A science pop worth reading. Examining the long list of the "Enlightener" award

In total, more than 170 works competed for the Enlightener Prize in 2020. The organizing committee headed by

co-chairs Alexander Arkhangelsky andAlexander Gavrilov selected 25 candidates for victory. Among them are books about history, art, insects, space and aging. The shortlist participants will be announced on September 17. Laureates of the Enlightenment Prize in both categories - Humanities and Natural and Exact Sciences - will receive a cash reward in the amount of 700 thousand rubles, authors of books included in the short list - 100 thousand rubles each. The award ceremony for book prize winners will take place on November 19 in Moscow.

"Artificial Intelligence and the Human Brain", Vladimir Gubailovsky

Programmer and writer Vladimir GubailovskyHe dedicated his book to digital brain modeling and various studies at the intersection of information and biotechnology. The main theme is human memory: Gubailovsky tells in detail how the brain receives and preserves

It contains information on how knowledge and memories are accumulated, why it is important not only to remember, but also to forget for effective brain function.

The author looks at the human brain asa biological computer, the processes of which can already be modeled fairly accurately thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural networks. According to Gubailovsky, today the science of the brain is experiencing a real explosion, and in the future it will only develop rapidly. This is confirmed by the testing of neurochips carried out by Elon Musk's company Neuralink.

“When a person is born, he already has a brain. And this brain already "knows" a lot. It is not a tabula rasa, as, for example, John Locke and other philosophers believed. The structure of the brain is determined genetically, and its topology remains basically unchanged. The structure of the brain - its main areas and some pathways - have already been formed. The structure will become more complex, simplified, change, but the basis with which a person was born is genetically predetermined.

Neurons can grow and become more powerful. For example, London taxi drivers, who must have a good idea of ​​25,000 irregularly paved streets and many intersections, have significantly increased volume of the hippocampus - the brain area responsible for spatial thinking.

And a major overhaul happens in systemsconnections of neurons - synapses. For example, during training of mice, an increase in spines on dendrites was noted, i.e. new synaptic connections appeared. The neuron itself can change due to

the appearance of polymerized proteins, which become a kind of "labels" of information. Neurons change the frequency of impulses, synapses change the bandwidth.

Thus, new, fast-conducting neural circuits arise. This is how long-term memory is realized. It is distributed throughout the brain, but pre-

is not zeros and ones - magnetizeddomains on the hard disk plate or punctures on the CD plane; and long-term structural rearrangements of the neural network. Dendritic spines, if training ends, can dissolve - this is forgetting. "

“Reptilians on a flat earth. Pseudoscience ", Andrey Zhvalevsky

A book about the painful problem of every scientist - about myths,which, thanks to the Internet and social networks, gather many supporters. Some people believe in a flat Earth, some in reptilians, and some in the dangers of vaccination.

History knows many examples when geniusscientists who revolutionized science had to fight the conservative majority: Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno… Today, the opposite situation is happening: numerous pseudoscientists put forward their theories, promote them with the help of their supporters (as a rule, these people do not understand the subject they ardently support) and eventually become authorities. As a result, the myth that the Americans never landed on the moon or the existence of psychotronic weapons.

The author of the book, Andrei Zhvalevsky, proposes to disassemble popular misconceptions from a scientific point of view, tells how to distinguish a scientist from a charlatan and science from pseudoscience.

Why is the scientific method objective? Because a real scientist will submit to him, even if the result of the experiment contradicts the personal principles of the scientist himself.

Let's say Heinrich Hertz, who experimentallyproved the truth of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, Maxwell initially tried… refute. Young Hertz believed in his teacher Hermann Heimholtz as if in God. And he said that the electromagnetic field and electromagnetic waves are British nonsense. Hertz rushed to prove this experimentally… And, to his horror, he proved that the teacher was wrong.

And the arrogant Briton is right. He probably could have somehow corrected the results of the experiment. In the end, he might not have published them.

I could - but I could not.

Because Heinrich Hertz was a real scientist. For him, objective truth was more important than the authority of his beloved teacher. If Hertz was a supporter of pseudoscience, he would simply discard all facts that do not fit into Heimholtz's theory.

