Ten Hundred Words of Science

“My job is to help people that have ideas (idea-people) to make sure that no one takes their ideas. The ideas that I work with usually are about things that doctors give to people to make them feel better, but I also work with ideas about computers.
An idea-person, with my help, can make sure that he or she is the only one, in a given state in the world, who uses his/her idea (for a short time) and can make money from his/her ideas, so that he or she can come up with even more ideas. One of the ways I help the idea-people is by searching to make sure that the ideas are new and have never been written about before.
If I find that an idea is not new, I can’t really help the idea-person, as he can’t then stop anyone from making or using his idea. If the idea is new, I can help the idea-person by writing an idea-paper which explains the idea.
The idea paper is then sent to a state office that works on ideas, called a state-idea-office. The state-idea-office then checks to make sure that the idea is new. If the state office says that the idea is new and that no one in the field would have thought of the idea after reading all of what was written before the time I wrote the idea-paper and sent it to the state-idea-office, then the state-idea-office allows the idea-paper. Sometimes I have to write to or talk with the state-idea-office and tell them why the idea really is new and should be allowed.
Once the idea-paper is allowed, the idea-person can stop other people from using or making his idea. He can also ask for money from a person who wants to use his idea. If someone uses his idea without the idea-person allowing, he can stop the person using it from using his idea.”

— Avraham, an Israeli patent attorney specializing in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology

“

It takes a lot of train-food to move a train, but less food for each person on the train than in cars or on buses. If we can work out how to use less train-food, we can help our world live longer.

A train-driving person can drive the train in four ways: full power (train goes faster), some power (train goes no faster and no slower), no power (train slows down), or counter-power (train slows down fast).

If we can tell the train-driving person when to change between the four driving ways, we can lower the train-food needed to get to each stop on time. In real life we can save ten to twenty parts in one hundred bits of train-food.

Our team uses numbers, letters and other strange marks to work out the least train-food needed to move a train to each stop on time. We show this to the train-driving person with a computer picture. The picture might change if the train-driving person is not doing what we told them, and so the train is going faster or slower than it should.

We also study how the train should be driven if there are very high or low parts on the track, how more than one train should be driven, and how to decide the best time that each train should be at each stop to use least total train-food.

”

“

All animals in the world are like a big family. Some animals are like brothers and sisters and other animals are like the children of each others aunts and uncles. In this big family, all animals fight with each other for food, space, water and stuff. I study if brother and sister animals fight more with each other than they do with the children of their aunt and uncle.

To study this. I make not real worlds in computers. In these not real worlds I have many many not real animals and I make these not real animals fight a lot lot lot lot of times. I then see which animals fought the most. It’s pretty cool.

”

“I study what happens to cats when people build things in places cats live. Some little cats stay close but bigs cats move far away. Big cats need lots of space and big animals to eat. People also need lots of space and big animals to eat. Big cats don’t like to share space or food with people, they like to be left alone. Little cats use less space and can eat smaller things. Sometimes the places people grow food are good for the smaller things little cats can eat which lets little cats live closer to people. Some little cats are mean to other little cats. Over time, the mean cats take over the ground and night-time and make the other cats use the trees and the day-time. When people build lots of things, it can change the way all of the cats live with one another, and how mean they are to other cats. Cats are important because they eat lots of other animals in the woods. If cats move away or die because people build too many things, the things cats eat will grow out of control and eat all of the woods. We need to make sure people don’t chase away all the cats so that the woods can be well for all people to use in the years to come.”

“My work is about trees of low lands and how they could deal with cold in high places. Cold air bothers trees, they love hot spots, so they can not grow very well if they are in struggles. Trees are especially slow to respond in short time to changes in the ground. Little shifts could kill them soon and If we don’t do something they will disappear in few years. So, I am interested in see what happen if they move to new colder places with human help because definitely they can’t do alone in short time. We need more work in the field and not decide without facts, just staying in a desk.”

“

Our world is a big ball of rock. There are rocks on the ground and rocks under the ground. The deeper a rock is under the ground, the more everything above it presses down on it and the more it gets hot. This pressing and hot change the rocks deep inside our world so that they are different from the rocks on the ground, even if all the rocks are made of the same thing to start with.

Some other worlds close to us in space are also balls of rock - like the small round thing that passes through the sky every night as it moves around us, and the red world that is the next one past us away from the Sun.

I study how the rocks change deep inside our world and inside other worlds near us, as they get hot and are pressed on under ground. But how can I study this if I can’t go hundreds of hundreds of feet under ground?

I am able to grow a piece of what is down there by pressing hard hard hard on a very tiny piece of rock and making it hot at the same time. The rock responds and changes as if it were deep under ground. Then I can look at the tiny new rock I made and study what happened to it.

-Lora (Experimentally studies rocks and minerals at high pressure and temperature in planetary interiors)

”

“I study how city people use water, often too much, and what that means for other living things who also live in cities. I study how many flying animals and green living things are able to live in the cities of the world. I find that fewer living things may be found inside cities than outside, but more than people expect. Many living things have found surprising ways to live, and do well, in cities besides people. I look for new and old ways for people to share the world with other living things.”

—

That is what I do, using some of the ten hundred most used words in English. If you want to know more, or follow my work, please read my blog.

- Madhusudan Katti

“One big problem with stars is that we can look at them and see how bright they look to us, but we can’t tell if they’re not so bright and close by or really bright and far away. My work is on a type of star that gets brighter and then less bright over some time, usually less than a day or so, and how long these stars take to get bright can be matched with how bright they actually are. So if we look at the kind of stars that change how bright they are over time, we can tell how bright they really are. Then we can look at how bright they look to us and tell how far away they are.”

— I work on RR Lyrae variables in Omega Centauri.

“

We want to know how the brain understands the world. When we look at things, we know what to do with them. We can imagine picking them up, throwing them around, what they feel like, what they sound like. We do not know how to give this power to things made by man.

We try to understand this power by looking into the animal brain while it plays around in interesting worlds. When things in the world change, animals are surprised and look like they are trying to explain what happened. After that, they move in a different way when they expect the world may change. By looking into their brains before and after the animals change what they expect, we hope to learn more about the brain’s power to understand worlds.

When we try to look into the brain, we are faced with a big problem. The brain is made of many cells that work together. We can hear them working, but we can only listen to very few of them at a time. Because of this, we try to build better ways to listen to more cells so we can understand what they are working on.

”

— Gonçalo and Danbee, PhD students in the Intelligent Systems Lab of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme

“As you grow, the stuff your body is made of must be broken down and built up again so that you can get bigger. We study how this is done and how it is controlled. When you eat, your body uses things to break down the food to get what you need out of it. The body uses the same sort of thing to cut up the stuff we are made of so that it can then build it up again, new and better. We study one of the things that does this - how, where, and when it is made, how it is turned on and how it is turned off over time. If this thing is made somewhere it is not supposed to be made, or is made at the wrong time, or is turned on or off at the wrong time and place - bad things can happen which can make you sick. We study how cells know if they should make this stuff, and what inside and outside the cell causes it to be turned on or off. We also study how this goes wrong when you are sick and how we might be able to make it work as it should again.”

— Mike.