Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists 2011, Volume 1260

This volume comprises contributions from faculty and postdoctoral finalists of the 2011 New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists.  The Awards celebrate the excellence of some of the most promising young scientists in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut by acknowledging their highly innovative, multidisciplinary accomplishments in the life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering.  Included in this volume are manuscripts of the individual finalists' areas of research, which provide a glimpse of some of today’s most compelling scholarly work. NOTE: Annals volumes are available for sale as individual books or as a journal. For information on institutional journal subscriptions, please visit http://ordering.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/subs.asp?ref=1749-6632&doi=10.1111/(ISSN)1749-6632. ACADEMY MEMBERS: Please contact the New York Academy of Sciences directly to place your order (www.nyas.org). Members of the New York Academy of Science receive full-text access to the Annals online and discounts on print volumes. Please visit http://www.nyas.org/MemberCenter/Join.aspx for more information about becoming a member.

A crosstalk between bone and gonads / Franck Oury Calabi-Yau manifolds and their degenerations / Valentino Tosatti Emerging topics in epigenetics : ants, brains, and noncoding RNAs / Roberto Bonasio Lighting up the brain's reward circuitry / Mary Kay Lobo Searching for new physics at the frontiers with lattice quantum chromodynamics / Ruth S. Van de Water Quo vadis, data privacy? / Johannes Gehrke Exploring the birth and death of black holes and other creatures / Szabolcs Márka Harnessing the world's biodiversity data : promise and peril in ecological niche modeling of species distributions / Robert P. Anderson Protein function and allostery : a dynamic relationship / Charalampos G. Kalodimos Plate tectonics and planetary habitability : current status and future challenges / Jun Korenaga Accurate evaluation and analysis of functional genomics data and methods / Casey S. Greene and Olga G. Troyanskaya Molecular dispersion spectroscopy : new capabilities in laser chemical sensing / Michal Nikodem and Gerard Wysocki