Scientists who ask the right questions at the right time can make history and change the world.
We compiled a list of 50 scientists from across the globe who are doing just that — changing the world for the better.
These scientists' revolutionary research in human happiness, evolutionary biology, neutrino physics, biotechnology, archeology, and other fields is helping to advance our lives in more ways than we could ever imagine.
For the list, we selected scientists noted in the media for their recent achievements as well as scientists highlighted in the 2014 lists of Forbes Magazine's "30 Under 30," Popular Science's The Brilliant Ten, and MIT's "35 Innovators Under 30."
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Abe Davis is finding new ways to use video by using the vibrations in it to reconstruct audio.
No sound? No problem. Abe Davis and a team of researchers from MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe developed an algorithm that can extract audio from silent videos by analyzing the tiny vibrations of the objects as captured by a camera.
In one experiment, the team filmed earbuds playing a song with no discernible sound. The vibrations of the earbuds in the video was enough to recreate a song identifiable by the app Shazam. When the team tried the experiment using an everyday point-and-shoot camera, as opposed to an expensive high-speed version, the vibrations were still able to reconstruct the sound. Davis presented these findings in a paper for Siggraph, a computer-graphics conference, and gave a TED talk where he demoed the visual microphone. And there’s more to come: The latest research from Davis and fellow graduate student Katie Bouman will be out this summer.
Davis is a doctoral student at MIT.
Alan Stern is spearheading the most important space mission of 2015.
On July 14, 2015, the NASA spacecraft New Horizons flew by Pluto — closer than any other human-made instrument has ever been. Alan Stern is spearheading the mission, leading the team of scientists that made sure the spacecraft survived its nine-year journey through space.
Until New Horizons reached its closest approach to Pluto, little was known about this dwarf planet and its system of five moons. Now the NASA spacecraft has collected data that Stern and his team will be analyzing over the coming months to understand the geology, composition, and atmospheric content of Pluto in significant detail, something that would never have happened without the New Horizons spacecraft.
Stern is the principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission.
Andrea Accomazzo was the first person to land a probe on a comet.
In August 2014, the Rosetta spacecraft began orbiting the comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko and transmitting images to Earth of the dusty space snowball that were more detailed than anything we'd ever seen.
Ultimately, Rosetta will give scientists a better idea of what comets are made of and how they work, as well as provide insights into the chemical makeup of the solar system. As the Rosetta flight director, Andrea Accomazzo helped design the mission and led the team that guided it toward 67P. Now he's working with the European Space Agency on their interplanetary missions to Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter.
Accomazzo is an ESA spacecraft-operations manager at Venus Express and the flight director of the Rosetta mission.
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