeatedly hit record highs. In
October 2015, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared
that a global bleaching event was happening as coral reefs in Hawaii, Papua New
Guinea and the Maldives began to succumb.
This year, the bleaching spread to Australia, Japan
and other parts of the Pacific. Researchers say that, as climate change drives
up baseline temperatures, bleaching will afflict reefs more frequently. Under
some scenarios, this could happen so often that most corals can no longer
survive.
Hughes is not ready to give up on the Great Barrier
Reef just yet. But the recent bleaching has left corals in a weakened state,
prone to attacks from pathogens and predators. Another bleaching event in the
near future could bring further damage. “The message to people,” he says,
“should be we’ve got a closing window of opportunity to deal with climate
change.”
An atmospheric chemist laid the foundation for an
international climate agreement.
By Jeff Tollefson
By Jeff Tollefson
Bea Blauwendraat
It isn’t often that atmospheric chemists get to help
save the world, but Guus Velders had his chance in October. He was attending
international negotiations in Kigali, Rwanda, that were seeking to phase out
production and use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), extremely potent greenhouse
gases commonly used in air conditioners.
Most nations had agreed on an aggressive timetable to
begin eliminating the compounds, but India and a handful of other countries
wanted an extra four years. After plugging the numbers into a model on his
laptop computer, Velders informed negotiators that this particular concession
would have little impact on the planet.
That and his earlier work helped to smooth the way for
a widely hailed
global accord,
which was signed on 15 October. Velders, a soft-spoken researcher at the
National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, the
Netherlands, is proud of the part he played. “I’ve never been involved in a
process that leads to a global agreement on climate before,” he says.
It was no coincidence, however. Colleagues say that
Velders has become the world’s expert on HFC emissions, and that nobody else
could have provided such rapid analysis in Kigali. He is part of a community of
scientists that has helped to refashion the 1987 Montreal Protocol — an
international agreement designed to protect the stratospheric ozone layer —
into a tool with
which to fight global warming.
The refrigerants that fall within the scope of the
protocol are also powerful greenhouse gases, and Velders’ team showed that the
Montreal agreement actually did more to control global temperatures than did
the 1997 Kyoto Protocol climate treaty. More recently, the team projected how
much warming HFCs were likely to cause over the twenty-first century. That
helped to set the stage for the agreement on HFCs, which was reached as an
amendment to the Montreal Protocol.
“The Velders team always answered the right questions
at the right time,” says Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for
Governance & Sustainable Development, an advocacy group in Washington DC.
“It’s safe to say that we wouldn’t have this agreement without them.”
Now it’s back to the drawing board for Velders’ team.
Their scenario about how HFC emissions would grow over time was rendered
obsolete by the new agreement to ban them. That’s the kind of intellectual
setback that Velders heartily accepts.
A physician raced to make sense of a medical mystery
in northeast Brazil.
By Declan Butler
By Declan Butler
Ale Ruaro
Fears about the Zika virus spread across the globe in
2016, and the epicentre of concern was Brazil, where the epidemic first
appeared in the Americas. Some researchers even called for postponing the
Olympic Games scheduled for Rio de Janeiro in August that year. But away from
the media frenzy, Celina Maria Turchi Martelli battled on the front lines in
northeast Brazil to make sense of the medical mystery there.
Turchi, a physician and infectious-disease expert, has
had her life turned upside down by Zika since September 2015. That’s when the
ministry of health asked her to investigate a sharp rise in reports of
babies born with abnormally small heads and brains, a condition known as microcephaly, in her home state
of Pernambuco. She quickly became convinced that the country was facing a
public-health emergency. “Not even in my worst nightmare as an epidemiologist
had I imagined a microcephaly neonate epidemic,” she says.
Turchi, who is based at the Aggeu Magalhães Research
Center in Recife, immediately contacted scientists across the globe for help.
