Using evidence from these artifacts, the researchers traced the rapid spread of cacao through trade routes after its initial domestication more than five millennia ago in Ecuador. They showed cacao’s dispersal to South America’s northwestern Pacific coast and later into Central America until it eventually reached Mexico 1,500 years later.

A tropical evergreen tree called Theobroma cacao bears large, oval pods containing the bean-like cacao seeds that today are roasted and turned into cocoa and multitudes of chocolate confections. In these ancient times, cacao was consumed as a beverage or an ingredient with other foods.

The researchers tested more than 300 pre-Columbian ceramics spanning nearly 6,000 years for traces of cacao DNA and three chemical compounds related to it, including caffeine. They
discovered cacao evidence on about 30% of them. The findings indicate cacao products were used more widely among these ancient cultures than previously known.

The ceramics themselves offered an artistic glimpse at the cultures, some displaying wondrous anthropomorphic designs.

A study published in 2018 revealed the domestication and use of cacao beginning about 5,300 years ago in Ecuador, based on evidence from ceramics at the Santa Ana-La Florida archeological site. The new study builds on that by tracking cacao’s spread through 19 pre-Columbian cultures. Some of the earliest use was shown through ceramics made by the Valdivia culture in Ecuador and Puerto Hormiga culture in Colombia.

The ancient DNA found on the ceramics also indicated that various cultures cross-bred cacao trees to adapt to new environments.

“The first steps of cacao domestication correspond to a more complex process than the one we had previously hypothesized,” said molecular geneticist Claire Lanaud from the AGAP unit of CIRAD, a French agricultural research center for international development, lead author of the study published on Thursday, March 7 in the journal Scientific Reports.

“We were not at all aware of such an important domestication of cacao trees all along the Pacific coast in South America in the pre-Columbian times, and so early. The significant genetic mixing that was observed testifies to numerous interactions that could have happened between peoples from Amazonia and the Pacific coast,” Lanaud added.

Cacao’s dispersal from Ecuador to Mesoamerica may have occurred through vast and interconnected political-economic networks, according to the researchers.

“First of all, we can firmly state that the origin of cacao and its domestication was the Upper Amazon – Mexico and Central America. The process of dispersal was rather quick and involved the close and long-distance interaction of the Amerindian people,” said archaeologist and study co-author Francisco Valdez of the PALOC unit of France’s IRD research institution and Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

“Maritime contacts must have been involved as well as the inland contacts. Previously, the common (belief) was that cacao was domesticated in the Mesoamerican lowlands and that it was dispersed from there to the south,” Valdez said.

The study provides insight into the earliest trade in what is now one of the world’s most important cash crops. Today’s sugary chocolate confections differ greatly from cacao’s early uses. Before Europeans reached the Americas five centuries ago, cultures like the Aztecs and Maya prepared it as a drink, mixed with various spices or other ingredients.

“Cacao as a plant is an energy-source food, as well as a medicinal product,” Valdez said. “Amerindian people used it in many ways. Raw, the pulp was sucked. The (cacao seed) could be cooked, roasted, grinded and made into liquid and solid foods. The bark, branches and the cob can be burned, and the ashes are an antiseptic. And it is also used to relieve skin or muscle inflammations and sores.” – Rappler.com

Researchers said on Wednesday, March 6, the stone tools – the most primitive kind known – were initially unearthed in the 1970s near the town of Korolevo in the Carpathian foothills along the Tysa river, close to Ukraine’s borders with Hungary and Romania. But their age had remained unclear.

The new method determined the age of the sediment layer containing the stone tools, making this site critical for understanding how humans first spread into Europe during warm spells – called interglacial periods – that interrupted the Ice Age’s grip on the continent.

The researchers concluded that the maker of the tools likely was Homo erectus, an early human species that arose roughly 2 million years ago and spread across Africa, Asia and Europe before disappearing perhaps 110,000 years ago.

“No bones were found at Korolevo, only stone tools. But the age suggests that Homo erectus was the only possible human species at the time. We know very little about our earliest ancestors. They used stone tools for butchery and probably used fire,” said Czech Academy of Sciences archeologist Roman Garba, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature.

Homo erectus was the first member of our evolutionary lineage with body proportions similar to our species, Homo sapiens, though with a smaller brain.

