The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has gone to Sweden’s Svante Paabo for his work on human evolution.

Today the 2022 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo. Take a look at all of today's news:https://t.co/GleXwQOxne

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2022

The Prize committee said he achieved the seemingly impossible task of cracking the genetic code of one of our extinct relatives – Neanderthals.

https://t.co/HI72Nyesxt

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2022

He also performed the « sensational » feat of discovering the previously unknown relative – Denisovans.

His work helped explore our own evolutionary history and how humans spread around the planet.

Watch the very moment the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is announced. Presented by Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Assembly.

See the full announcement: https://t.co/fcLxEf9p0W #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/Q4emKNZ2Mo

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2022

The Swedish geneticist’s work gets to the heart of some of the most fundamental questions – where do we come from and what allowed us, Homo sapiens, to succeed while our relatives went extinct.

He was just off to pick his daughter up from a sleepover when he got the call saying he’d won. He told the BBC: « I was very surprised and overwhelmed, I had not expected this. »

In the 1990s, research on working out the human genetic code was taking place at pace. But that relied on fresh samples of pristine DNA.

Prof Paabo’s interest was in the old, degraded and contaminated genetic material from our ancestors. Many thought it was an impossible challenge. But he was, for the first time, able to sequence DNA from a 40,000-year-old piece of bone.

2022 #NobelPrize laureate in physiology or medicine Svante Pääbo was born in 1955 in Stockholm, Sweden.

In 1999 he founded the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (@MPI_EVA_Leipzig) where he is still active.https://t.co/w31ccQ5218 pic.twitter.com/SQveQE3AZL

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2022

Those results showed that Neanderthals – who mostly lived in Europe and Western Asia – were distinct from both modern day humans and chimpanzees.

His work focused on hominins – the group of modern humans that includes us, Homo sapiens, but also our extinct relatives.

« By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human », the Nobel committee said.

Further comparisons between Neanderthal DNA and humans from around the world showed their DNA was a closer match to humans coming from Europe or Asia.

This tells us that Homo sapiens had sex and children with Neanderthals after migrating out of Africa around 70,000 years ago.

And you can still see the legacy of that today. Between 1-4% of modern human DNA comes from our Neanderthal relatives and this even affects our body’s ability to respond to infection.

World Opinions + BBC News

L’article Nobel Prize goes to Svante Paabo for Neanderthal work est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

The Finnish government officially announced its intention to join NATO on Sunday, as Sweden’s ruling party was to hold a decisive meeting that could pave the way for a joint application.

Less than three months after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the move is a stunning reversal of Finland’s policy on military non-alignment dating back more than 75 years.

Sweden, which has been militarily non-aligned for more than two centuries, is expected to follow suit with a similar announcement, possibly on Monday.

« Today, the President of the Republic and the Government’s Foreign Policy Committee have jointly agreed that Finland will apply for NATO membership, after consulting parliament, » Finnish President Sauli Niinisto told reporters at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Sanna Marin on Sunday.

« This is a historic day. A new era is opening », Niinisto said.

Despite last-minute objections by Turkey, NATO members are on « good track » in their discussions on welcoming Sweden and Finland into the Western military alliance, Croatia’s foreign minister, Gordan Grlic Radman, said as he arrived for talks with NATO counterparts in Berlin.

Finland’s parliament will convene to debate the membership proposal on Monday.

« We hope the parliament will confirm the decision to apply for NATO membership during the coming days. It will be based on a strong mandate », premier Marin said.

An overwhelming majority of Finnish MPs back the decision after Marin’s Social Democratic Party on Saturday said it was in favour of joining.

« Hopefully, we can send our applications next week together with Sweden, » Marin had said on Saturday.

The two Nordic countries broke their strict neutralities after the end of the Cold War by joining the EU and becoming partners to NATO in the 1990s, solidifying their affiliation with the West.

But the concept of full NATO membership was a non-starter in the countries until the war in Ukraine saw public and political support for joining the alliance soar.

Finland, which shares a 1,300-kilometre (800-mile) border with Russia, has been leading the charge, while Sweden appears anxious at being the only non-NATO country around the Baltic Sea.

Finland is also Sweden’s closest defence cooperation partner.

Many Swedish politicians have said their support is conditional on Finland joining.

On Saturday, the Finnish head of state phoned his Russian counterpart President Vladimir Putin to inform him of his country’s desire to join NATO, in a conversation described as « direct and straightforward ».

« Avoiding tensions was considered important, » Niinisto said in a statement after the call.

But Putin responded by warning that joining NATO « would be a mistake since there is no threat to Finland’s security », according to a Kremlin statement.

Moscow has repeatedly warned both countries of consequences if they join NATO.

