The super important science

You've probably heard about the Nobel in Physiology this year. It was awarded for the breakthroughs in the immunology to Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffman discovered how the body's first line of defence was activated and to Ralph Seinman discovered the dendritic cell, which helps defeat infection. However after the laureates were announced it turned out Ralph Seinman died three days ago. It was so recent that the Nobel committee didn't know about his passing. It created a problem as the awards are only given to living people. There is a rule that if someone dies before the awarding ceremony the award is still theirs but this is the first time someone was already dead when they announced it. There was some confusion what to do in this case but now we know that he will keep the award. The best part of this story is, however, the story of his fight with pancreatic cancer. It is one of the most deadly forms of cancer but he managed to live for four years since his diagnosis thanks to the very discoveries he was awarded the Nobel Prize for. Four years is even better then Nobel.

Wired has a story about The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram. I was sure that by now it is defined by some relation to the constants of nature like second and meter but to my surprise it's still a lump of an alloy of nine-tenths platinum and one-tenth iridium kept in a basement in Paris. This is unacceptable. Kilogram is used as a reference for the mass of everything and while it is and object any changes to that object change mass of everything else. You may think that the change of a dust speck means nothing but when you are measuring stars and planets it's a pretty sudden weight change. And if you think it doesn't concern you because you use pounds remember that pound is defined in relation to kilogram so it changes too. I hope they'll hurry up. This uncertainty is unnerving.

The Bolshoi Simulation a computer simulation of everything. A massive, incredibly detailed model of the whole 14 billion years of our universe. Probably that's why it's called Bolshoi (which means big, great in Russian). They used data from maps of light left over from the Big Bang in for of the cosmic microwave background radiation and theory of dark matter being 25% of everything in the universe and about 80% of all matter to get the normal matter behave how we observe it does in RL. This created incredibly detailed simulation of our Universe showing how many things we observe probably happened. And now we can watch how it happens in visualisations from the simulation data.