The tools, made of volcanic rock, were fashioned in what is called the Oldowan style. While quite simple – flaked tools such as choppers, scrapers or basic cutting instruments – they represent the dawn of human technology.

Until now, the oldest-known evidence of humans in Europe was about 1.2-1.1 million years old from a site called Atapuerca in Spain.

The Korolevo findings provide insight into the route of the first human expansion into Europe. Homo erectus fossils from 1.8 million years ago are known from a Caucasus site in Georgia called Dmanisi. Coupled with Korolevo, this suggests Homo erectus entered Europe from the east or southeast, migrating along the Danube river, Garba said.

“Korolevo is the northernmost outpost found so far of what we presume to be Homo erectus and is testimony to the intrepidness of this ancestor,” Czech Academy of Sciences geoscientist and study co-author John Jansen added.

It has been notoriously difficult to determine the age of Paleolithic sites like Korolevo. The study dated the tools, left by their makers on a river bed, by determining when the layer bearing the artifacts was buried under overlaying sediment.

“Earth is constantly bombarded by galactic cosmic rays. When these rays – mainly protons and alpha particles – penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, they generate a secondary shower of particles – neutrons and muons – that, in turn, penetrates into the subsurface,” geoscientist and study co-author Mads Knudsen of Aarhus University in Denmark said.

These particles react with minerals in rocks to produce radioactive nuclides, a class of atoms. The sediment was dated based on the ratio of two nuclides, thanks to their differing pace of radioactive decay.

Europe was later colonized by other now-extinct human species including Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, arriving in significant numbers in Europe perhaps around 40,000-45,000 years ago.

The Homo erectus pioneers encountered a Europe inhabited by large mammals including mammoths, rhinos, hippos, hyenas and saber-toothed cats.

“Most likely they were scavengers, looking for carcasses left by hyenas or other predators, but what attracted them to Korolevo was a source of high-quality volcanic rock, very good for making stone tools,” Garba said.

The researchers suspect evidence of European human occupation even older than Korolevo will turn up.

“The question is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ we will find a site of similar or older age somewhere else in Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria or Serbia,” Garba said. – Rappler.com

Then, the world would be blanketed by dark soot. Temperatures would drop, and there could be no sunny days in over a decade.

On the off chance that you survive all of these, you still have to contend with nuclear winter, political and economic instability, and the third horseman of the apocalypse: famine.

Enter the humble seaweed.

Seaweed, the food for survival

With its ability to thrive with little sunlight and less resources, seaweed can prove to be a resilient crop in the aftermath of a nuclear war, when the food supply chain is disrupted.

In a peer-reviewed study recently published in the science journal Earth’s Future, researchers found that post-nuclear seaweed production could be ramped up to 45% of the global food demand in a short amount of time.

What’s most surprising is that the more severe the nuclear war is, the faster seaweeds can grow. Talk about grace under pressure.

“It’s surprising that the seaweed grows better the worse the nuclear catastrophe is,” Michael Roleda, professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman Marine Science Institute (UP MSI), told Rappler in an interview. “Because actually, we expected the opposite.”

Roleda, who has been studying seaweeds for the past 30 years, is a co-author of the study.

When the world cools after a nuclear war, colder and nutrient-rich water from below rises to the ocean’s surface, Roleda explained. These nutrients would help seaweeds grow faster.

While the algae can survive with low light, Roleda noted that, of course, growth is better if seaweeds are given more than the bare minimum. He said they simulated the growth of seaweeds in a reduced sunlight setting, when the atmosphere is covered by dust in scenarios of a nuclear war or a volcanic eruption.

“The amount of light that could pass through the atmosphere, it’s enough to make the seaweed photosynthesize and grow,” he said. “Basically, that makes seaweed a resilient crop during some catastrophic event.”

Aside from that, seaweed is not reliant on arable land, fertilizers, and pesticides – resources that people may be hard put to get in a time of war.

The study was conducted by researchers from the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, Louisiana State University, University of Canterbury, and the UP MSI.

It envisioned a future after a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, with a world dealing with 150 trillion grams of soot. A separate study in Nature Food saw that this scenario would decrease calorie production from crops up to 90%, three to four years after the war ended.

