Welcome to this week’s research news challenge!
This week’s quiz is all about the newly announced Nobel Prizes! Challenge yourself with three questions and see how well you’re staying on top of the latest research news.
Question
For which board game, invented in China, did one of this year’s chemistry Nobel Laureates develop a breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI) model that beat a champion in the game?
See answer
Go. Demis Hassabis, who shares half of this year’s chemistry Nobel Prize with John M. Jumper, co-founded DeepMind, a company that developed AI models for popular board games. DeepMind achieved a breakthrough in AI by beating a champion player of Go.
Question
Which Austrian scientist is the artificial neural network model, developed by this year’s physics Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton, named after that, and which can, e.g., detect patterns in images?
See answer
Ludwig Boltzmann. Hinton’s model, the “Boltzmann machine“, uses the Boltzmann distribution known from statistical physics to evaluate the probabilities of certain states of a system.
Question
In which organism did this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, first discover microRNAs, which are tiny RNA molecules that regulate gene activity?
See answer
Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes. In these roundworms (nematodes), they studied the effects of certain genetic changes on growth and development. They found a short, non-coding RNA that represented a completely new type of gene regulator: the first microRNA.
Caenorhabditis elegans is a species of small, transparent roundworms widely used in biological research. It is a model organism due to its simple anatomy, short life cycle, and fully mapped genome
The News Behind the Quiz
See the news
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024
October 9, 2024
David Baker, USA, is honored for his work in computational protein design, the other half is shared by Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper, both UK, for their contributions to protein structure prediction
Nobel Prize in Physics 2024
October 8, 2024
John Joseph Hopfield, Princeton University, and Geoffrey E. Hinton, University of Toronto, were honored for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning (ML) with artificial neural networks
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024
October 7, 2024
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, University of Massachusetts Medical School, USA, were honored for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation
