8 scientists have influence studies in 2019

In 2019, there are many contributions from researchers around the world in the fields of computers, biology, archeology and astronomy.

Ricardo Galvão

While wildfires raged in the Amazon, physicist Ricardo Galvão became a hero when he dared to challenge the Brazilian government. On July 19, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro angrily criticized a report on Galvão's wildfire and colleagues at the National Research Institute (INPE) in São Paulo. The team's analysis shows skyrocketing deforestation in the Amazon. The president accused the scientist of lying about the data and speculated that the Galvão president could collude with environmentalists.

Physicist Ricardo Galvão.(Photo: Nature).

Instead of hastily reacting, Galvão spent 12 hours to prepare his own response. After a sleepless night, he spoke out to protect the INPE scientists. He also criticized the cowardly president and demanded a direct meeting. As expected, Galvão was sacked two weeks later, just as the wildfire season began in the Amazon. He returned to his previous work at the University of São Paulo and focused on research work. However, colleagues and even street strangers consider Galvão like a hero. A woman also blocked the way at the subway station in São Paulo to thank him for the courage to confront the president and help her understand the importance of preserving the Amazon forest.

According to the latest data released on November 18 by INPE, an estimated area of ​​9,762 km, larger than Puerto Rico, was cleared during August 2018 to July 2019, an increase of 30% compared to with last year and double in 2012.

Victoria Kaspi

Victoria Kaspi, an astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, uses many of the world's leading telescopes to make many important discoveries. In 2017, she participated in the construction of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope.

Astrophysicist Victoria Kaspi.(Photo: Nature).

The efforts of Kaspi and dozens of other astronomers paid off. CHIME has become the world's best tool for hunting radio waves (FRBs), mysterious flashes of radio energy that regularly flash in the sky. Located in the southern British Colum province of Canada, CHIME has detected hundreds of lightning waves, more than any other telescope. Thanks to it, cultured astronomers hope to be able to answer the source of the signal.

Kaspi plays an important role in helping CHIME detect FRB. Initially, the telescope was designed to map hydrogen emissions from distant galaxies, helping to answer questions about the early universe. Kaspi finds CHIME's sensitivity and wide viewing range ideal for FRB search provided the telescope is upgraded. She proposed the idea and worked with cosmologists to add a device and connect CHIME with powerful computers, helping to scan data 1,000 times per second at 16,000 different frequencies.

Nenad Sestan

Neuroscientist Nenad Sestan and colleagues at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, discovered the activity of cellular electrical signals in brains from pigs. They separate the brain as soon as the pig dies, then pump oxygen and cryoprotectant, thereby partially reviving the brain. With the surprising results, Sestan realized that a small project to find better ways to preserve brain tissue for research became a finding that could change people's understanding of life and death.

Neuroscientist Nenad Sestan.(Photo: Nature).

For the next few months, experts peeked at the ethical implications of the findings, such as whether the brain could restore consciousness and whether the medical community needed to reconsider the definition of brain death. . Sestan foresaw ethical issues and take a number of safety measures. Before starting the experiment, his team decided to anesthetize the brain with inhibitors to prevent neuron activation at the same time, a prerequisite for cognition.

The results of Sestan's research show that hypoxia caused by a stroke or serious accident does not harm brain cells as previously speculated. After making sure the experiment meets the ethical standards, the researchers continue the experiment. Sestan wants to focus on exploring the brain retention time and considering whether the technology helps preserve other internal organs for transplants.

Sandra Díaz

On May 4, ecologist Sandra Díaz at Argentina's National University of Córdoba and 144 other researchers issued a gloomy warning after completing the most comprehensive study of biodiversity in the world. According to the study, one million species are about to become extinct due to human activity and we need to take action to prevent that. "The extinction rate of species is at least dozens to hundreds of times faster than the average over the past 10 million years," Díaz said.

Ecologist Sandra Díaz.(Photo: Nature).

Díaz is one of the three co-chairs of the Intergovernmental Science – Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an intergovernmental organization that conducts research. For nearly three years, she and her colleagues, anthropologist Eduardo Brondízio at Bloomington University, Indiana and ecologist Josef Settele at the Helmholtz Environmental Research Center in Halle, Germany, coordinated research work. of experts from 51 countries, meeting at webinars and working groups, filtering over 15,000 sources of information.

Their 1,500-page summary report states that countries will not be able to meet most of the global goals for biodiversity and sustainable development unless they make strategic changes such as giving up their views. The economy must grow continuously.

Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum

In 1976, microbiologist Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum went into the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to find out the outbreak of a strange disease that caused people to die quickly. The young scientist discovered the strange thing when taking blood samples from a sick person and the blood at the injection site did not coagulate. Blood dripped down Muyembe's gloved hand but luckily he never fell ill because the virus would later be named Ebola.

Microbiologist Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum.(Photo: Nature).

43 years after discovering the disease, Muyembe is leading the program to cope with the largest Ebola outbreak in DRC. Since August 2018, the disease has killed more than 2,200 people in the northeast of the country, the region engulfed in conflict and political instability for a quarter of a century.

In 1995, Muyembe developed important measures to check public health. He found a solemn way to bury the dead while minimizing the risk of infection. He also conducted research to help develop effective drugs and vaccines against Ebola virus. During the latest outbreak, Muyembe took blood samples from people recovering from Ebola virus infection and injected them into 8 infected patients, 7 of whom survived.

Last month, clinical trials of 680 patients conducted by Muyembe et al. Showed a 90% cure rate in those who took antibody-containing drugs. One of the drugs called mAb114 is made from antibodies taken from the blood of surviving patients. In recent weeks, the number of new Ebola cases is decreasing. After the outbreak, Muyembe is collecting animals from areas where the virus has spread to humans to track how the disease is spreading between species.

Yohannes Haile-Selassie

Anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie noticed a gray, grapefruit-sized round object at a desert site in northern Ethiopia in February 2016. The object protrudes from the arid ground, only about 3 meters away from the goat's jaw skeleton. The fossils form the complete skull of prehistoric humans, dating back 3.8 million years. The skull belongs to Australopithecus anamensis, the earliest hominid species.

Anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie.(Photo: Nature).

The skull, called MRD, was announced in August 2019, helping researchers for the first time envision the face of an ancient human relative. Before that, A. anamensis was known only by a few broken pieces of bone. The specimen is as striking as anthropologist Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old bone fossil of Australopithecus afarensis, a close relative of A. anamensis.

MRD is important because it came from the absence of fossil record and changed the oldest branch in the evolution tree of the Apes. Haile-Selassie and colleagues suggest that the features of this skull indicate that the evolution of the early humans is quite complex. A. anamensis and A. afarensis coexist for at least 100,000 years. The team is looking at the skull to find more evidence of the location of prehistoric A. anamensis. Haile-Selassie also hopes to return to the MRD site to find the complete skeleton.

Hongkui Deng

Research from Hongkui Deng's lab at Peking University shows that CRISPR gene editing techniques can create an infinite supply of immune cells unaffected by the HIV virus. This method is designed based on the successful treatment of a patient named Timothy Ray.

In 2008, Brown became the first person to be cured of HIV through bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia. His doctors intentionally look for bone marrow donors with a gene mutation that neutralizes CCR5, the protein the HIV virus uses to infect immune cells. They added donor cells to Brown's immune system and the HIV virus no longer exists on his body.

Immunologist Hongkui Deng.(Photo: Nature).

But mutations in people who donate bone marrow to Brown are rare and not present in China. After discovering the importance of CCR5 for the HIV virus in the 1990s, Deng decided to modify the gene. He took blood-forming stem cells from a donor's bone marrow, corrected them using CRISPR-Cas9, and then transplanted them into patients with leukemia and HIV with compatible immune systems.

For safety reasons and because the type of cells used in the study were difficult to correct, Deng used a combination of multiple cells in the transplant, only about 18% of them were transformed. The HIV virus remains in the patient's body. Deng said the work shows that CRISPR-Cas9-modified cells can serve bone marrow transplants and not cause adverse effects. Some of the corrected cells remain in the patient's blood after nearly two years. Deng hopes to be able to transplant with a higher percentage of edited cells in the near future, while developing a way to reprogram cells into pluripotent stem cells that are easier to edit and convert them into stem cells. blood formation.

John Martinis

In October, John Martinis, head of research at Google, announced that quantum computers can calculate faster than today's best popular computers. A physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has spent 17 years developing hardware for quantum computers called Google's Sycamore. At the heart of the machine are superconducting loops called qubits, quantum systems that exist in many different forms.

Physicist John Martinis.(Photo: Nature).

Physicists have long argued that exploiting interactions between qubits can help computers master many calculations, such as database scans and encryption. The team of more than 70 scientists and engineers proved that. Sycamore takes only 200 seconds to do what the best supercomputers today take 10,000 years. This achievement is the result of hardware improvements that help reduce error rates and connect qubits in a new way.

Martinis's future goals are to create a better quantum chip, including manipulating noise-correcting errors, enabling outside researchers to use Sycamore through cloud systems. Cloud and review the useful algorithms that Sycamore can implement.