In the interim

Roleda, who has dedicated much of his academic career in the study of seaweeds, hopes people would appreciate what seaweed has to offer. He studies seaweed as a source of protein and carrageenan.

Carrageenan is extracted from seaweeds and is used as an emulsifier and thickener in different products.

Seaweed can be found from the toothpaste in your bathroom to the canned meat products stocked in your pantries. Even chocolate milk and ice cream has seaweed component.

Seaweed is good for gut health and is rich with vitamins. It has antioxidant and anti-obesity properties, and is a staple in some Asian cuisines. Roleda lamented that despite the popularity of seaweeds in neighboring countries, this enthusiasm for the algae doesn’t translate as much in the Philippines.

“Despite that, very few people appreciate seaweed,” he said. “And the name in itself, ‘weed,’ has a misnomer because if it’s a weed, it’s something unusable, masakit sa mata (It’s an eyesore).”

According to the Philippine Seaweed Industry roadmap, the country used to be a lead exporter of seaweeds, selling to China, the United States, and some European countries. However, the degrading quality of seedlings set back the country.

That’s why Roleda and his team is working on an in-vitro gene bank where they are cultivating different strains to see which has the most superior quality for seaweed farming.

The scientist attributed the underdeveloped industry to the available areas in the country for cultivation, the frequency of typhoons, and the lack of support for research and development in the multimillion dollar industry of seaweeds.

For Roleda, it’s time the government puts forward more support for the seaweed industry – even before a nuclear war erupts in other places in the world.

“We don’t need to wait for a nuclear war to happen or a big volcanic eruption covering all our atmosphere before we appreciate that seaweed is a resilient crop that could maybe help us thrive,” he said. – Rappler.com

The triumphal arch was discovered in December at the site of Viminacium, a Roman city near the town of Kostolac, 70 km (45 miles) east of Belgrade.

Miomir Korac, the leading archaeologist, said the discovery was made during excavation of the main street of Viminacium, the capital of the Roman province of Moesia.

“This is the first such triumphal arch in this area…. It can be dated to the first decades of the third century AD,” Korac told Reuters on Monday, January 22.

Viminacium was a sprawling Roman city of 45,000 people with a hippodrome, fortifications, a forum, palace, temples, an amphitheater, aqueducts, baths, and workshops. It existed between the first and sixth centuries.

“When we found square foundational footprints made of massive limestone pieces…there was no doubt that this was a triumphal arch,” Korac said.

A fragment of a marble slab with letters reading CAES/ANTO suggested that the arch was dedicated to Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, known as Caracalla, who reigned from 198 to 217 AD.

It is believed that Caracalla was elevated to emperor in Viminacium, said Mladen Jovicic, an archaeologist.

“We are hoping to find more pieces…. We have found one finely made pillar, beams, but we would like to find more from the inscription on the arch,” Jovicic said.

Excavations of Viminacium have been going on since 1882, but archaeologists estimate they have only scoured 5% of the site, which they say is 450 hectares – bigger than New York’s Central Park – and unusual in not being buried under a modern city.

Discoveries so far include two Roman ships, golden tiles, coins, jade sculptures, religious items, mosaics, frescos, weapons, and remains of three mammoths. – Rappler.com

The low-cost water quality sensor, developed by Giovanni Tapang of the National Institute of Physics in partnership with the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute (UP MSI), measures water temperature and levels of salinity, pH, oxygen, and chlorophyll.

The data is then fed to the Harmful Algal Blooms Observing System, or HABHub (a play on the words pancit habhab, the noodle dish of Quezon province), a digital database and early warning system for toxic algal bloom, commonly known as red tide.

At the helm of HABHub is marine scientist Dr. Aletta Yñiguez. It was started in 2018 through the support of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), the academe, and local governments.

Yñiguez told Rappler in an interview that she has always been interested in the “patterns that make up ecosystems.” She shared that one of the reasons that pushed her to pursue marine science years ago was seeing coral reefs’ changing appearance under the sea due to the light and waves.

Yñiguez’ areas of interests include marine ecology, biological oceanography, and ecological modeling. She married these fields when she led the creation of HABHub, which integrates data from sensors at sea to show real-time ocean status.