So the scientific method works because it is reliable and objective. Any hypothesis must be confirmed by practice, otherwise it is a baseless fantasy. "

“Clap with one hand. How inanimate nature gave birth to the human mind ", Nikolay Kukushkin

The debut book of neurophysiologist Nikolai Kukushkin, in which he seeks answers to key questions: how our consciousness arose, how the Earth managed without humanity, why we appeared and why.

Life on Earth is incomprehensible, omnipresent,a bacchanalia teeming with millions of legs, knots, thorns and teeth. For three and a half billion years, there was no man on the planet, and now, in the last moments of history, a man emerges from this intricacies of animals, plants, fungi and microbes and asks the question: who am I and what is the meaning of my, human, life?

Nikolay Kukushkin recreates the painting step by stepthe world from inanimate matter to the human mind, in order to find answers to eternal questions in the past of their species. It turns out that dinosaurs are to blame for human suffering, lungs exist thanks to lichens, and the main event in the lives of our ancestors over the last eon was the transformation into worms.

“Leaning over the giving birth turtle, I thought aboutthe bitter irony of her life. Secondary “moving” from land to sea is not such a rarity (this is what, for example, the ancestors of whales and dolphins did in their time). But the sea turtle is not easy

changed her mind about living on land. The sea turtle is like a frog in reverse. In their lives, amphibians tend to land, but always return to water, which pulls them back. Sea turtles rush into the ocean but are pulled back by land. The same "land" egg, which allowed the ancestors of turtles to abandon water dependence, now creates a dependence that threatens the existence of these animals. A turtle egg is inextricably linked with land: if the egg is flooded with water, the embryo will die from lack of oxygen.

Water dependence is easy to understand. Life appeared in water, works in water, is filled with water. There can be no living organism without water, at least in the form we know. Therefore, the fact that the frog needs to go through the "water"

diet before becoming a land animal, nonothing surprising. We ourselves go through this water stage, we just have a very closed reservoir - the amnion. It is not so difficult to understand the motivation of sea turtles and dolphins, whose ancestors returned to the ocean in search of adventure, which there has always been enough and enough.

Much more interesting is the question of the opposite relationship. Why do living beings, in principle, get out of the water? "

"Counterclock-wise. What is aging and how to deal with it ", Polina Loseva

Science journalist and biologist Polina Loseva decidedto conduct an audit of modern ideas about immortality. Is there a cure for old age, what modern gerontologists are doing and how to correctly interpret the results obtained by them in the framework of research - the author asks all these questions to scientists and world science. Moreover, Polina Loseva herself acts not as a judge, but rather as an advocate for scientific achievements in the field of longevity.

“Cancer fits well into the portrait of agedisease. It is based on a shift in the balance between cell division and death: the former begins to dominate the latter. Tumor cells divide, neighboring cells die, unable to withstand competition

rents, and free up space in the tissue for growth -the same vicious circle arises that intensifies any age-related disease. And it cannot be prevented, because cell reproduction and competition are natural

processes that only benefit any healthy tissue.

However, among other age-related diseases, cancerstands apart and causes special awe. And it's not even the number of victims - in the WHO ratings, it does not even rise to the top three causes of death in the world. The point is not that medicine still does not know how to deal with it. Despite the fact that new "cancer drugs" time after time do not live up to their expectations, the treatment is not so bad at all, and in developed countries the prognosis for patients is getting better every year. In Europe, for example, breast cancer deaths have tripled over the past three decades.

In fact, cancer scares us because each case is unique. ”

“From orgasm to immortality. Notes of a Drag Designer ", Grigory Nikiforovich

Drug production is a profitable business:It's no secret that the income of pharmaceutical corporations is high. And any biochemist can grab his piece of this pie - at least, he can try.

Grigory Nikiforovich talks about the exciting but thorny path of creating new drugs - from idea to appearance on pharmacy shelves.

You will find out how much time and money it takes todrug development, why not every good idea turns into a pill, how Viagra, conceived as a remedy for chest pain, is now known in a completely different capacity, and why the meldonium scandal will ultimately benefit him.

