A French mathematician has been awarded this year’s Abel Prize, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for advances in understanding the randomness in the universe – the heights of ocean waves crashing onto a beach, the weight of babies, the ups and downs of nature. market – work that has found use in mathematical physics and statistics.

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which administers the Abel Prize, announced Wednesday morning that the recipient was 72-year-old Michel Talagrand, a former researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

“Talagrand is an exceptionally productive mathematician whose work has transformed probability theory, functional analysis and statistics,” the academy said in its award ceremony. “His research is characterized by a desire to understand interesting problems at their most fundamental level, and to build new mathematical theories along the way.”

Dr. Talagrand will receive 7.5 million Norwegian krone, or about $700,000. That money, along with money he won in 2019 for the Shaw Prize, another prestigious prize, will go toward a new prize “in my favorite areas of mathematics,” he said.

As a 15-year-old, a month in hospital helped boost his math skills. Ten years earlier, he had gone blind in his right eye after a detached retina, the result of a genetic condition. Then the retina in his left eye also detached. His father, a college math teacher, taught him math while his eyes were bandaged.

“This is how I learned the power of abstraction,” wrote Dr. Talagrand an autobiography for the Shaw Prize.

Until then he was an average student. “The trauma made me a different person, in ways that are still mysterious to me,” he wrote. “When I went back to school, I was an excellent student, at least in math and science.”

In an alternate universe, Dr. Talagrand might have ended up as a high school teacher and not done any research. But he also applied for a position at the National Center for Scientific Research that did not require a PhD.

He was hired in 1974 and remained with the center until his retirement in 2017. (He received his PhD from the University of Paris VI in 1977.)

The Abel Commission mentioned three areas of Dr. Talagrand.

One of these concerns so-called stochastic processes – temperatures, water level in a river, market fluctuations – where measurements fluctuate randomly. Dr. Talagrand investigated how to estimate the maximum of such random measurements. For example, someone who builds a house along a river would like to know what the risk of flooding is.

“You look at the river level as a stochastic process, and it evolves over time, and you want to find the maximum that this level can have over a 25-year period,” said Helge Holden, chairman of the awards committee.

An exact calculation is impossibly complex, but Dr.’s statistical methods. Talagrand were able to provide good estimates, better than he expected when he started the research.

“In this case, the universe turned out to be beautiful,” said Dr. Talagrand. “As simple as it can be.”

Assaf Naor, a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, said Dr. Talagrand could use ideas from geometry to analyze what could be said about arbitrary measurements.

“This is a very remarkable connection,” said Dr. Naor.

The technique has broad applicability, said Dr. Naor. “I’m not saying it’s easy to implement, but you know that if you follow his recipe, if you succeed, you will discover the truth.”

A second area highlighted by the Abel Commission concerned the way in which Dr. Talagrand helped demonstrate that there is a degree of predictability within random processes. A simple example is tossing a coin with a 50 percent chance of heads and 50 percent of tails. Flip the coin twice and the expected value of the number of heads is one. But half the time, the result will be as far away from the expected value as possible: zero or two.

Flip the coin 1000 times and the result will be much closer to the expected value. An essay for the earlier Shaw Prize pointed out that the probability that the number of heads will fall between 450 and 550 is approximately 99.7 percent; the chance that the number will exceed 600 is virtually negligible.

The same goes for other, more complex problems, such as the number of bins needed for items of different sizes or the shortest distance a traveling salesman can travel to a number of different cities.

Later, Dr. Talagrand is interested in a physics problem known as spin glasses, which involves complex interactions between individual magnets. An example of a spin glass is iron atoms randomly mixed in a lattice of copper atoms. Based on intuition, physicist Giorgio Parisi came up with a detailed description of how these disordered magnetic materials should behave.

“To a mathematician, this makes no sense,” said Dr. Talagrand on the rationale that Dr. Parisi used.

While mathematicians devise a mathematical proof for Dr. Parisi as an impossibly difficult problem, Dr. Talagrand to try it. “I say, ‘OK, I’m not going to fix it, but there’s nothing to lose if you try,’” he said.

After five years without success, he made a simple observation that led to solid evidence showing that Dr. Parisi was right.

“It turned out the solution wasn’t that difficult,” said Dr. Talagrand. “But of course you couldn’t get up in the morning and figure it out. There must be a lot of modest work.”

Dr. Parisi shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for his spin glass work.

For problems that Dr. Talagrand himself has not found out, he has offered money to anyone who can. On his website he proclaims, “Get RICH with my prizes,” listing five problems. One of them, known as the Bernoulli conjecture, was indeed solved in 2012, and Dr. Talagrand paid out the $5,000 prize to the two mathematicians who provided the proof.

“I worked on it continuously for over a decade, but I couldn’t solve it,” said Dr. Talagrand. “The most beautiful piece of mathematics I have ever seen. And I was very happy when they solved this, because I could never have done something so difficult.”

Unlike Nobel laureates who find out just before the prizes are announced publicly, Abel laureates get the news a few days in advance, usually from colleagues who have learned the secret before.

“The people who knew set up quite a trap,” Dr. Talagrand said, referring to a subterfuge of a telephone interview request to inform him of the Abel Prize news.

“My mind went completely blank for a good five seconds when I heard that,” said Dr. Talagrand in an interview. “I wouldn’t have been more surprised if I had seen the alien ship land in front of the White House.”

President Biden announced executive actions Monday to expand the federal government’s research into women’s health, including midlife conditions such as menopause, arthritis and heart disease, as well as issues that specifically affect women in the military.

In what the White House described as the “most comprehensive” action by a president on women’s health research, Mr. Biden will sign an executive order on Monday directing federal agencies to ensure that they keep federal funds use for research into health problems and diseases that disproportionately impact women’s health care. women. The actions come after Mr. Biden said late last year that the first lady, Jill Biden, would spearhead an initiative to address the underrepresentation of women in health research.

“For far too long, women’s health research has been underfunded and underresearched,” said Dr. Carolyn M. Mazure, psychologist and professor at the Yale School of Medicine who chairs the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research. “We still know too little about how to effectively prevent, diagnose and treat a wide range of health problems in women.”

Dr. Mazure said these conditions could include heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease or fibroids. Dr. Biden has been traveling the country to learn about such disparities and “the groundbreaking research that is possible when we invest in women’s health,” said Dr. Mazure.

After the Supreme Court ruled Roe vs. Wade in 2022 and an Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos should be considered children, threatening in vitro fertilization, the Biden campaign has increasingly accused Republicans of undermining women’s health . During his State of the Union address earlier this month, Mr Biden said such decisions would motivate women to vote in the November election, while also saying his White House would be committed to investing in health in the coming year of women.

“Women make up more than half of our population, but research on women’s health has always been underfunded,” Biden said as he called on Congress to pass a plan to invest $12 billion to create a new fund for research into women’s health at the National Institutes. of health. In the meantime, the executive order signed Monday will direct the NIH to spend $200 million on women’s health research. Dr. Biden traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, last month to announce the first step of the Women’s Health Initiative: $100 million to support female health researchers and start-up companies.

Mr. Biden’s executive order will require agencies to report annually on their investments in women’s health research and explore ways in which artificial intelligence can be used to advance such research. The NIH will increase investments in small businesses focused on women’s health by 50 percent. The Department of Defense also plans to invest $10 million to learn more about cancer and mental health issues facing women in active military service.

The World Bank’s internal watchdog on Thursday criticized the organization’s handling and oversight of its investments in a chain of Kenyan schools that were subject to an internal investigation following allegations that students had been abused.

The investigation, which began in 2020, has consumed World Bank officials and shareholders in recent months and led to investigations into its investment arm, the International Finance Corporation, which invested in the education project a decade ago.

Countries on the IFC’s board have debated how to compensate victims of the abuse. Although the scandal predates the tenure of Ajay Banga, the new World Bank president, it has emerged as one of the first tests of his management.

Mr Banga will be responsible for driving any changes to how the bank invests in private sector projects. He has already faced criticism for appearing dismissive of suggestions that the IFC was interfering in the investigation US lawmakers told him so that the bank’s future financing could depend on its handling of the matter.

The watchdog reportpublished by the The World Bank Compliance Advisor Ombudsmanconcluded that the IFC “did not take into account the potential risks of child sexual abuse posed by the project, nor did it take into account the client’s ability to meet environmental and social requirements relating to the risks and consequences of sexual abuse of children.”

The World Bank had a $13 million stake in Bridge International Academies from 2013 to 2022. She quit the program after complaints of sexual abuse at the schools, which led to an internal investigation into the events and a review of how her investment department oversees such programs. .

The report, citing Bridge International Academies, added that the “IFC failed to regularly monitor or substantively address with its client the project-related risks and consequences of child sexual abuse and gender-based violence.”

It was then recommended that the victims of the abuse receive financial compensation.

However, a management action plan agreed by the IFC Board of Directors did not fully take these recommendations into account. Instead, the plan said it would “directly fund a recovery program for survivors of child sexual abuse” for up to 10 years. The plan would pay an unspecified amount for psychological support and sexual and reproductive health care for adolescents.

The decision on whether to directly compensate victims was the subject of intense internal debate among board members, with some arguing that the bank should not take such direct financial responsibility for what happened during the program.

In an email to World Bank staff sent on Wednesday evening, Mr Banga, who was not at the helm during the period of abuse, acknowledged that mistakes had been made in the handling of the program and the investigation and was remorseful. .

“I am sorry for the trauma these children have experienced, I am committed to supporting the survivors and determined to ensure we do better in the future,” Mr Banga wrote.

Mr Banga acknowledged allegations that IFC officials tried to cover up allegations of misconduct, adding that he would appoint an external investigator to ensure the previous investigation was free of interference.

“We should have responded earlier and more aggressively,” he said. “This is a difficult moment for our institution, but it must be a moment of introspection.”

Human rights groups and civil society organizations have been critical of the proposed action plans, arguing that they do not go far enough to compensate victims.

On Thursday they continued to lament the lack of direct financial support in the action plan, which proposes to pay for it counseling services and healthcare for the victims.

“IFC’s action plan fails to do what it is required to do: provide a solution for Bridge survivors,” the spokesperson said. David Predthe executive director of the human rights group Inclusive Development International.

In recent days, US lawmakers have also urged the Treasury Department, which helped nominate Mr Banga to lead the bank, to push for more to be done and reject the action plan.

“I am concerned that failure to provide immediate and meaningful compensation will harm not only the survivors and their families, but also the reputation of the IFC, which has a vital mission around the world, and that of the United States as its largest shareholder,” Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, wrote in a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen on Wednesday.

The Treasury Department, which had pushed for compensation for the victims, said in a statement Thursday that it accepted the report’s findings. However, it suggested that survivors should be consulted as the IFC determines how best to compensate them.

“We believe that the IFC should keep all resolution options on the table as consultations continue,” The Ministry of Finance reported this in a statement.

The statement added that the department was also concerned about allegations of interference in the investigation and welcomed an independent review of how this was handled.

“We are deeply concerned by the broader liability issues this case raises,” the report said.

Teenage pregnancies increase the likelihood of a young woman dropping out of school and struggling with poverty, research shows. Teens are also more likely to develop serious medical complications during pregnancy.

Now a major study in Canada reports another disturbing finding: Women who were pregnant as teenagers are more likely to die before their 31st birthday. The trend was observed in women who had completed a teenage pregnancy, as well as in women who had had a miscarriage.

“The younger the person was when she became pregnant, the greater the risk of premature death,” said Dr. Joel G. Ray, an obstetric medicine specialist and epidemiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and the study’s first author . It was published Thursday in JAMA Network Open.

“Some people will argue that we shouldn’t judge this, but I think we have always intuitively known that there is an age that is too young for pregnancy,” he added.

The study used a provincial health insurance registry to analyze pregnancy outcomes for approximately 2.2 million teens in Ontario, Canada, including all girls who were 12 years old between April 1991 and March 2021.

Even after the researchers took into account pre-existing health problems the girls might have had, as well as income and education differences, teens who carried a pregnancy to term were more than twice as likely to die prematurely later in life.

The researchers found similar odds among women who had an ectopic pregnancy as a teenager, in which the fertilized egg grows outside the uterus, or in pregnancies that ended in a stillbirth or miscarriage.

The danger was significantly lower in women who had terminated a pregnancy as a teenager; however, they were still 40 percent more likely to die prematurely, compared to women who had not been pregnant.

Dr. Ray and his colleagues found that the greatest risk of premature death was among women who became pregnant before the age of 16 and among women who were pregnant more than once as a teenager.

Injuries – both self-inflicted and unintentional, such as seizures – caused the most premature deaths, the analysis found.

Women who had been pregnant as a teenager were more than twice as likely to die from an unintentional injury at a young age, compared to women who had not been pregnant as a teenager – and they were also twice as likely to die from an self-inflicted injury.

In a commentary accompanying the article, Elizabeth L. Cook, a scientist at Child Trends, a research organization focused on children and youth, noted that teen pregnancy may not be a causal factor in premature death.

Rather, it may be indicative of a range of other influences, including adverse childhood experiences, that increase the likelihood of an early death. She called for more research to understand these causes.

While some teens choose to become pregnant, “most teen pregnancies are unintended, exposing shortcomings in the systems that exist to educate, guide and support young people,” Ms. Cook wrote. The stigma and isolation that many pregnant teens face “can make it harder to thrive in adulthood,” she added. The new study is not the first to find a link between teen pregnancy and premature death, but appears to be one of the largest and most robust.

A Finnish study reported in 2017 that women who had had a teenage pregnancy were more likely to die prematurely due to suicide, alcohol-related causes, circulatory disorders and car accidents. That study attributed the additional risk to a low level of education.

Although the risks of pregnancy generally increase with age, pregnant adolescents are more likely than women in their 20s and 30s to develop pregnancy-related high blood pressure and a life-threatening condition called preeclampsia.

They are more likely to give birth prematurely and have babies that are small at birth, and their babies often have other serious health problems and are at greater risk of dying during their first year of life.

Oil and gas producers in major oil fields in the United States may be emitting three times as much planet-warming methane gas as official estimates, according to new research published Wednesday. undercounted.

In some parts of New Mexico, more than 9 percent of the natural gas produced escaped into the atmosphere, researchers said in the study: published in the journal Nature.

Methane is the main component of natural gas and when released unburned into the atmosphere, it acts as an extremely potent greenhouse gas. It could warm the planet more than 80 times as much over 20 years as the same amount of carbon dioxide.

The release of methane – often from leaks at wells or gas processing plants, along pipelines or in other energy facilities – is bad news for global warming, which is already leading to higher sea levels, more intense storms, more intense droughts and greater energy losses. biodiversity around the world.

For the study, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Kairos Aerospace and other labs looked at about a million measurements collected from aerial surveys over six oil and gas producing regions. Using these measurements, along with computer models, they found that oil and gas activities in those regions released an estimated 6.2 million tons of methane per year.

That’s almost 3 percent of the total gas these regions produce annually, or the equivalent of the annual greenhouse gas emissions from the energy used by 20 million households. Expressed in dollars, this amounts to approximately a billion dollars in gas.

One conclusion from this and previous studies was “how concentrated the emissions are in a very small fraction of sites,” said Evan D. Sherwin, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who led the study. “That’s the silver lining. “If we can figure out what’s happening in this small subset of sites, we’ll be halfway to solving the methane problem in the oil and gas sector,” he said.

Scientists are increasingly turning their attention to getting better measurements of man-made methane emissions, much of which comes from the oil and gas industry. MethaneSAT, a satellite launched this month by the Environmental Defense Fund, is designed to track methane on a global scale. It is one of many satellites that can detect and measure methane from space.

The new study found that methane emissions varied widely from region to region, from 0.75 percent in Pennsylvania to more than 9 percent in parts of New Mexico. One reason for high rates in New Mexico: Operators there often drill for oil, not gas, and simply release much of the gas into the atmosphere.

Ritesh Gautam, a scientist at the EDF who was not involved in the study, said it provided important new data. He also said that more extensive measurements, including data from MethaneSAT, would soon complement these studies. “To get a complete picture, these data need to be combined with direct measurements of total methane emissions,” he said.

In a separate one analysis The International Energy Agency said on Wednesday that methane emissions from the energy sector continued to reach near-record highs in 2023. But it also struck a hopeful tone, saying new steps announced in recent months could soon reduce those emissions.

For now, global methane emissions remain “far too high” to meet international climate targets, the IEA said. To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial times, a key goal of the Paris climate agreement, methane emissions from fossil fuels must fall by 75 percent this decade decrease, according to the energy agency.

The IEA analysis found that fossil fuel production and use generated almost 132 million tonnes of methane emissions last year, a small increase from the previous year. Emissions have remained at similar levels since 2019, when they hit a record. The United States, the world’s largest global producer of oil and gas, was also the largest emitter of oil and gas activities, followed by Russia.

Nearly 200 governments agreed at last year’s global climate talks in Dubai to “substantially” reduce methane emissions by 2030. Major oil and gas companies have also signed the Global Methane Pledge to curb their emissions. The Biden administration is also moving forward with rules requiring oil and gas producers to detect and repair methane leaks.

All pledges by countries and companies, fully implemented and on time, would cut methane emissions from fossil fuels by 50 percent by 2030, the IEA’s new analysis shows. However, the IEA noted that most commitments were not yet backed by concrete plans.

“I am encouraged by the momentum we have seen in recent months and that our analysis shows it could make a huge and immediate difference in the world’s fight against climate change,” said Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA , in a statement. “Now we must focus on turning commitments into action, while raising the bar.”