India’s rich haul at maths olympiad
The six-member Indian team that took part in the 65th edition of the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO 2024) held in Bath, UK, from July 11 to 22 won four gold medals, one silver, and one honourable mention. The team rank was fourth out of 108 participating countries. The team comprised Adhitya Mangudy Venkata Ganesh (Pune), Ananda Bhaduri (Guwahati), Kanav Talwar (Noida, Uttar Pradesh), and Rushil Mathur (Mumbai), all of whom won gold; Arjun Gupta (Delhi), who won silver; and Siddharth Choppara (Pune), who got an honourable mention.
This is the best performance in the IMO by an Indian team since the country’s debut in the competition in 1989, in terms of the number of gold medals won and the rank achieved, a press release by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE) of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, said.
The IMO, which was started in 1959, is the World Championship Mathematics Competition for high school students and is held annually in a different country. Participating countries send at most six students to the IMO each year. Indian participation is coordinated by the HBCSE.
IMO 2024 had six questions of 7 marks each. Google’s specialised AI systems, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, developed at its subsidiary DeepMind, worked together to successfully solve four out of the six problems, which is equivalent to winning the silver medal. The top four countries and their scores are given in the tableYoungs. In all 609 students took part (528 boys, 81 girls).
Also Read | Is India becoming the cancer capital of the world?
Roger Zemp and Parsin Hajireza with their equipment that is capable of early detection of cancer in growing tumours using acoustic waves. | Photo Credit: Faculty of Engineering/University of Alberta
A blood test to detect cancer
Roger Zemp and colleagues of the University of Alberta, Canada, have developed a non-invasive and painless cancer-detection method using ultrasound waves instead of the usual biopsy for tissue extraction to obtain genetic information about a patient’s cancer. The method also enables early detection of certain types of cancer. Zemp reported this development by his team at the recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Ottawa, Canada.
Knowledge about genetic mutations or chromosomal abnormalities in the cells of a growing tumour is critical for an accurate diagnosis of the cancer and for prognosis and treatment. Zemp’s team used ultrasound pulses to stimulate cancer cells to release their genetic information. This information then circulates in the bloodstream and can be detected through a blood test. This is less painful, significantly cheaper, and easier to perform than a traditional biopsy.
By growing cancerous human tumours in mice, the team found that this method also increased the concentration of cancer-relevant DNA and RNA biomarkers in the bloodstream by up to a factor of 100, which was sufficient for detection with a blood test. “People have been looking for ways to use blood tests to make diagnoses for quite some time, but it is challenging because very few tumor-specific biomarkers are naturally present in the blood,” Zemp was quoted by the American Physical Society’s online magazine Physics.
A close-up of the pure sulphur crystals that NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover found inside a rock on May 30, the 4,200th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Curiosity captured this image on June 4, the 4,205th sol of the mission. | Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
Curiosity finds elemental sulphur on Mars
ON May 30, Curiosity, NASA’s Mars rover, drove over a rock and cracked it open to reveal something never seen before on the red planet: elemental yellow sulphur crystals.
Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with sulphates, compounds containing sulphur and oxygen that form as water evaporates. Unlike the past findings, which have been of such sulphur-based minerals made of sulphur and other materials, the most recent detection is of pure elemental sulphur. NASA scientists are not clear about what relationship, if any, the elemental sulphur has to the other sulphur-based minerals in the area.
Unlike sulphur compounds that smell of rotten eggs arising from hydrogen sulphide gas, elemental sulphur is odourless. It forms only in a narrow range of conditions that scientists had not associated with the history of this location. And Curiosity has found a lot of it: an entire region of bright rocks similar to the one the rover crushed. “Finding a field of stones made of pure sulphur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it.”
It is one of the several discoveries Curiosity has made while roving over the rocky Martian terrain within Gediz Vallis channel, a groove that winds down on the 5-km-tall Mount Sharp, the base of which the rover has been ascending since 2014. Each layer of the mountain represents a different period of Martian history. Curiosity’s mission is to study where and when the planet’s ancient terrain could have provided the nutrients needed for microbial life, if any ever formed on Mars.
While the sulphur rocks were too small and brittle to be sampled with a drill at the discovery site, a large rock nicknamed “Mammoth Lakes” that was safe for drilling with the rover’s powerful drill at the end of the six-wheeled rover’s 2 m robotic arm was located close by. Curiosity pocketed the powderised rock into instruments within it for further analysis.
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