1.A Sense of Where You Are
The New York Times April 29, 2013
TRONDHEIM, Norway — In 1988, two determined psychology students sat in the office of an internationally renowned neuroscientist in Oslo and explained to him why they had to study with him.
Unfortunately, the researcher, Per Oskar Andersen, was hesitant, May-Britt Moser said as she and her husband, Edvard I. Moser, now themselves internationally recognized neuroscientists, recalled the conversation recently. He was researching physiology and they were interested in the intersection of behavior and physiology. But, she said, they wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“We sat there for hours. He really couldn’t get us out of his office,” Dr. May-Britt Moser said.
“Both of us come from nonacademic families and nonacademic places,” Edvard said. “The places where we grew up, there was no one with any university education, no one to ask. There was no recipe on how to do these things.”
“And how to act politely,” May-Britt interjected.
“It was just a way to get to the point where we wanted to be. But seen now, when I know the way people normally do it,” he said, smiling at the memory of his younger self, “I’m quite impressed.”
So, apparently, was Dr. Andersen. In the end, he yielded to the Mosers’ combination of furious curiosity and unwavering determination and took them on as graduate students.
They have impressed more than a few people since. In 2005, they and their colleagues reported the discovery of cells in rats’ brains that function as a kind of built-in navigation system that is at the very heart of how animals know where they are, where they are going and where they have been. They called them grid cells.
“I admire their work tremendously,” said Eric Kandel, the Nobel laureate neuroscientist who heads the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia and who has followed the Mosers’ careers since they were graduate students.
John O’Keefe of University College London, who in the 1970s identified the so-called place cells in the brain that register specific places, like the corner deli or grandma’s house, and who was one of the Mosers’ mentors, said that the discovery of the grid cells was “incredibly significant.”
The workings of the grid cells show that in the brain “you are constantly creating a map of the outside world,” said Cori Bargmann, of Rockefeller University, who is one of the two leaders of a committee set up to plan the National Institutes of Health’s contribution to President Obama’s recently announced neuroscience initiative.
2.American and 2 Japanese Physicists Share Nobel for Work on LED Lights
The New York Times OCT. 7, 2014
Three physicists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for revolutionizing the way the world is lighted.
The 2014 physics award went to Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara, for “the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources.”
The three scientists, working together and separately, found a way to produce blue light beams from semiconductors in the early 1990s. Others had produced red and green diodes, but without blue diodes, white light could not be produced, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Tuesday morning in its prize citation.
“They succeeded where everyone else had failed,” the academy said.
Their work has spurred the creation of a whole new industry. The committee that chose the winners said light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, would be the lighting source of the 21st century, just as the incandescent bulb illuminated the 20th.
The three scientists will split a prize of $1.1 million, to be awarded in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Dr. Akasaki, 85, of Meijo University and Nagoya University, and Dr. Amano, 54, of Nagoya University, are Japanese. Dr. Nakamura, 60, is American. Awakened by a phone call from the Swedish academy, he described it in a news conference as “unbelievable.”
In its announcement, the academy recalled Alfred Nobel’s desire that his prize be awarded for something that benefited humankind, noting that one-fourth of the world’s electrical energy consumption goes to producing light. This, it said, was a prize more for invention than for discovery.
Frances Saunders, president of the Institute of Physics, a worldwide scientific organization based in London, agreed with those sentiments. Noting in an email statement that 2015 is the International Year of Light, she said, “This is physics research that is having a direct impact on the grandest of scales, helping protect our environment, as well as turning up in our everyday electronic gadgets.”
In Africa, millions of diode lamps that run on solar power have been handed out to replace polluting kerosene lamps.
For the same amount of energy consumption, LED bulbs produce four times the light of a fluorescent bulb and nearly 20 times the light of an incandescent bulb.
LED bulbs are also more durable, lasting 10 times as long as a fluorescent bulb and 100 times as long as an incandescent bulb.
3.China’s Balancing Act
The Project Syndicate OCT 8, 2014 3
NEW YORK – China’s slowdown is the biggest short-term threat to global growth. Industrial value added fell in August, credit growth has slowed dramatically, and housing prices are falling, with sales down 20% year on year. Given stagnation in the eurozone and Japan’s uncertain prospects, a Chinese hard landing would be a big hit to global demand.
Much attention is focused on likely GDP growth this year relative to the government’s 7.5% target. But the bigger issue is whether China can rebalance its economy over the next 2-3 years without suffering a financial crisis and/or a dramatic economic slowdown. Some factors specific to China make this outcome more likely, but success is by no means certain.
Faced with the 2008 financial crisis, China unleashed a credit boom to maintain output and employment growth. Credit soared from 150% of GDP in 2008 to 250% by mid-2014. Multiple forms of shadow bank credit supplemented rapid growth in bank loans.
The strategy worked, and China continued to create 12-13 million new urban jobs per year. But with investment rising from 40% to 47% of GDP, growth became dangerously unbalanced and heavily dependent on infrastructure construction and real-estate development. Narrowly defined, these activities account for 12% of Chinese value added. In fact, recent research shows that 33% of China’s economic activity relies on the real-estate sector’s continued health.
China is now struggling with a dilemma common to all advanced credit booms. The longer the boom runs, the greater the danger of wasted investment, huge bad debts, and a major financial crisis. But simply constraining new credit supply and allowing bad loans to default can itself provoke crisis and recession.
This year has been one of seesawing policy responses. The discipline of default has been much discussed, but never quite applied. Despite a significant slowdown, the People’s Bank of China has resisted across-the-board cuts in interest rates or reserve requirements. But, in the second quarter of the year, Premier Li Keqiang reiterated the 7.5% growth target, which was then underpinned by several “targeted” stimulus measures – mainly new lending focused on railways, smaller banks, agriculture, and small businesses. Constraints on the property market, such as limiting multiple purchases or highly leveraged investments, have been tightened and then relaxed.
At least for now, the arguments for constraint and market discipline appear to have won the debate. That may partly reflect a subtle shift in emphasis about the most crucial objective. Recent speeches by both Li and policy experts have downplayed the importance of a specific growth target, focusing instead on job creation and low unemployment.
Fortunately, demographic changes are about to make it easier to rebalance the economy and boost employment enough to avoid social tension. The Chinese working-age population is now slowly shrinking. More dramatically, the number of 15-30-year-olds will fall 25% from 2015 to 2025. The rural workforce is still above 300 million, implying that large numbers could still migrate to urban areas. But as the rural workforce ages, the pace of migration will slow.
As a result, China’s labor market will tighten more rapidly than many expect. Rising real wages will support the shift to a more consumption-driven economy, and declining worries about unemployment will reduce reliance on credit-fueled construction to soak up labor supply.
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