Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chairman and Secretary, Department of Space Koppillil Radhakrishnan
I'm not much for what the media business calls listicles. Which is tough this time of year, because they are everywhere.
You know the kind of stuff I'm talking about even if you never read it: "5 Celebrities Who Should Have Sued Their Plastic Surgeon," "The Most Wonderful Christmas Songs," "10 Ways to Perk Up Your Sex Life," "12 Politicians Who Could Be the Next President," "20 Techniques to Get Rid of Belly Fat," "25 Airports to Avoid," "50 Things You Should Know About the Marijuana Laws," and 100 different versions of "The Worst of..." and "The Best of...."
It's true that some listicles are pretty funny. For instance, there Barnes & Noble's "If Classic Books Were Listicles" has a few good entries, such as: "The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair—20 Things You Didn’t Want to Know About Where Your Steak Comes From."
Although listicles long predate the Worldwide Web—See old copies of Cosmopolitan—now they are a prime source of clickbait. People just can't resist the distraction. Even when they know they should.
However, one listicle I actually learned quite a lot from is the Nature journal's "Ten people who mattered this year."
• ANDREA ACCOMAZZO: Comet chaser: A former test pilot steered the Rosetta mission to an icy world in deep space.
• SUZANNE TOPALIAN: Cancer combatant: One clinician always believed that cancer immunotherapy would work—and she was right.
• RADHIKA NAGPAL: Robot-maker: A researcher inspired by social insects gets robots to coordinate on a massive scale.
• SHEIK HUMARR KHAN: Ebola doctor: An infectious-disease expert battled a killer virus in Africa.
• DAVID SPERGEL: Cosmic sceptic: An astrophysicist found errors in a major discovery about cosmic inflation.
• MARYAM MIRZAKHANI: Surface explorer: A mathematician's award shines a light on a lack of women in the field.
• PETE FRATES: Ice-bucket challenger: A patient advocate helped to kick-start the social-media stunt of the year—with huge returns for research.
• KOPPILLIL RADHAKRISHNAN: Rocket launcher: India's space chief led the country's charge to Mars.
• MASAYO TAKAHASHI: Stem-cell tester: An ophthalmologist injected hope into the stem-cell field during a troubled year.
• SJORS SCHERES: Structure solver: A biologist brought the cell's molecular machines into sharper focus.
Head below the fold to read some snippets from Nature's brief articles about two of these 10.
Radhika Nagpal
Radhika Nagpal
When Radhika Nagpal was a high-school student in India, she hated biology: it was the subject that girls were supposed to study so that they could become doctors. Never being one to follow tradition, Nagpal was determined to become an engineer.
Now she is — leading an engineering research team at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But she also has a new appreciation for the subject she once disliked. This year, her group garnered great acclaim for passing a milestone in biology-inspired robotics.
Taking their cue from the way in which ants, bees and termites build complex nests and other structures with no central direction, Nagpal's group devised a swarm of 1,024 very simple 'Kilobots'. Each Kilobot was just a few centimetres wide and tall, moved by shuffling about on three spindly legs and communicated with its immediate neighbours using infrared light. But the team showed that when the Kilobots worked together, they could organize themselves into stars and other two-dimensional shapes [...]
The hope is that this kind of swarm-robotics research will eventually lead to self-organizing robot teams that can rapidly respond to disasters, say, or aid in environmental clean-up. But getting even this far took much longer than Nagpal and her team originally estimated.
Koppillil Radhakrishnan
Koppillil Radhakrishnan knew the odds were against him when India's Mangalyaan space probe closed in on Mars this year. As head of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), he was well aware that half of all attempts to reach Mars have ended in failure.
But the ISRO had taken lessons from other countries' mistakes, and it set modest aims for its first interplanetary mission, which it billed as a technology demonstration. When Mangalyaan settled successfully into Mars orbit on 24 September, India joined the elite group of nations with the ambition and technical capability to explore the Solar System. [...]
Radhakrishnan says that India's space plans should not be judged against those of other countries: “We are not racing with anyone. We are only racing with ourselves.” But he will soon leave the race. Radhakrishnan will retire at the end of the year, leaving him free to pursue his love for classical South Indian singing and dancing. He has not had much time for that during the ISRO's hectic pursuit of Mars.