This information may be used to forecast changes in sea conditions, like harmful algal blooms (HAB), and then promptly warn the concerned community.

Red tide is a type of HAB. These blooms are caused when algae, such as phytoplankton, grow out of control and generate toxic effects on fish, shellfish, birds, and people. The impacts cut across the fishing industry, public health, and the environment.

In the Philippines, the first recorded HAB occurrence was in Maqueda Bay, Samar, in 1983. However, there are anecdotes of HABs detected in Manila Bay as far back as 1908.

Since HABs have become regular occurrences, the BFAR dedicated a shellfish bulletin in their website to update the public on areas where shellfish tests are positive for toxic red tide. In 2020, for instance, BFAR conducted 6,603 monitoring activities through 10 HAB laboratories nationwide.

In general, monitoring the physical and chemical conditions of the oceans can lead to an understanding of how oceans are changing, especially with water pollution and a warming world.

HABHub is the first of its kind in the Philippines, said Yñiguez. She admitted that the system still has a long way to go if it wants to encompass coastal communities throughout the country.

“It’s not just the database itself, but the technology [of] having consistent, past data. I think that’s [what’s] critical,” said Yñiguez.

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Science gives people choices

Fisherfolk experience red tide when they detect discoloration at sea. They know that red tide can contaminate shellfish and make them harmful to eat. Fish kills caused by red tide mean less money and less food on the table. Worse, red tide can be deadly to people.

Currently, the science of algal blooms is largely contained within academic circles. But Yñiguez said communities should know about it too since they’re the ones who directly experience the phenomenon.

“You don’t keep them ignorant about the knowledge. Allow them – whether or not they want to, that’s their choice – allow them to be able to at least engage in these kinds of discussions,” said Yñiguez in a mix of Filipino and English.

Furthermore, having an early warning system for red tide would give local governments and fishers lead time to engage in other livelihood activities or sources of income. However, Yñiguez also admitted that at present, fishers and shellfish farmers hardly have alternative choices.

For those engaged in mariculture, with an early warning, they can opt to harvest before a fish kill occurs.

Locals they have worked with in Bolinao, for example, were “very open” to HABHub, said Yñiguez.

“They were quite open to collaboration. And I think this needs to be continued. [Learn] how to really strengthen these relationships and engagements,” she said.

Lack of data

The coastal town of Bolinao has accumulated long-term datasets on the conditions of their waters because of the academe’s ongoing studies in the area. But other towns are not as lucky.

According to Yñiguez, they tried to institute HABHub in other places such as Leyte, Capiz, and Puerto Princesa. Unfortunately, many towns do not have basic data, and without data, you cannot institute a machine learning model like HABhub to gather more information.

Yñiguez saw this glaring problem that HABhub faces, especially after she finished post-graduate studies in Miami, Florida.

“I came from [doing] a PhD na ang dali ng access sa datasets sa mga online databases…nandoon na ‘yung mga models and prediction systems for the environment,” said Yñiquez. “And dito, ‘yung mga long-term and easily accessible data wala pa nga.”

(I came from doing a PhD where there’s easy access to datasets in online databases, and you already have models and prediction systems for the environment. Here, long-term and easily accessible data is still lacking.)

Since the project with the DOST on HABhub has been terminated, Yñiguez said they are looking for funding and other sources of support. At the moment, they are trying to continue what they’ve started.

Their dream is to incorporate HABhub into a larger ocean database. Offhand, Yñiguez cites Copernicus, the European Union’s earth observation program, as an example.

HABHub is only one example of how the Philippines can use technology and data to improve social and environmental conditions. Despite budget constraints and the many limitations of working with scant datasets in many areas in the country, there remains a sea of possibilities.

At the bottom of this project – and all related efforts – lies the long crusade of protecting marine ecosystems. – Rappler.com

(Editor’s note: The first update of this article misstated that the low-cost water quality sensor used to measure water conditions was also developed by the UP College of Engineering. This has been deleted.)

Recently, Filipino researchers discovered new way to trap microparticles using honeycomb structures, which could potentially be effective against pollutants.