She formed a networked task force of epidemiologists, infectious-diseases
experts, paediatricians, neurologists and reproductive biologists. The
challenges were formidable, says Turchi: there were no reliable lab tests for
Zika, and there was no consensus
on a case definition of microcephaly. But the intense networking paid off, and Turchi and
her colleagues eventually generated enough evidence to demonstrate a link
between the condition and infection with Zika in the first trimester of
pregnancy.
Still, the mysteries are far from solved, says Turchi.
Although Zika has spread across the Americas, the expected explosion in the
number of microcephaly cases outside northeast Brazil has not materialized.
Turchi and her task force are now trying to work out why. When she started
going into the hospitals of Recife to investigate the outbreak, Turchi says,
she had to innovate. “There was no book to follow.” Now, she and her colleagues
are writing that book.
The founder of an illegal hub for paywalled papers has
attracted litigation and acclaim.
By Richard Van Noorden
By Richard Van Noorden
Apneet Jolly/flickr/CC BY 2.0
It took Alexandra Elbakyan just a few years to go from
information-technology student to famous fugitive.
In 2009, when she was a graduate student working on
her final-year research project in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Elbakyan became
frustrated at being unable to read many scholarly papers because she couldn’t
afford them. So she learnt how to circumvent publishers’ paywalls.
Her skills were soon in demand. Elbakyan saw
scientists on web forums asking for papers they couldn’t access — and she was
happy to oblige. “I got thanked many times for sending paywalled papers,” she
says. In 2011, she decided to automate the process and founded Sci-Hub, a
pirate website that grabs copies of research papers from behind paywalls and
serves them up to anyone who asks. This year, interest in Sci-Hub exploded as
mainstream media cottoned on to it and usage soared. According to Elbakyan’s
figures, the site now hosts around 60 million papers and is likely to
serve up more than 75 million downloads in 2016 — up from 42 million
last year and, by one estimate, encompassing around 3% of all downloads from
science publishers worldwide.
It is copyright-breaking on a grand scale — and has
brought Elbakyan praise, criticism and a lawsuit. Few people support the fact
that she acted illegally, but many see Sci-Hub as advancing the cause of the
open-access movement, which holds that papers should be made (legally) free to
read and reuse. “What she did is nothing short of awesome,” says Michael Eisen,
a biologist and open-access supporter at the University of California,
Berkeley. “Lack of access to the scientific literature is a massive injustice,
and she fixed it with one fell swoop.”
For the first few years of its existence, the site
flew under the radar — but eventually it grew too big for subscription
publishers to ignore. In 2015, the Dutch company Elsevier, supported by the
wider publishing industry, brought a US lawsuit
against Elbakyan on
the basis of copyright infringement and hacking. If Elbakyan loses, she risks
having to pay many millions of dollars in damages, and potentially spending
time in jail. (For that reason, Elbakyan does not disclose her current location
and she was interviewed for this article by encrypted e-mail and messaging.) In
2015, a US judge ordered Sci-Hub to be shut down, but the site popped up on
other domains. It’s most popular in China, India and Iran, she says, but a good
5% or so of its users come from the United States.
Elbakyan has found her name splashed across
newspapers, and says she typically gets a hundred supportive messages a week,
some with financial donations. She says she feels a moral responsibility to
keep her website afloat because of the users who need it to continue their
work. “Is there anything wrong or shameful in running a research-access website
such as Sci-Hub? I think no, therefore I can be open about my activities,” she
says.
Critics and supporters alike think that the site will
have a lasting impact, even if it does not last. “The future is universal open
access,” says Heather Piwowar, a co-founder of Impactstory, a non-profit firm
incorporated in Carrboro, North Carolina, which helps scientists track the
impact of their online output. “But we suspect and hope that Sci-Hub is
currently filling toll-access publishers with roaring, existential panic.
Because in many cases that’s the only thing that’s going to make them actually
do the right thing and move to open-access models.”
