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Silicon Valley Billionaires Award $22 Million in 'Breakthrough Prizes' (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quote The Guardian: The most glitzy event on the scientific calendar took place on Sunday night when the Breakthrough Foundation gave away $22 million in prizes to dozens of physicists, biologists and mathematicians at a ceremony in Silicon Valley. The winners this year include five researchers who won $3 million each for their work on cell biology, plant science and neurodegenerative diseases, two mathematicians, and a team of 27 physicists who mapped the primordial light that warmed the universe moments after the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. Now in their sixth year, the Breakthrough prizes are backed by Yuri Milner, a Silicon Valley tech investor, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and his wife Priscilla Chan, Anne Wojcicki from the DNA testing company 23andMe, and Google's Sergey Brin. Launched by Milner in 2012, the awards aim to make rock stars of scientists and raise their profile in the public consciousness. The annual ceremony at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California provides a rare opportunity for some of the world's leading minds to rub shoulders with celebrities, who this year included Morgan Freeman as host, fellow actors Kerry Washington and Mila Kunis, and Miss USA 2017 Kara McCullough...

Life sciences prizewinner, Joanne Chory at the Salk Institute in San Diego, was honoured for three decades of painstaking research into the genetic programs that flip into action when plants find themselves plunged into shade. Her work revealed that plants can sense when a nearby competitor is about to steal their light, sparking a growth spurt in response. The plants detect threatening neighbours by sensing a surge in the particular wavelengths of red light that are given off by vegetation. Chory now has ambitious plans to breed plants that can suck vast quantities of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in a bid to combat climate change. She believes that crops could be selected to absorb 20 times more of the greenhouse gas than they do today, and convert it into suberin, a waxy material found in roots and bark that breaks down incredibly slowly in soil. "If we can do this on 5% of the landmass people are growing crops on, we can take out 50% of global human emissions," she said.

The Mercury News published a list of all the winners, pointing out they were chosen from more than 11,000 entries (from 178 countries). And Wired notes that the top prize winners get $2 million more than Nobel prize winners.

23 comments

  1. Re:Surprise, surprise a woman wins. Sexists sows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

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  2. Re:Surprise, surprise a woman wins. Sexists sows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Chris living in his imaginary world again which most people find weird, twisted and absurd and which Chris accepts as being perfectly normal.
    ---
    Nancy Guerrero
    Director
    Special Education
    Santa Clara County Office of Education

  3. Re:Surprise, surprise a woman wins. Sexists sows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thanks Nancy,

    Your posts are always enlightening and right on topic! Keep up the good work over there at Special Education!

    I have noted that Chris uses child psychology to convince his so called trolls to give up by pretending they just give him free publicity. That's adoring! ;-)

    Anyway Chris would have a hard time to learn anything above child level matters, including psychology.

    https://childdevelopmentinfo.c...

    ---
    Silvia Bunge
    Psychology Department
    University of California, Berkeley

  4. Wow! $22 million? by Vinegar+Joe · · Score: 1

    That's Friday night beer money for Zuckerberg & Friends.

    --
    "The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
    1. Re:Wow! $22 million? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's cheaper to have people work for free than give them salaries. If one man-year = $100,000 (fresh undergrad salary), you can get 220 man-years from $22 million... chump change. Way more than 220 man-years went into this research. So, this so-called prize barely covers the cost of the research. Where's the payout, where's the profit? Oh wait, profit is only for capitalists and governments, not the working class.

      I would rather the government give perpetual "discovery" patents to scientists who discover stuff. Then when a product is sold using this research, the greedy capitalists have to pay 5 or 10% sales price royalties to these people.

    2. Re:Wow! $22 million? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No. Patents are unjust. Find another solution.

    3. Re:Wow! $22 million? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Patents are just... they ensure the people who do the intellectual work get paid proportional to how much profit is made from their ideas. The reason they are time-limited, is because the capitalists and governments don't want intellectual "working class" people to get rich. The whole patent system is designed to lure clever people to work for crumbs, whereafter the capitalists and the government share the whole cake.

      People who hate patents are freeloaders who want the IP for free, and there are a lot of such people in the world.

    4. Re:Wow! $22 million? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Patents are just... they ensure the people who do the intellectual work get paid proportional to how much profit is made from their ideas. The reason they are time-limited, is because the capitalists and governments don't want intellectual "working class" people to get rich. The whole patent system is designed to lure clever people to work for crumbs, whereafter the capitalists and the government share the whole cake.

      People who hate patents are freeloaders who want the IP for free, and there are a lot of such people in the world.

      You are correct in that the stated purpose of patents want to achieve that. The reality is that the us patent system isn't set up to actually function like that and lets patents through which include very little intellectual work but massive hindrance and great paydays for capitalists. Add a 2-3 year implementation requirement and do proper checking on all patents i will agree that the US patent system works correctly.

    5. Re:Wow! $22 million? by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The intention is good, I suppose. Perhaps the backers do this in part to toot their own horn, show the world what great benefactors they are. Well, let them.

      But what irks me is that the summary lists all of the important backers, as well as a bunch of the celebrities trotted out for the ceremony, but only one of the scientists is mentioned by name. Just who are we supposed to be celebrating here? This doesn't really help to turn our best scientists into rock stars. Even the headline mentions "Silicon Valley billionaires" rather than "The Breakthrough Foundation". The Guardian article isn't a great deal better, though at least they do mention the scientists.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    6. Re:Wow! $22 million? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not all people can be satisfied. Without stars etc., common people will never learn about science. This is a necessary PR and Adv. Stop complaining and appreciate that some people care about science and at least some children will get inquisitive. These guys are looking at 5% of brained people. Join them.

    7. Re:Wow! $22 million? by Gilgaron · · Score: 1

      They probably can't figure out how to have the award named after themselves without having to pony up all the money individually to become the next Nobel or whatnot.

  5. Elites celebrating other elites by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 0, Troll

    Wow, their lives sure are good. Showering each other with cash while the rest of us look on, noses stuck to the window. Good job there, Zuckerberg. What a lovely culture you represent.

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    1. Re:Elites celebrating other elites by blahplusplus · · Score: 2

      Gee perhaps if you'd stop being politically uninformed you could actually elect someone to fix that clusterfuck of a government down there.

      US distribution of wealth

      https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

      http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

      Protectionism for big business by state intervention

      Big business was always protected there was no market

    2. Re:Elites celebrating other elites by CodeHog · · Score: 1

      Canadian eh? How's the weather eh?

      --
      Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
  6. Chump change by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    $22 million?

    The piggy bank at the back of the elites' sofas has much more than _that_

  7. Billionaires by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'am sensing a pattern, all of the billionaires are Jewish, was this a AIPAC event ?

  8. At a time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ...where just three men own half of the wealth of our nation and the OnePercent own a majority of the world, it is time to declare possession of over $100 million a crime against humanity. Make that much wealth a controlled substance by international law and gave these turds 30 days to turn it over the U.N. Those who to fail to comply forfeit all their assets and their miserable lives.

    Thou not suffer a billionaire to live.

  9. "Stop. No. Don't do it," sighed Willy Wonka by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 0

    Do not create plants whose job it is to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. As much as some don't want to hear it, sea rise over a century or three is an inconvenience and not a deadly threat.

    Plants that get out into the wild are, as it (like other ameliorative efforts) could overshoot and induce an ice age. Given these come on in as little as a few years (you need just one cold summer where the snow doesn't melt) you will indeed kill billions.

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  10. Lets suck some bilionaires cocks! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's the /. way. Just keep waiting, it'll start ti trickle down ANY DAY NOW.