2019 future science awards announce the winners of 2019 future science awards
The 2019 future science award has just been announced. Shao Feng, deputy academic director and senior researcher of Beijing Institute of life sciences, won the 'Life Science Award' for his contribution to the discovery of receptors and executive proteins in human cells for the inflammatory response of pathogenic bacterial endotoxin LPS; Academician Wang Yifang of the Institute of high energy physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Professor Lu Jinbiao of the University of California, Berkeley won the 'Material Science Award' for their possible contribution to the new physical research beyond the standard model, especially to explain the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe; Academician Wang Xiaoyun of Tsinghua University and Shandong University won the 'Mathematics and computer science award' for her pioneering contribution in cryptography. Her innovative cryptographic analysis method revealed the weaknesses of the widely used cryptographic hash function and contributed to the new generation of cryptographic hash function standard. Wang Xiaoyun has therefore become the first female scientist to win the future science award in the past four years.
It provides a new way to explore pathogen infection and treatment
Most bacteria coexist peacefully with humans, helping us digest food and even resist other harmful pathogens. How to distinguish beneficial and harmful bacteria and effectively initiate immune response is an important issue in biological research. Over the past decade, Dr. Shaofeng's laboratory has provided a systematic answer: they have found several cytoplasmic pattern recognition molecules that specifically recognize invading bacteria, and revealed the molecular mechanism of distinguishing pathogenic and non pathogenic bacteria in host cell inflammatory response. The most important is to find that inflammatory protein hydrolases caspase-4 and Caspase-5 are intracellular receptors for endotoxin LPS (lipopolysaccharide in the cell wall of Gram-negative bacteria). Shao Feng's discovery provides a new way to explore the prevention and treatment of pathogen infection and related diseases.
It will have a far-reaching impact on the development of particle physics in the future
The Daya Bay neutrino experiment cooperation group led by Wang Yifang and Lu Jinbiao first discovered a new electron neutrino oscillation mode near the Daya Bay nuclear power plant in Guangdong, China, and accurately measured their disappearance probability caused by the oscillation phenomenon. The experimental establishment of this oscillation mode shows that neutrinos may destroy the joint symmetry (CP) of parity and antiparticle. Physicists generally believe that the existence of new CP destruction is a necessary condition to explain the observation that matter is far more than antimatter in the universe and the formation of the material world.
Neutrino is a kind of basic particle with weak interaction released in nuclear decay and nuclear reaction. At the beginning of this century, scientists in Japan and Canada found two mutual transformation phenomena (or oscillations) among the three known neutrinos, indicating that neutrinos have non-zero mass and interaction beyond the current standard model of particle physics, so they won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2015. However, the third kind of neutrino oscillation in theory is more interesting because it indicates that the neutrino oscillation has the property of CP destruction. But in the first decade of this century, physicists thought that the third oscillation might be very weak or even non-existent. Nevertheless, particle physics experimenters in China, France, South Korea and the United States have put forward experimental schemes and launched a high-level scientific competition.
In March 2012, Wang Yifang and Lu Jinbiao, on behalf of the Daya Bay International Cooperation Group, announced the detection of the third oscillation mode of neutrinos for the first time. This discovery will have a far-reaching impact on the development of particle physics in the future.
Contributed to a new generation of cryptographic hash function standards
Cryptographic hash function is the core of most cryptographic applications and systems, such as data integrity verification and authentication, digital signature, information integrity, blockchain, etc. Cryptographic hash function is a function that hashes any length of input into a fixed length summary. Its important attribute is that it is difficult to find 'collision' under the current computing power, that is, two different input hashes to the same summary. If the collision of the hash function can be easily found, it means that the hash function is unsafe, and all applications that use it will be regarded as unsafe.
Professor Wang Xiaoyun proposed a series of powerful cryptanalysis methods for cryptographic hash functions, especially modular differential bit analysis. Her method breaks through many cryptographic hash function standards that were generally considered safe before, and changes how to analyze and design a new generation of cryptographic hash function standards.
Professor Wang Xiaoyun's work has led to the phasing out of MD5 and SHA-1 hash functions in almost all software systems in the industry. Her work promoted and helped the design of a new generation of cryptographic hash function standards, including Sha-3, blake2 and SM3. Professor Wang presided over the design of China's national standard cryptographic hash function SM3. Since its release in 2010, SM3 has been widely used by Chinese software products.