The Rank Prize for Nutrition has been awarded to Professor Roy Taylor and Professor Mike Lean
The Rank Prize for Optoelectronics has been awarded to four pioneers of retinal imaging technology
LONDON, July 2, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The 2024 Rank Prizes were awarded last night at a ceremony in central London. Dame Sally Davies, the UK Special Envoy on Antimicrobial Resistance, was Guest of Honour.

Rank Prize for Nutrition
Professor Roy Taylor and Professor Mike Lean were the winners of the 2024 Rank Prize for Nutrition. Their research has furthered understanding of how type 2 diabetes develops, and has shown for the first time that remission from type 2 diabetes is possible for some by following a low-energy weight management programme. Their work is transforming services for people newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes by giving them the support to manage their health and reverse the effects of this serious condition.
Professor John C. Mathers, Chair of Rank Prize’s Nutrition Committee, explained that: “The ground-breaking research by Professors Taylor and Lean has shown that a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes is not a life sentence. Their demonstration that type 2 diabetes can be put into remission by sustained weight loss will empower millions of people globally to change their eating behaviour and to improve their health.”
On receiving the award, Professor Lean commented that: “Success in research, making a difference for our patients, is gratifying, and for all this to be recognised by the Rank Prize is immensely rewarding.” Professor Taylor added: “I am delighted to receive this recognition on behalf of the physicists, doctors, nurses, dietitians and others who have provided fantastic team input over many years of this research.”
Rank Prize for Optoelectronics
The 2024 Rank Prize for Optoelectronics was awarded to four internationally leading scientists for the development of instruments that use adaptive optics technologies to capture high-resolution images of the living human retina. Their pioneering research has generated new fundamental insights into the structure and function of the human eye in both health and disease as well as new clinical interventions to remedy sight loss from common disorders. The winning scientists are:
Dr Junzhong LiangProfessor Donald T. MillerProfessor Austin RoordaProfessor David R. WilliamsProfessor Donal Bradley, Chair of Rank Prize’s Optoelectronics Committee, noted that: “The Prize recognizes a seminal contribution to imaging within the eye that opens new opportunities to understand this complex optical instrument and to improve eyesight through precise interventions. The winners are to be commended both on their highly insightful contributions to vision science and their subsequent development of applications.”
Professor David R. Williams responded: “Inventions and discoveries are almost always made by teams and this certainly was the case in this instance. I am so proud to be sharing this award with my former teammates, each of whom was not only critical to the initial development of ophthalmic adaptive optics but also continues to lead its evolution so successfully.”
About the Rank Prize
Established by Lord J. Arthur Rank, a British industrialist and philanthropist, the Rank Prizes are awarded biennially in the fields of nutrition and optoelectronics. Previous winners include Arthur Ashkin and Shuji Nakamaru, who have gone on to win the Nobel Prize. Find out more at www.rankprize.org.
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QINGDAO, China, July 2, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Recently, the Matrix Cup Cyber Security Competition came to an end at the Qingdao International Convention Center. The competition set up three major tracks: Vulnerability Mining Competition, Artificial Intelligence (Large Model) Challenge, and Team Offensive and Defensive Competition, attracting more than 1,000 teams and nearly 3000 players from many countries around the world to jointly launch an attack on the 20 million prize.