Researchers from the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman (Jonathan Patricio, Gillian Kathryn Yap, Jose Jesus Gayosa, and Susan Arco) and from Ateneo de Manila University (Marco Laurence Budlayan, Jose Mario Diaz, and Raphael Guerrero) collaborated on a study on honeycomb pattern formation on polyvinyl chloride (PVC) films recently published in the Materials Research Express journal.

Budlayan, the primary author of the study, is a PhD Physics student of Ateneo working on the collaboration research between the two laboratories in UP Diliman (Synthetic Organic Chemistry Lab) and Ateneo (Photonics Lab). The recent discovery in this project was a side experiment for his thesis.

The researchers mentioned that the honeycomb pattern’s repeating units or cells can effectively trap particles and impurities, which makes it a prospective structure for air and water filters.

“We found out that we can simply create honeycomb-like structures on a glass film. We can control the resulting honeycomb pattern’s pore size and lining thickness by merely drying the film at different temperatures,” Budlayan said.

By adjusting and controlling the drying temperature of PVC films during the manufacturing process, the researchers were able to utilize biomimicry engineering of one of the most functional and strong natural architectures on Earth: the hexagonal cells of honeycomb.

“I was coating a glass with the polymer layer when I observed that the transparency of the resulting film varied when the film was dried in a different environment. When I inspected the film in an electron microscope, I saw honeycomb patterns on the glass, so I thought about why it happened and the possible applications of these accidentally found structures,” Budlayan said.

While there are various techniques to achieve microparticle trapping, the team used an electric field to stimulate fluid movement within their created honeycomb channels. The order and structure of honeycomb patterns were not only aesthetically pleasing but also promising in functioning as cages to trap tiny particles.

“We look forward to incorporating the PVC honeycomb patterns in actual microfluidic chips designed to trap specific microparticles of interest. This will be helpful in isolating pollutants in water, including microparticles and other inorganic impurities,” Budlayan said.

Possible applications

Microparticles or microscopic particles are similar to the size of a bacteria, which is less than the width of a hair strand. These particles are everywhere, such as powdered sugar, pollen, and even microplastics. Due to its size and different behavior, unwanted pollutants can easily enter various systems and wreak havoc.

Despite its size, the impact of microparticles can be tremendous as it can accumulate in time and trigger unwanted changes. Because of its effect, scientists worldwide have been exploring several ways to trap microparticles in various environments (air, water, land, etc.).

While this honeycomb-structured PVC technology is only in its infancy stage, it provides promising microparticle trapping, sensing, and other related applications using simple and accessible materials for Filipinos.

Further improvements to this technology could lead to the making of more smart materials that could help revolutionize various industries (e.g. water purifiers and medical sensors for the health industry), clean the environment from pollutants, and many others.

Nature, science, and biomimicry

Bees take on several roles (farmers, engineers, architects, etc.) that often serve as inspirations to science and technology. The bees and their beehives are great examples of what strategies people can learn from nature in solving challenges. This concept, called biomimicry, can be applied to almost any human activity.

Although the UP and Ateneo researchers discovered honeycomb patterns on polymer by accident, they showed appreciation for and understanding of nature by further exploring its possible functions.

“Its unique properties and structure inspired the construction of light and robust aircraft, protection gear, panels, packaging, and cushioning because of an ability to absorb impact and energy,” the researchers mentioned in their paper.

Biomimicry is a feat of human adaptation to nature that offers various guiding solutions to how the world works against challenges. It can be applied using complex technologies or even simple tools available.

“It tells us that we can produce meaningful results from accidental discoveries and simple experimental setup,” Budlayan said, aiming to inspire more scientists with their simple fabrication technique and easy tuning of polymer microstructure despite the often-outdated laboratories existing in the Philippines. – Rappler.com

The Nobel prize committee awarded Karikó and Weissman for their work on “nucleoside base modifications” that helped in the creation of the COVID-19 vaccine.

But in an interview with the Nobel prize committee shortly after the announcement, Karikó recalled she was “kicked out from Penn,” and was “forced to retire.”

In an article posted by Penn on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, October 2, the university recognized Karikó and Weissman as the “28th and 29th Nobel laureates affiliated with Penn.” It added that the pair joins nine previous Nobel laureates in Medicine with ties to the university. But at the bottom of the post, context was added by readers claiming that Penn’s wording was “misleading,” stating that the university missed to mention they demoted Karikó.