Niinisto said Sunday that while Helsinki expects Russia to respond to its decision, « little by little, I’m beginning to think that we’re not going to face actual military operations. »

« After the phone call with Putin, I think so even more. »

No other choice

According to recent polls, the number of Finns who want to join the alliance has risen to over three-quarters, almost triple the level seen before the war in Ukraine.

In Sweden, support has also risen dramatically, to around 50 percent — with about 20 percent against.

Sweden’s Social Democrats, led by Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, were meeting Sunday to decide whether the party should abandon its historic stance against joining, last reaffirmed at the party’s annual congress in November.

A green light from the party would secure a firm parliamentary majority in favour of joining.

While the party’s leading politicians have seemed ready to reverse the decision, critical voices within have denounced the change in policy as rushed.

But analysts say it is unlikely that the party will oppose the move.

NATO membership needs to be approved and ratified by all 30 members of the alliance.

While Finland and Sweden claim to have received favourable signals from Ankara, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday expressed hostility to the idea.

Turkey’s objections, directed in particular at Stockholm, focus on what it considers to be the countries’ leniency towards the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is on the EU’s list of terrorist organisations.

Niinisto said Sunday he was « prepared to have a new discussion with President Erdogan about the problems he has raised ».

At NATO’s meeting in Berlin, Slovakia’s Foreign Minister Ivan Korcok said he was « absolutely certain that we will find a solution », while Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said « the signs don’t look bad » for Sweden and Finland.

World Opinions+ Agencies

L’article Finland announces ‘historic’ NATO bid, Sweden expected to follow suit est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has said he was « surprised and humbled » to be awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.

BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” pic.twitter.com/zw2LBQSJ4j

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021

The Swedish Academy praised Gurnah for his « uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism ».

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m / £840,000).

Gurnah, 73, is the author of 10 novels, including Paradise and Desertion.

He said how grateful he was to the academy, adding: « It’s just great – its just a big prize, and such a huge list of wonderful writers – I am still taking it in.

« It was such a complete surprise that I really had to wait until I heard it announced before I could believe it. »

"The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to … "

See the very moment the world discovered who had been awarded this year's literature prize.

Watch the full announcement: https://t.co/m84ucblWAR pic.twitter.com/tUcT8nNQGg

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021

‘Dedication to truth’

Paradise, published in 1994, told the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania in the early 20th Century and was nominated for the Booker Prize, marking his breakthrough as a novelist.

“The story is about growing up with a sense that there are things hidden from you.”

2021 literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah speaks about his novel 'Gravel Heart', and reads us an extract.

Take a look:https://t.co/B3Un7Gb6SG#NobelPrize

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021

« Abdulrazak Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking, » the Nobel Committee for Literature said in a statement.

« His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world. »

« [His] characters find themselves in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between a life that was and a life emerging; it is an insecure state that can never be resolved. »

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s.

He was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until his recent retirement.

Gurnah is the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986.

He said his award would mean issues such as the refugee crisis and colonialism, which he has experienced, will be « discussed ».

« These are things that are with us every day. People are dying, people are being hurt around the world – we must deal with these issues in the most kind way, » he said.

‘Much more violent’

« I came to England when these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the same – more people are struggling and running from terror states.

« The world is much more violent than it was in the 1960s, so there is now greater pressure on the countries that are safe, they inevitably draw more people. »

In an interview in 2016, when asked if he would call himself an « author of postcolonial and/or world literature », Gurnah replied: « I would not use any of those words. I wouldn’t call myself a something writer of any kind.

« In fact, I am not sure that I would call myself anything apart from my name. I guess, if somebody challenges me, that would be another way of saying, ‘Are you a… one of these…?’ I would probably say ‘no’. Precisely, I don’t want that part of me having a reductive name. »

The Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded since 1901, recognise achievement in literature, science, peace and latterly economics.

Past winners have included novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, poets such as Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky and Rabindranath Tagore, and playwrights including Harold Pinter and Eugene O’Neill.

Last year’s award was won by American poet Louise Gluck.

World Opinions Culture – Twitter

L’article Nobel Literature Prize 2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah named winner est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

The Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to three scientists who sought to predict the long-term evolution of a complex system such as the climate by modelling variables — weather, human actions — that create disorder within those systems.

BREAKING NEWS:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2021 #NobelPrize in Physics to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems.” pic.twitter.com/At6ZeLmwa5

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2021

What is the link between the modelling of global warming, which earned Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann half the prize, and the work of the third winner, Giorgio Parisi, who focused on the underlying disorder of matter?

All three study complex systems: large-scale climate or the behaviour of certain materials at an infinitely small scale. From the erratic fluctuations within these systems, the three physicists succeeded in teasing out simpler behaviours and reliable predictions.

Did you miss the announcement of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics earlier today?

Watch the very moment the prize was announced and see the full announcement at https://t.co/6cdrlGk1Si#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/Gehb4dVkXK

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2021

« We recognised that emerging phenomena sometimes require us to look at all the individual complicated physical mechanisms and knit them together to make a prediction, » said Nobel Physics Committee member John Wettlaufer, on hand when the awards were announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Climate « is THE complex system par excellence, » said Freddy Bouchet, a physicist at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research.

A large number of variables, in other words, interact — atmosphere, oceans, soils, vegetation — rendering any reliable forecast beyond a few weeks elusive.

But alongside and within this observable chaos there are also clear trends that can be linked to well-identified causes, such as long-term global warming attributable to human activity.

Discover more about our 2021 physics laureate in this thread! #NobelPrize https://t.co/jntexwwCvt

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2021

– Hidden rules –

« In climate science, the random and the systematic overlap, » said Bouchet. « The mathematical tools developed by Klaus Hasselmann have made it possible to separate the two in order to better understand the evolution of climate. »

Being able to tease out patterns in what is random — the signal in the noise — is fundamental to understanding the evolution of extreme weather such as heat waves, storms and hurricanes.

The models developed by the Japanese-American Syukuro Manabe have succeeded in cracking the signature code of climate subsystems.

"It will take me a few days to answer all the phone calls that I had today."

Physics laureate Giorgio Parisi talks to us following the announcement of his #NobelPrize in Physics. pic.twitter.com/S2UrIMRzGy

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2021

« These are the first models which made it possible to calculate the effect of the increase in carbon dioxide of anthropogenic origin on global warming at the core of contemporary climate models », Bouchet said.

Giorgio Parisi, for his part, made a major contribution to the theory of these complex systems by revealing the hidden rules that govern them.

« I started to lay the foundations of this science — which did not exist at the beginning of the 1980s — by studying nature through mathematics », the Italian researcher told Corriere della Sera newspaper earlier this year.

It is a science that allows us, for example, to explain the changing form of a cloud of starlings in flight.

Parisi provided the mathematical tools to understand how random processes can play a decisive role in the development of large structures, such as those governing climate.

Today, they are applied in biology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

World Opinions News – Twitter

L’article Physics Nobel: deciphering climate disorder to better predict it.. Video est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

You’re underwater and you are responsible for 100 people, and a nuclear reactor, and you’re operating in an environment that is fundamentally hard, Britain’s second sea lord said recently, discussing his former role as a commander of a nuclear submarine. “If you make a mistake, you will sink and you will die, and everybody else will … the focus and the ability to deliver on the complexity of that operation is something that I was naturally comfortable and reasonably good at.”

Nick Hine was explaining why he believes his autism made him a better naval officer. The developmental condition affects social interaction, but manifests in strikingly varied and complex ways in each individual. Some require full-time support and care. Others regard it as a difference rather than a disability, pointing to their skills and abilities, such as deep focus and resilience to peer pressure. In his recent book, The Pattern Seekers, Simon Baron-Cohen – an influential though controversial expert on autism – argues that people with “hyper-systemising minds” that focus on precision, details and systems have driven the development of civilisation, and that there has been significant overlap between innovators and autistic people. Ignoring those with the condition squanders talent and risks the groupthink that comes from hiring people whose minds work the same way.

Growing diagnosis of the condition needs to be matched by increasing acceptance and support

The primary costs of such narrow vision are borne by autistic people themselves, of course. On Monday – the start of autism awareness week – new research found that more children in England are autistic than previously thought: around one in 57, reflecting a global rise thought to be largely due to improved recognition. But while only around a third have learning disabilities, many more will struggle at school. The Office for National Statistics says that only one in five autistic adults are employed. Changing that will require not only recognising their abilities, but also adapting working environments, practices and expectations.

Yet autistic people should not be valued only if they are seen as “productive”. This year has shown how far away we are from accepting neurodiversity in its truest sense. Autistic people were among those placed under blanket “do not resuscitate” orders due to Covid, without their knowledge or consent; the Care Quality Commission found in December that such notices had led to potentially avoidable deaths. Essential social care that many families relied upon vanished. While elderly people in care homes were prioritised for vaccination, younger people with learning disabilities, some of whom were autistic, had to wait much longer, despite evidence that the death rate among them was up to six times higher than for the general population in the first wave of Covid-19. Research conducted pre-pandemic suggested two out of three autistic adults were not getting the support they needed, and the public spending watchdog now warns that devastating service cuts are likely as the council funding crisis deepens.

Embracing neurodiversity must mean not merely celebrating people who are capable of thriving even in a world designed by and for neurotypicals, but also supporting those who are severely affected. It should not need saying that autistic people are valuable not because their autism can make them useful to society, improving a company’s performance or advancing science – but because they are people.

The Guardian View

 This article was amended on 2 April 2021 to describe autism as a developmental – rather than neurological – condition

L’article View on autism awareness: recognising diverse talents – and needs est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.