{"id":98183,"date":"2019-11-05T23:42:15","date_gmt":"2019-11-06T07:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/at-gala-held"},"modified":"2019-11-05T23:42:15","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T07:42:15","slug":"at-gala-held","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/at-gala-held","title":{"rendered":"At Gala Held"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/at-gala-held.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The televised gala, broadcast on the National Geographic Channel as well as YouTube and China\u2019s Tencent, whose founder Ma Huateng is also a sponsor, played heavily on a theme that\u2019s become somewhat tarnished in Silicon Valley in recent years\u2014that scientific and technological progress will solve humanity\u2019s biggest problems. For the past two years, Facebook and Google have both been battered by lawmakers and the public for how they\u2019ve failed to eliminate the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories (sometimes about science) and content that connects violent extremists. Both Zuckerberg and Pichai have also countered rising complaints from the tech giants\u2019 workforces.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Some of the top scientists who accepted <a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/alexknapp\/2019\/09\/05\/the-team-took-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole-is-one-of-the-2020-breakthrough-prize-winners\/#171e8b6818e9\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"\">Breakthrough Prize<\/a> awards used the nationally broadcast ceremony to decry the spread of misinformation, problems that continue to dog the tech giants whose leaders, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, celebrated at the glitzy Silicon Valley gala Sunday evening. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cScience is a rock of truth in a sea of fake news,\u201d said physicist Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, who with collaborators Sergio Ferrara and Daniel Freedman accepted an award Sunday evening for their work around the theory of supergravity. <\/p>\n<p>David Julius, a University of California at San Francisco physiology professor who won a $3 million award for research into the capsaicin found in chili peppers and pain relief, noted \u201cwe live in a time when technology and so many other resources make so much possible. <strong>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The televised gala, broadcast on the National Geographic Channel as well as YouTube and China\u2019s Tencent, whose founder Ma Huateng is also a sponsor, played heavily on a theme that\u2019s become somewhat tarnished in Silicon Valley in recent years\u2014that scientific and technological progress will solve humanity\u2019s biggest problems. For the past two years, Facebook and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":417,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1522],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/417"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}