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, Penn’s historic mRNA vaccine research team, win 2023 @NobelPrize in Medicine https://t.co/ztt9x0Iumu #nobelprize

— Penn (@Penn) October 2, 2023

According to an October 2023 article by Forbes, Karikó started at Penn in 1989 as an adjunct professor and researcher. Karikó worked on mRNA therapies at the university throughout the 1990s, but struggled to win grants as excitement around mRNA began to fade. In 1995, Penn gave her an ultimatum to either leave or to continue working on mRNA but get demoted from her full-time professor track.

“It was particularly horrible as that same week, I had just been diagnosed with cancer,” Karikó said in an interview with Wired.

“I was facing two operations, and my husband, who had gone back to Hungary to pick up his green card, had got stranded there because of some visa issue, meaning he couldn’t come back for six months. I was really struggling…,” she added.

Karikó accepted the demotion and began collaborating with Weissman, a professor of medicine at Penn, in 1997.

Siren Biotechnology founder Nicole Paulk insisted on social media that Penn “played no role” in the pair’s win. “You should feel immense shame, not pride, today,” Paulk said, replying to a congratulatory post by the university.

And yet you shunned her and put roadblocks in the way of her and her research when she was at Penn. You should feel immense shame, not pride, today. You played no role in this. This win is hers and Drew's.

— Dr. Nicole Paulk (@Nicole_Paulk) October 2, 2023

New England Complex Systems Institute Chief of COVID-19 Task Force and former Harvard Medical School researcher Eric Feigl-Ding also urged Penn to apologize to Karikó, and admired the Nobel laureate for persisting in her research work despite her demotion.

📍UPENN needs to apologize to #NobelPrize2023 winner Dr. Kariko: "UPenn told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality. When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.’”@Penn — apologize! pic.twitter.com/LgoTKgUi6j

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) October 2, 2023

“Kati lit the match and we spent the rest of those 20-plus years working together, figuring it out,” Weissman said in a press conference at Penn.

“We would sit together in 1997 and afterwards and talk about all the things that we thought RNA could do, all of the vaccines and therapeutics and gene therapies….That’s why we never gave up. We just kept persevering and kept working at it,” he said.

In 2013, Penn refused to reinstate Karikó to the full-time professor track she had been demoted from in 1995. “They told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality,” she told Wired.

Karikó accepted an offer to become senior vice president at German biotechnology company BioNTech in the same year. She has been leading the company’s COVID-19 vaccine development since.

“About 10 years ago, I was here in October because I was kicked out, from Penn, was forced to retire,” Karikó told Nobel after the announcement of her award.

“Then my husband supported me and said that, you know, when [he] finally visited in Germany and found that maybe BioNTech is the right place. Then he said ‘Just try it and I will make sure that you don’t regret.'”

Karikó is currently an adjunct professor of neurosurgery in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, while Weissman is the Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. Both joined a celebration in the university after the announcement by the Nobel prize committee.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine is annually awarded to persons who have made “the most important discovery” within the field. There are currently 227 Nobel laureates in Medicine, according to its official website. – Rappler.com

The prize-awarding academy said that the research of the three US-based scientists on quantum dots, which in size ratio have the same relationship to a football as a football to Earth, had “added color to nanotechnology.”

“Researchers believe that in the future they could contribute to flexible electronics, tiny sensors, thinner solar cells and encrypted quantum communication,” the academy said in a statement.

The more than century-old prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1 million).

One of the “fascinating and unusual properties” of quantum dots is that they change light color depending on the particle size, while keeping the atomic structure unchanged, said Johan Aqvist, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

Bawendi said he felt “very surprised, sleepy, shocked, unexpected and very honored” by the award. Brus said it was so unexpected that he ignored the first half a dozen phonecalls he received from people trying to break the news to him.

Earlier on Wednesday, October 4, the academy appeared to have inadvertently shared the prize winners’ names.

“It was very unfortunate that the press release got out and we still don’t know why it happened,” said Hans Ellegren, the academy’s secretary general. He added it did not affect the choice of laureates.

The quantum dot technology, which enabled high-definition QLED TVs sold by Samsung 005930.KS, Sony 6758.T or TCL 000100.SZ, traces its roots to early 1980s work by Ekimov.