Whether or not that’s true, Elbakyan says she will
keep building Sci-Hub — in particular, to expand its corpus of older
manuscripts — while studying for a master’s degree in the history of science.
“I maintain the website myself, but if I’m prevented, somebody else can take
over the job,” she says.
A physician jump-started debate over a controversial
IVF procedure.
By Sara Reardon
By Sara Reardon
New Hope Fertility Center
Shock, anger, scepticism and congratulations. Those
were some of the reactions that fertility specialist John Zhang triggered in
the scientific community in September, when he announced that a controversial
technique that mixes DNA from three people had been used to produce a healthy baby boy.
This kind of technique is intended to prevent children
from inheriting disorders involving mitochondria — the cellular structures that
produce energy. But ethical and safety concerns have prompted the United States
to ban such procedures without a permit. Zhang, who works at New Hope Fertility
Center in New York City, performed the technique at the company’s clinic in
Mexico.
Critics saw this as an attempt to evade regulation,
and complained that he had announced the work at a conference rather than in a
publication. But Zhang brushes aside those objections. “The most important is
to have a live-birth baby, not to tell the whole world,” he says.
Zhang has a habit of pushing scientific and ethical
boundaries. In the 1990s, he worked with reproductive endocrinologist Jamie
Grifo at the New York University Langone Medical Center to develop a version of
the technique that Zhang used this year. The approach was designed to help
older women to become pregnant by replacing their ageing mitochondria with
those from younger eggs. No successful pregnancies resulted.
When US regulators began restricting this technique in
2001, Zhang and his collaborators in China took over the work. In 2003, Zhang’s
team created and implanted multiple embryos into a woman. After all the fetuses
were miscarried, China banned the technique as well.
Grifo and some others applaud Zhang’s latest work. “I
think it’s a great thing it was finally done,” says Grifo. But others have
criticized the New Hope team. “A lot of things they did were completely unsafe,”
such as infusing the donor’s egg with a drug that could cause chromosomal
abnormalities, says Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a stem-cell scientist at Oregon Health
& Science University in Portland.
Zhang is undeterred. He says that plenty of other
families at risk of mitochondrial disease have expressed interest in his
procedure, and he hopes to perform it in other countries. “Five to ten years
from today, people will look at it and say, ‘Why were we all so stupid, why
were we against it?’” he says. “I think you have to show the benefit to
mankind.”
A budding biologist put gene-drive ethics before
experiments.
By Heidi Ledford
By Heidi Ledford
MIT Media Lab
It was a trip to the Galapagos Islands at the age of
ten that first whetted Kevin Esvelt’s appetite for tinkering with evolution. As
he stood marvelling at the iguanas, birds and sheer diversity of the place that
had inspired Charles Darwin, Esvelt vowed to understand evolution — and improve
on it. “I wanted to learn more about how these creatures came to be,” he says.
“And, frankly, I wanted to make more of my own.”
Today, Esvelt is still a precocious biologist. Less
than a year after launching his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Media Lab in Cambridge, he has already made a name for himself as
one of the pioneers of a controversial technique called a gene drive. His
method harnesses CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing to circumvent evolution, forcing a gene to
spread rapidly through a population. It could be used to wipe out
mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria or eradicate invasive species. But it could
also set off
unintended ecological chain reactions, or be used to create a biological weapon.
The idea of CRISPR gene drives hit Esvelt when he was
tinkering with the Cas9 enzyme in 2013. “I had one day of absolute, ecstatic
glee: this is what’s going to let us get rid of malaria,” says Esvelt. “And
then I thought, ‘Wait a minute.’”
Following that thought, Esvelt has worked to ensure
that ethics comes before experiments. He first sounded the alarm in 2014,
calling for public discussion about gene drives even before he had demonstrated
that a CRISPR–Cas9 gene drive could work (K. A. Oye et al. Science 345, 626–628
(2014); K. M. Esvelt et al. eLife 3, e03401;
2014). Since then, he
and his colleagues have shown how gene
drives might be made safer,
and how they could be reversed (J. E. DiCarlo et al. Nature
Biotechnol. 33, 1250–1255; 2015).
