He has a love for numbers, but not if they come with a dollar sign attached.

Grigory Perelman’s mathematical genius won the reclusive Russian a $1 million prize for solving what had been seen as the world’s hardest problem. On Thursday, he turned it down.

In 2006, Perelman was due to collect the equivalent of $14,000 in Canadian dollars as the recipient of the Fields Medal, considered math’s Nobel Prize. He turned it down.

In 1996, he was awarded a prize by the European Congress of Mathematicians. Yes, that’s right: He turned it down.

He rejected the Clay Mathematics Institute’s $1 million because he thought it was unfair and “unjust,” saying that a U.S. mathematician deserved as much credit as he did, the Interfax news agency said.

The Cambridge, Mass., institute posted his rejection on its website and said it would wait until the fall before deciding what to do with the money.

Perelman’s fame is due to his solving a riddle that has had mathematicians scratching their heads since 1904, when the Frenchman Henri Poincare posited that a three-dimensional sphere is the only such space that doesn’t have holes.

The Russian attracted attention in 2003 when he posted papers on the Internet that later turned out to be proof of Poincare’s theory. But Perelman refuses to take all the credit, saying he had built on the work of a Columbia University professor, Richard Hamilton.

The president of the Clay Institute, James Carlson, said that he had spoken with Perelman by phone and that he was, “as usual, quite pleasant” but “firm in his decision” not to accept its prize, The New York Times reported.

According to Interfax, Perelman said, “To put it short, the main reason is my disagreement with the organized mathematical community. I don’t like their decisions. I consider them unjust.” Read More..

X-37 space plane launches successfully Read the full story

Understanding how to control light in this way has important implications for laser technology used in wide a range of industries.

Dr Mark Dennis from the University of Bristol and lead author on the paper, explained: “In a light beam, the flow of light through space is similar to water flowing in a river. Although it often flows in a straight line – out of a torch, laser pointer, etc – light can also flow in whirls and eddies, forming lines in space called ‘optical vortices’.

“Along these lines, or optical vortices, the intensity of the light is zero (black). The light all around us is filled with these dark lines, even though we can’t see them”. Read the full story

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. Read the full story

Of the billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, 15 percent may host “twins” of our solar system, a new study says.

While that might not sound like much, the find suggests that several hundred million star systems look a lot like the one we call home, the study authors say.

The research is based on surveys of stars with gas giant planets—similar to Jupiter and Saturn—that orbit far from their stars. Read the full story

Future humans won’t have to wait to travel to Pandora for the chance to mine unobtanium, because Neptune and Uranus may have diamond icebergs floating atop liquid diamond seas closer to home. The surprise finding comes from the first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, Discovery News reports.

Scientists zapped diamond with a laser at pressures 40 million times greater than the Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, and then slowly reduced both temperature and pressure. They eventually found that diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, and that chunks of diamond will float in the liquid diamond. Read the full story

With a lanky legspan of up to nearly a half foot, a newly discovered spider species is the largest among its family of arachnids in the Middle East.

The spider, now dubbed Cerbalus aravensis, was discovered in the dunes of the Sands of Samar in the southern Arava region in Israel by a team of biologists from the University of Haifa-Oranim. The scientists say C. aravensis is nocturnal and mostly active during the hottest months of the year. Read the full story

China and Russia try to control rain clouds and the Dutch use technology to keep low-lying inland areas from flooding, so why shouldn’t the United States be able to manipulate lightning? In an attempt to better understand one of nature’s most powerful processes, DARPA issued abroad agency announcement yesterday asking for ideas on how to best protect American personnel and resources from dangers and costs associated with lightning strikes. To wit:

Lightning causes more than $1B/year in direct damages to property in addition to the loss of lives, disruption of activities (for example, postponement of satellite launches) and their corresponding costs. A better understanding of the physics underlying lightning discharge, associated emissions, and related processes (for example, tribocharging in the clouds) may lead to revolutionary advances in the state of the art of lightning protection. Read the full story

Scientists have detected a flash of light from across the Galaxy so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The flash was brighter than anything ever detected from beyond our Solar System and lasted over a tenth of a second. NASA and European satellites and many radio telescopes detected the flash and its aftermath on December 27, 2004. Two science teams report about this event at a special press event today at NASA headquarters. A multitude of papers are planned for publication.

Read the full story

WASHINGTON, DC (Herald de Paris) - EXCLUSIVE - Researchers have revealed the first images from the Caribbean sea floor of what they believe are the archaeological remains of an ancient civilization.  Guarding the location’s coordinates carefully, the project’s leader, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, says the city could be thousands of years old; possibly even pre-dating the ancient Egyptian pyramids, at Giza. Read the full story

Do you know why Richard Branson was in such a hurry to unveil SpaceShipTwo last week? It’s not because he loves cool toys — it’s because he was worried an inventor who’s created a personal UFO would steal his thunder.

Or at least, that’s what a new press release from UFO guru Luke Fortune claims. Fortune, an inventor, has put the plans and patents to allow you to build your own laser-fusion-powered UFO online for free. Read the full story

This can’t be good,

MOSCOW: Good news for vodka lovers as you can consume your favourite drink just like any other solid food, without the hassle of carrying heavy glass bottles.

Russian professor Evgeny Moskalev of Saint Petersburg Technological University has evolved a technique that allows turning alcohol into powder and packing it in pills. The new technique can solidify any kind of alcohol, including whisky, cognac, wine and beer. Read the full story

Bangalore: Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) are on the brink of a path-breaking discovery. They may have found signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon.

They believe so because scientific instruments on India’s first unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface, Surendra Pal, associate director, Isro Satellite Centre (Isac), said at the international radar symposium here on Friday. Read the full story

CAIRO, Egypt — An award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist traveled to Saudi Arabia earlier this year to perform a religious pilgrimage. He never returned.

Shahram Amiri’s mysterious disappearance is turning into a Middle Eastern whodunit involving nuclear secrets and political intrigue, with a new round of accusations emerging this week and the U.S. government still refusing to comment. Read the full story

By placing electrode grids inside patients’ skulls, researchers at the Mayo Clinic have created a way for people to type words using only their brainwaves. It’s a major breakthrough for brain-computer interface research.

The experiments were undertaken on patients who already had electrodes in their brain to monitor epilepsy. Readings were taken via electrocorticography (ECoG), as the subjects were shown a grid of letters and numbers. As each symbol was illuminated, the patient was told to focus on the letter or number, and data was recorded. Once this calibration data was taken, the patients would think of a letter or number, and their brain waves would be appropriately translated to the screen. The theory is that this technique will allow people to communicate and type far more easily when they suffer from Lou Gehrig’s disease, MS, or paralysis. Read the full story