“I could never have thought you could make these things at such a large commercial scale,” Bawendi said in a press conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is a professor.

Ekimov was a pioneer, discovering that the color of glass changes with the size of copper chloride molecules contained in it and that sub-atomic forces were at play.

Speaking to Reuters on the phone, 78-year-old Ekimov, who was born in the Soviet Union and later moved to the US, marveled at the latest flat-screen technology, something he did not envision during his work in the 1980s. “Remember what a TV was back then!” he said, laughing.

A few years later, Brus extended the work to microscopic particles suspended in liquids.

“It’s a collaborative effort,” Brus said in an interview at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. “There’s not a single ‘eureka!’ moment.”

In 1993, Bawendi revolutionised the production of quantum dots and improved their quality.

Among other uses, the research enabled LEDs that shine more like natural sunlight, avoiding the bluish light they were previously shunned for.

Brus is a professor emeritus at Columbia University and Ekimov works for Nanocrystals Technology Inc, both in New York.

Brus was hired by AT&T Bell Labs in 1972 where he spent 23 years, devoting much of the time to studying nanocrystals.

“It’s not that I’m a genius, I’m very far from being a genius,” Brus said. “But what’s important is to try to find the problem that other people don’t realize is important and aren’t working on.”

Bawendi, who was born in Paris, was a student when he went to Bell Labs for a summer, where he met Brus, who became his mentor. “It was a cauldron of energy and science,” Bawendi said.

He also described flunking his first chemistry exam as a first-year undergraduate student. “I got 20 out of 100, it was the lowest grade in the class, and I thought, ‘Oh no, this is the end of me, what am I doing here?'” he said.

The third of this year’s crop of awards, the chemistry Nobel follows those for medicine and physics announced this week.

Established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and chemist Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace have been awarded since 1901.

While the chemistry awards are sometimes overshadowed by the physics prize and its famous winners such as Albert Einstein, chemistry laureates include many scientific greats, including radioactivity pioneer Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie, who also won the physics prize. – Rappler.com

$1 = 11.0225 Swedish crowns

The prize-awarding academy said their studies had given humanity new tools for exploring the movement of electrons inside atoms and molecules, a phenomenon that was long thought impossible to trace.

Changes in electrons occur in a few tenths of an attosecond, a unit so short that there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe.

“The ability to generate attosecond pulses of light has opened the door on a tiny, extremely tiny, time scale and it’s also opened the door to the world of electrons,” said Eva Olsson, member of the Nobel Prize in Physics Selection Committee.

There are potential applications of the findings in many different areas. In electronics, it is important to understand and control how electrons behave in a material.

The field also holds promise in areas such as a new in-vitro diagnostic technique to detect characteristic molecular traces of diseases in blood samples, the academy said.

Hungarian-born Krausz, whose team generated the first ultra-fast pulses in the early 2000s, has likened attosecond physics to a fast-shutter camera where the short light flashes allow a freeze frame look within the microcosm.

“Just as you try to photograph a Formula 1 racing car with a fast camera, for example, as it runs through the finish line. You need a camera to take sharp snapshots and reconstruct the movement,” he told Reuters at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, where he is director. “This is exactly the concept we use for the fastest movements that happen in nature outside the atomic nucleus, which is the movement of electrons.”

L’Huillier, who received word she had won the prize in the middle of a lecture, said, “it is really a prestigious prize and I’m so happy to get it. It’s incredible.” She proceeded with the lecture after the news, a half hour she described as “a bit difficult.”

Only the fifth woman to win a Nobel physics prize, French-born L’Huillier works at Lund University in Sweden, while Agostini, who was also born in France, is a emeritus professor at Ohio State University in the United States.

The two French winners were congratulated by French President Emmanuel Macron, who said on social media: “What pride for our Nation!”

Inside the atom

L’Huillier discovered a new effect from the interaction of laser light with atoms in a gas in experiments beginning in the 1980s. Agostini and Krausz then demonstrated how this could be used to create shorter light pulses than previously possible.

While Krausz and his colleagues in Austria were working on a technique that could select a single pulse, Agostini and his group in France succeeded in producing and investigating a series of consecutive light pulses, like a train with carriages.