This year, his advocacy has begun to bear fruit.
Researchers and policymakers worldwide have been discussing the technology, and
a report from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
urged that gene-drive
research proceed, but cautiously. Omar Akbari, who studies gene drives at the
University of California, Riverside, believes Esvelt’s outreach has focused
public attention — and attracted funding — for a nascent technology at just the
right time. “I attribute that to Kevin,” says Akbari. “It’s difficult for a
scientist to do what he’s done.”
An astronomer detected the nearest known planet
outside the Solar System.
By Alexandra Witze
By Alexandra Witze
Brian David Stevens for Nature
Guillem Anglada-Escudé wasn’t surprised early this
year when evidence of an alien world rippled across his computer screen. He had
been almost certain that an Earth-sized planet orbited Proxima Centauri, the
star nearest the Sun at just 1.3 parsecs (4.2 light years) away.
To Anglada, an astronomer at Queen Mary University of
London, the discovery came as more of a relief than a shock. He and his
colleagues had been working feverishly to stake their claim in the competitive
world of planet hunting, and the Proxima find confirmed that they were on the
right path. “We made it,” he says.
To the rest of the world, the discovery of
the closest known exoplanet to
Earth stoked the public imagination. It raised questions about whether life
might exist in our cosmic backyard, and whether astronomers might be able to
detect it.
These are the kinds of question that got Anglada into
planet hunting in the first place. A science-fiction fan while growing up near
Barcelona, Spain, he got his astronomical start doing data simulations for
Gaia, a European Space Agency mission to map 1 billion stars. Later, he turned
his data-crunching skills to exoplanets. He developed a method for extracting
faint planetary signals from data gathered by the world’s premier ground-based
planet-hunting instrument, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher
(HARPS) at the European Southern Observatory in La Silla, Chile.
“Guillem has a natural talent of seeing the big
picture where others see details,” says Mikko Tuomi, an astronomer at the
University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and a collaborator of Anglada’s.
But Anglada soon ran straight into high academic
drama, tussling with other researchers over who deserved credit for discovering
a planet bigger than Earth and smaller than Neptune orbiting the star
Gliese 667C. “I could have left the field and done something else,” he
says. “But I took the decision of following it very aggressively.”
He dived into HARPS data, publishing paper after paper
on the planetary signals he discovered amid the background noise in the data.
And then, as if to push back on all the secrecy and competition, Anglada
launched a very public hunt for a planet orbiting Proxima.
He put together a team and got observing time on
HARPS, as well as other telescopes that could double-check whether any promising
evidence that they found was caused by stellar activity, which can mimic the
signs of a planet (a problem that plagues many exoplanet claims). The
researchers put nearly all their details on an outreach website and social-media accounts. Being so transparent
“didn’t seem dangerous at all”, Anglada says. “We had a feeling nobody else
would do this.”
Within days, they confirmed that the planet was there;
within weeks, they submitted a manuscript detailing their discovery. The
planet, called Proxima b, is at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth and orbits
Proxima every 11.2 days.
Although it is close to its star, the world is within
the ‘habitable zone’, where liquid water could exist on its surface. That makes
it not only the closest known exoplanet of the 3,500-plus confirmed so far, but
also a place where otherworldly life could thrive — a double bonus for
researchers and science-fiction fans alike.
Just before the paper was published in Nature in
August (G. Anglada-Escudé et al. Nature 536, 437–440;
2016), Anglada
e-mailed British sci-fi writer Stephen Baxter, author of the novel Proxima (Gollancz,
2013). They corresponded about what life might be like on a world with one
hemisphere permanently facing a flaring star, as happens at Proxima.
People could eventually get a close-up look at Proxima
b. The Breakthrough Starshot initiative aims to send fleets of tiny
laser-propelled spacecraft to a nearby star, and it may target Proxima as its
closest and best option.