“The most famous medicine of our time isof course, Viagra, the last hope of men to maintain, if not superiority, then at least self-respect in a world given over to women. “Oh, give, give us Viagra, we will be able to atone for our shame,” sings the bard Timur Shaov, and he is right.

In the first round of clinical trialsa substance that later became Viagra, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer faced an unusual situation. Several dozen male subjects flatly refused to return unused surplus of this substance when the tests were suspended.

And after Viagra officially entered the drug market in the United States - this happened twenty years ago - in the first three months, two million nine hundred thousand prescriptions for the “blue pill” were written.

In 2017, Pfizer's revenue from Viagra sales decreased: they amounted to only one billion two hundred million dollars compared to the period 2008-2013.

Dov, when every year brought up to two billion.

Then the company's exclusive rights to Viagra expired, but the number of pills did not decrease - competing drugs and even counterfeits appeared in many.

“Strange monkey. Where did the wool go and why people are of different colors ”, Alexander Sokolov

Editor of the portal “Anthropogenesis.ru »Alexander Sokolov decided to sort out an important question: when did our ancestors lose their wool, and did they lose it at all? Why aren't we naked and aquatic, but rather sweating monkeys? How many wild hypotheses have been proposed to explain our hairlessness?

“Is it possible to estimate hair thinning in numbers? In 1931, the anthropologist Adolf Schulz tried to do this. The scientist calculated the density of the visible

los, i.e. their number per cm2 of scalp, chest and back skin in 71 species of primates. To them, for comparison, Schultz added one rodent and one predatory - a cat. The study also used 15 skin samples of Homo sapiens - representatives of different races. At the same time, the scientist checked whether the climate or other conditions affect the hairiness of animals: suddenly, primates kept in high latitudes will have thicker wool than their relatives living closer to the equator? Or did the captive monkeys lose their hair? But such an effect was not found. For example, of the five silver gibbons in the study, two were caught in Java and three lived at the Washington Zoo. However, the captive animals had hair as thick as the wild ones.

What did the researcher end up with?In general, hair density in narrow-nosed primates is lower than in broad-nosed primates (i.e., South American monkeys are hairier than their Old World relatives), and in apes it is lower than in monkeys and baboons. True, gibbons are distinguished by high hair density. But they are all “puppies” compared to a cat!

Man is truly one of the mostsparsely haired primates, but that depends on how you look. For example, the density of hair on the head of humans is noticeably higher than that of chimpanzees and orangutans, and is slightly inferior only to gorillas. The chest of humans and gorilla is equally sparse with hair, and the human back is especially let down: not a single hair was found on any of the Homo sapiens examined. However, having visited the Black Sea beaches, I can responsibly  say: “You didn’t look well, Mr. Schultz!”

"Universe. Travel in time and space ", Sergey Yazev

A new book from the Museum of Cosmonautics talks abouthow the concept of the Universe has changed: from myths and legends to today's theories and hypotheses, from black holes and tunnels through time to microscopic particles that contain their own worlds with their own physical laws. And the author of the book, director of the Astronomical Observatory of Irkutsk State University, Sergei Yazev, tells what will happen to our planet in the future.

"The situation with the perception of a new picture of the worldnoticeably aggravated in connection with the activities of the outstanding Italian thinker Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). From the point of view of the church, Bruno was certainly a heretic. He completely rejected many provisions of Christian teaching. For example, he believed that Jesus Christ is not God, but simply a magician who, like his apostles, showed some tricks on the shores of Lake Galilee. He did not believe in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and laughed at it, denied the Sacrament of Transubstantiation (the idea that wine and bread, in the course of a special religious ceremony, in a certain sense, are transformed into the blood and body of Christ). In general, everything that could be violated from the point of view of Catholics, Giordano violated.

At the same time, Bruno was not at all an atheist. He did not believe in Christ, but believed in such a God who created an infinite universe filled with an infinite number of worlds. At first, Bruno reacted with doubt to the Copernican system, but then, realizing its meaning, began to support it. Bruno went further than Copernicus: he believed that the Sun, together with the planets revolving around it, including the Earth, is just a tiny fragment of an infinite world in which each star is like the Sun, which means that each star can have its own planets, populated like Earth".

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