It is reported that as the largest cyber security competition in the Eastern Hemisphere, with the highest prize money and the top offensive and defensive competitions, the Matrix Cup has set a number of “top” in the industry. In terms of track settings, the Matrix Cup has set up three major tracks and five major events, achieving full coverage of mainstream event types in the industry for the first time. In terms of team size, the Matrix Cup has attracted more than 1,000 teams and nearly 3,000 players from scientific research institutions and government and enterprise units around the world to sign up for the competition. It is worth mentioning that the proportion of female players in the Matrix Cup far exceeds that of similar events, and they fully demonstrated the charm of female hackers in the competition, and also achieved remarkable results. In terms of competition results, the Matrix Cup has made many breakthroughs in internationally renowned software and hardware products. In terms of technological innovation, the competition included innovative products such as large models into the target for the first time, and set up an AI (large model) track to cultivate AI practical talents at the same time. In addition, the competition staged a 3v3 man-machine competition to create a benchmark event for technological innovation of “safety + AI”.
The Matrix Cup Cybersecurity Competition, based on the concept of “real network, real soldiers, real combat, and real training”, aims at enhancing the practical capabilities of security talents through simulation of confrontation, simulation of infiltration, and simulation of attack and defense, and to identify system vulnerabilities and threats. The competition team showed a world-class level in the competition, and the players challenged mainstream applications such as network core devices, office products, cloud services, mobile devices, operating systems, browsers, and databases, as well as artificial AI large model applications through clever techniques such as joint exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities, reflecting the value of international network security attacks and competition.
In the future, the Matrix Cup will continue to take the responsibility of selecting and cultivating cybersecurity talents with practical capabilities, effectively contribute to the development of new quality productive forces.
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HONG KONG, July 2, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The more we discover about the natural world, the more we find that nature is the greatest engineer. Past research believed that liquids can only be transported in fixed direction on species with specific liquid communication properties and cannot switch the transport direction. Recently, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) researchers have shown that an African plant controls water movement in a previously unknown way – and this could inspire breakthroughs in a range of technologies in fluid dynamics and nature-inspired materials, including applications that require multistep and repeated reactions, such as microassays, medical diagnosis and solar desalination etc. The study has been recently published in the international academic journal Science.

Liquid transport is an unsung miracle of nature. Tall trees, for example, have to lift huge amounts of water every day from their roots to their highest leaves, which they accomplish in perfect silence. Some lizards and plants channel water through capillaries. In the desert, where making the most of scarce moisture is vital, some beetles can capture fog-borne water and direct it along their backs using a chemical gradient.
Scientists have long sought to hone humankind’s ability to move liquids directionally. Applications as diverse as microfluidics, water harvesting, and heat transfer depend on the efficient directional transport of water, or other fluids, at small or large scales. While the above species provide nature-based inspiration, they are limited to moving liquids in a single direction. A research team led by Prof. WANG Liqiu, Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Professor in Smart and Sustainable Energy, Chair Professor of Thermal-Fluid and Energy Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering of PolyU, has discovered that the succulent plant Crassula muscosa, native to Namibia and South Africa, can transport liquid in selected directions.
Together with colleagues from the University of Hong Kong and Shandong University, the PolyU researchers noticed that when two separate shoots of the plant were infused with the same liquids, the liquids were transported in opposite directions. In one case, the liquid travelled exclusively towards the tip, whereas the other shoot directed the flow straight to the plant root. Given the arid but foggy conditions in which C. muscosa lives, the ability to trap water and transport it in selected directions is a lifeline for the plant.
As the shoots were held horizontally, gravity can be ruled out as the cause of the selective direction of transport. Instead, the plant’s special properties stem from the tiny leaves packed onto its shoots. Also known as “fins”, they have a unique profile, with a swept-back body (resembling a shark’s fin) tapering to a narrow ending that points to the tip of the plant. The asymmetry of this shape is the secret to C. muscosa’s selective directional liquid transport. It all has to do with manipulating the meniscus – the curved surface on top of a liquid.
Specifically, the key lies in subtle differences between the fin shapes on different shoots. When the rows of fins bend sharply towards the tip, the liquid on the shoot also flows in that direction. However, on a shoot whose fins – although still pointing at the tip – have a more upward profile, the direction of movement is instead to the root. The flow direction depends on the angles between the shoot body and the two sides of the fin, as these control the forces exerted on droplets by the meniscus – blocking flow in one direction and sending it in the other.
Armed with this understanding of how the plant directs liquid flow, the team created an artificial mimic. Dubbed CMIAs, for ‘C. muscosa-inspired arrays’, these 3D-printed fins act like the tilted leaves of C. muscosa, controlling the orientation of liquid flow. Cleverly, while the fins on a natural plant shoot are immobile, the use of a magnetic material for artificial CMIAs allows them to be reoriented at will. Simply by applying a magnetic field, the liquid flow through a CMIA can be reversed. This opens up the possibility of liquid transport along dynamically changing paths in industrial and laboratory settings. Alternatively, flow could be redirected by changing the spacing between fins.
Numerous areas of technology stand to benefit from CMIAs. Prof. Wang said, “There are foresee applications of real-time directional control of fluid flow in microfluidics, chemical synthesis, and biomedical diagnostics. The biology-mimicking CMIA design could also be used not just for transporting liquids but for mixing them, for example in a T-shaped valve. The method is suited to a range of chemicals and overcomes the heating problem found in some other microfluidic technologies.”

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