Anglada’s next step is to see whether Proxima b
transits, or passes across the face of its star as seen from Earth. The chances
are low, but if it does, then much more science can be gleaned when Proxima’s
light passes through the planet’s atmosphere, if it has one.
And if the transit does not happen? Then Anglada may
be off, to tease out some other signal of another
world.
A transgender physicist paved the way for greater
acceptance of minority groups.
By Elizabeth Gibney
By Elizabeth Gibney
Kandice Carter
Physicists can be open to seeing the world in new
ways, but they need to see the data first. This posed a problem for Elena Long,
a nuclear physicist who has fought for her field to be more inclusive of people
from sexual and gender minorities. “We didn’t have any data, because people
considered it too offensive to ask if we exist. It was a catch-22.” Long was
one of the architects of a first-of-its-kind
survey run by the
American Physical Society (APS), charting the experiences of physicists who are
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or from another sexual or gender minority
(LGBT).
The findings, presented to a packed room at the APS
March meeting this year, were stark. Of the 324 scientists who responded, more
than one in five reported having been excluded, intimidated or harassed at work
in the previous year. Transgender physicists reported the highest incidence of
discrimination. Long, who is transgender herself, was unsurprised. In 2009, she
began work for her PhD at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in
Newport News, Virginia, which lacked trans-inclusive employment protections and
health-care benefits. She felt isolated without LGBT support networks. “I loved
the work I was doing, and I loved the research. But it was rough,” she says.
So she founded the LGBT+ Physicists support group and began pushing for greater
recognition at the APS, which eventually created a committee to collect data on
LGBT discrimination. Many physicists, she says, could not even understand the
need for such a study. Thanks to Long and her colleagues, physics is emerging
as exemplary in its approach to these issues, says Samuel Brinton, a board
member of the society Out in
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. “We are literally using their work to start changes
for the better in multiple fields,” he says. The APS accepted the
recommendations made in the March report. And in August, a major APS
division voted to move
its 2018 meeting out of Charlotte, North Carolina, in response to a state law that forces people to use
public toilets that match the gender they were assigned at birth.
Long has meanwhile won two young-scientist awards
offered by her lab and become a co-leader on two new accelerator experiments.
“I’ve known a lot of postdocs who’ve done voluntary work, and usually it
compromises their science,” says Karl Slifer, Long’s postdoctoral supervisor at
the University of New Hampshire in Durham. “I’ve never seen that in Elena.”
(Long attributes her strict time management to a computer program she designed
that charts every hour of her day.)
Now Long is helping to set up an APS membership group
focusing on diversity and inclusion, which she hopes will make it easier for
scientists in other minority groups to flourish. “I’m sure there are other
people facing problems in the field I never thought about,” she says. “I don’t
want them to wait seven years to get to a place where they can have a voice.”
Ones to watch in 2017
Cori Bargmann, Science president, Chan Zuckerberg
Initiative
Bargmann is steering the research operations of a
US$3-billion effort by the philanthropic organization to cure, prevent or
manage all disease by 2100.
Robert Feidenhans’l, Chairman, European XFEL
As the new head of the world’s most powerful X-ray
free-electron laser, Feidenhans’l will guide the €1.2-billion (US$1.3-billion)
facility during its ramp up to becoming fully operational by mid-year.
Jef Boeke, Co-leader, Human Genome Project–Write
Boeke is a director of an ambitious effort that is
seeking to synthesize the human genome. He and others are already close to
making a yeast genome.
Wu Weiren, Chief Designer, China Lunar Programme
China ’s plans call for launching the Chang’e-5
mission in the latter half of 2017 to collect the first lunar rock samples to
be brought back to Earth since the 1970s.
Marcia McNutt, President, National Academy of Sciences
With her experience in President Barack Obama’s
cabinet, McNutt will have a central role in representing US science during
Donald Trump’s presidency.
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