These experiments all showed that attosecond pulses could be observed and measured, and could be used in new experiments.

Krausz said he was trying to take in the reality of winning the award.

“I did not expect it,” he said. “I am overwhelmed.”

The academy was unable to immediately reach Agostini, who was in Paris, to give him the news.

“My daughter called me and she was asking: ‘Is it true you have the Nobel prize?'” he said in an interview at his Paris apartment. “Of course, I told her, ‘No, this can’t be true.'”

Physics is the second Nobel to be awarded this week after Hungarian scientist Katalin Kariko and US colleague Drew Weissman won the medicine prize for making mRNA molecule discoveries that paved the way for COVID-19 vaccines.

Created in the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace have been awarded since 1901 with a few interruptions, becoming arguably the highest honor for scientists everywhere.

While the award for peace can take the limelight, the physics prize has also often taken centre stage with winners such as Albert Einstein and awards for science that has fundamentally changed how we see the world.

Announced on consecutive weekdays in early October, the physics prize announcement will be followed by ones for chemistry, literature, peace, and economics, the latter a later addition to the original lineup. – Rappler.com

$1 = 11.0129 Swedish crowns

Their more recent dark state article was published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters in April 2023, with co-authors Jim Skulte, Phatthamon Kongkhambut, Sahana Rao, Ludwig Mathey, Hans Keßler, and Andreas Hemmerich.

With almost the same set of authors, they published their prior article in August 2022, which led to their surprising discovery of a dark state. This previous groundbreaking study created another type of time crystal, called continuous time crystal, for the first time in physics history.

Similar to the Big Bang Theory‘s theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper, Cosme, along with his colleagues, created a theory or mathematical model and successfully verified it in their experimental design.

As a theorist, that’s something that excites you because we’re able to understand something at the fundamental level and that it works.

JAYSON COSME

Cosme clarified that what they found, the dark state, is different from dark matter, as the latter is mostly a theoretical form of matter and has not been detected yet. The dark state or dark quantum state, on the other hand, is the state of an atom or molecule that does not absorb or emit light (photons), hence “dark.” More importantly, the dark state is not just a theory as its existence has been proven and repeatedly created.

“It is closer to an invisibility cloak in Harry Potter,” he said, describing the dark state. “It’s practically invisible.”

Using the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) for their system, the study showed a unique way of creating a dark state using two key ingredients: the interaction between the atoms as facilitated by light via the laser beam, and the shaking of the laser itself.

He shared that different types of interactions create various states of matter, similar to how water molecules can become solid (ice), liquid (water), or gas (vapor), depending on how the molecules interact.

Their original setup was initially designed to create an incommensurate time crystal. By shaking the system harder, Cosme shared that they were surprised to see the transformation of the time crystal into something new and realized it was a dark state.

“We’re able to show that you can create a new state, which is a dark state, by combining periodic driving and interaction between the constituent particles that make up the Bose-Einstein condensate.”

While the study is fundamental research, the concept of the dark state can already be applied to quantum computing. Quantum computing is a multidisciplinary field that uses quantum mechanics to solve problems quicker than classical computers that exist nowadays.

While quantum computing has more possibilities for combinations of 1s and 0s, its state is not stable. For example, classical computers are more stable, which makes current devices like laptops and cameras function properly. Hence, its state of 1, for instance, will always remain 1, and so forth.

However, in a quantum bit, state 1, for instance, will at some point become 0.

With the dark state, a quantum bit will be more stable in creating a system that can solve more complex problems or perform faster functions than today’s supercomputers.

Cosme first started working with the team when he was working as a postdoctoral researcher and theorist in Hamburg, Germany, under Mathey, from 2017 to 2020. When he started working as an associate professor at UP Diliman in 2020, their collaboration continued.

As the principal investigator for the study, Cosme shared his idea with his close collaborator, Jim Skulte, to improve the mathematical model behind it and work on the experiment to prove their theory, along with their other colleagues from Hemmerich’s experimental group. 

“Apart from the joy of discovery and doing the physics itself, also seeing that your fellow scientists, colleagues, [and] your peers appreciate the work that you have done and make use of your ideas, to me, that’s one of the reasons that I’m still here doing physics, still doing science,” he said. – Rappler.com