Author: cxdig

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023

The three Nobel Laureates in Physics 2023 are being recognised for their experiments, which have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules. Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.

Read the full article at: www.nobelprize.org

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 The discoveries by the two Nobel Laureates were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020. Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times. 

Read the full article at: www.nobelprize.org

Reducing cartel recruitment is the only way to lower violence in Mexico

RAFAEL PRIETO-CURIEL , GIAN MARIA CAMPEDELLI, AND ALEJANDRO HOPE
SCIENCE 21 Sep 2023 Vol 381, Issue 6664 pp. 1312-1316 DOI: 10.1126/science.adh2888

Mexican cartels lose many members as a result of conflict with other cartels and incarcerations. Yet, despite their losses, cartels manage to increase violence for years. We address this puzzle by leveraging data on homicides, missing persons, and incarcerations in Mexico for the past decade along with information on cartel interactions. We model recruitment, state incapacitation, conflict, and saturation as sources of cartel size variation. Results show that by 2022, cartels counted 160,000 to 185,000 units, becoming one of the country’s top employers. Recruiting between 350 and 370 people per week is essential to avoid their collapse because of aggregate losses. Furthermore, we show that increasing incapacitation would increase both homicides and cartel members. Conversely, reducing recruitment could substantially curtail violence and lower cartel size.

Read the full article at: www.science.org

Mark Newman | Leaders and Best: Networks and Ranking in Sports, Markets, and Society

One of the oldest of network problems is the ranking of individuals, teams, or commodities on the basis of pairwise comparisons between them. For example, if you know which football teams beat which others in a particular year, can you say which team is the best overall? This is a harder problem than it sounds because not all pairs of teams play games in a given season, and also because the outcomes of the games can be ambiguous or contradictory. This talk will introduce the techniques used to solve such ranking problems, with examples from games and sports, consumer research and marketing, and social hierarchies in both animal and human communities, then ask how those techniques can be extended to answer a range of new questions about competition and ranking, including the development of new computer algorithms for ranking, questions about the varying patterns of competition in different sports, and what happens when individuals or teams compete in multiple different ways.

Watch full talk at: www.mivideo.it.umich.edu