Breakthrough Prize – 2017

Laureates of the analog of the Nobel Prize from Milner and Zuckerberg are named

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The winners of the prestigious Breakthrough Prize scientific award, which was established by Russian investor Yuri Milner, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have been named.

The winners were researchers in the field of cell biology, plant physiology, neurodegenerative diseases, mathematics and cosmology. The prize fund of the contest is three million dollars. 

It is reported that one of the cash prizes was awarded to a team of 27 physicists who created a map of relic radiation – thermal radiation that has been evenly filling the Universe since the time when space became transparent to electromagnetic waves (13.8 billion years ago).

Biologist Joanne Chory from the Salk Institute in San Diego became the winner thanks to a thirty-year study of genetic programs that control the growth of plants in the shade. She showed that plants competing for light are able to "feel" that their rivals are beginning to shade them, and therefore accelerate their growth. The stimulus is an increase in the number of red light waves that are released by neighboring plants.

Mathematicians Christopher Hacon from the University of Utah and James McKernan from the University of California, San Diego received the prize for their work in birational geometry. They established rules for projecting objects with more than a thousand dimensions onto surfaces with fewer dimensions.

Other prizes were awarded for studying the mechanisms of cellular regulation, motor neuron diseases and chromosome research.

The main goal of the award is to popularize scientific research and give scientists the status of real stars. However, the Breakthrough Prize is often criticized for the fact that huge funds could serve science better if they were spent on research projects or on grants to needy scientists from poor countries.

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