首页
登录
职称英语
The Prize: $10 MillionA They are an elite club of
The Prize: $10 MillionA They are an elite club of
游客
2024-01-09
12
管理
问题
The Prize: $10 Million
A They are an elite club of billionaires, movie producers, dotcom wiz kids and the occasional astronaut and between them they hope to change the face of scientific research with money and influence, the 20-strong team—among them the producer of the Blues Brothers and Naked Gun movies, the cofounder of Google, a former White House aide and the Vietnam veteran-turned-billionaire genetics entrepreneur, Craig Venter, are to launch a series of multimillion dollar prizes to accelerate scientific breakthroughs that otherwise might be decades away.
B Together, they make up the X-Prize Foundation, an organisation set up by Peter Diamandis of Space Adventures, the company that arranged for Dennis Tito to fly to the International Space Station in 2001 and so become the world’s first space tourist. The foundation (motto: "Creating radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity"), plans to launch three prizes of at least $10 million this year to crack some of the toughest problems facing genetics, nanotechnology and the car industry. "Our goal is to build ourselves into a world-class prize institute and focus on using those prizes to attack some of the grand challenges of our time," Dr Diamandis said. "By setting up prizes with a big enough purse, you can reach across space and time and problems will get solved."
C The move follows the foundation’s huge success with the Ansari X-Prize, which promised $I0 million for the first commercial manned spacecraft to reach suborbital space twice within two weeks. Named after Anousheh Ansari, a dotcom multimillionaire and one of only two women on the foundation’s board, the prize attracted 26 teams which spent more than $100 million trying to win. The prize was triggered by what Dr Diamandis calls his "absolute frustration at the glacial pace of progress" and was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan, an American aeronautics expert, with his rocket-plane SpaceShipOne. The competition forced US officials to draw up regulations for commercial spaceflight and paved the way for Richard Branson to add space tourism to his portfolio with the launch of Virgin Galactic, a spaceflight venture that will use a rocket designed by Mr Rutan.
D Now the foundation is looking to repeat its success in other areas of science. Dr Diamandis is cagey about the finer details of future prizes, but one will offer $10 million for the first company to sequence the genetic code of 100 people in a matter of weeks. The prize is intended to force private industry to find ways of making full genome sequencing cheap enough for everyone to afford. It will be no cakewalk: a full genome sequence now takes around six months to read and costs $20 million. "The value of having the human genome doesn’t really occur until you have it for tens or hundreds of thousands of people, so the prize will make that happen," Dr Diamandis said. "To say this gene correlates with adult onset diabetes, that this gene reacts badly with that drug, you need a huge statistical database."
E A second prize is aimed at kicking America’s self-proclaimed addiction to oil, by spurring research into greener vehicles. "This is a hot button that can effect our reliance on energy from around the world and our production of pollution, which are major problems from a national security standpoint and an environmental standpoint,’ Dr Diamandis said. "We’re still using the internal combustion engine after 100 years, and getting 20 miles per gallon for the past 40 years. It’s ripe for a major prize to break things open." The foundation is also planning prizes in nanotechnology and education and is considering a second space prize, which could see the first commercial team to put a person into orbital spaceflight win $50 million to $100 million. "We’re always looking for where things have become stuck, where there are bureaucratic, technology, government or industrial problems stopping things evolving." According to Dr Diamandis, in the future such prizes will shape research by focusing minds on a particular problem and ensuring the goalposts do not change with political whims. Soon, he believes $100 million and even $1 billion prizes will be put up by organisations keen to draw on the mass intelligence of the world’s experts.
F The money for the prizes comes from donations from wealthy individuals and sponsorship, and entry is usually open to all. "In general we want these open to the most brilliant minds on the planet," Dr Diamandis said. "A lot of the value is not just the cash, it’s the heroism that goes along with winning the competition. It’s what drives people to work around the clock and take risk to levels required for breakthroughs." The X-Prize Foundation has inspired others to follow suit, notably Nasa, which believes its money might be better spent setting up a prize fund than running parallel research projects in-house. This month it released details of six $5 million "challenges" to solve technical hurdles standing in the way of typically Nasaish projects, namely how to build extraterrestrial fuel depots, human lunar all-terrain vehicles, low-cost space pressure suits, lunar night power sources, micro reentry vehicles and "station-keeping solar sails". [br] *
选项
答案
假
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3346852.html
相关试题推荐
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
ThePrize:$10MillionATheyareaneliteclubof
随机试题
Theindustrialsocietieshavebeenextremelyproductiveduringthelasttwo
UnforgettableOlympicMomentsSinceFrenchbaronPierred
对于大体积混凝土浇筑块,成型后的偏差不应超过木模安装允许偏差的(),取值大小视结
保荐人存在擅自改动科创板股票注册申请文件情形,下列关于中国证监会可采取的监管措施
不属于载脂蛋白的是()。A.ApoB100 B.铜蓝蛋白 C.ApoA1
下列属于红细胞生成减少性贫血的是A.遗传性球形红细胞增多症B.缺铁性贫血C.自身
成组装车的优点有( )。 A.减少编组站改编作业 B.减少装卸地点取
下列公式错误的是( )。 A.货物运输量=发送量+接运量 B.货物运输
某地铁地下车站,消防应急照明和疏散指示系统由1台应急照明控制器、2台应急照明配
连续梁桥上部结构采用支架现浇施工时,确定支架搭设高度应考虑的因素( )。A.梁体
最新回复
(
0
)