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Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck won the Abel prize for her fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.Credit: Andrea Kane/IAS

US mathematician Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck has won the 2019 Abel Prize — one of mathematics’ most prestigious awards. Among her most influential results — and the one that she says she’s most proud of — is the discovery of a phenomenon called bubbling. It’s part of seminal work she did with collaborator Jonathan Sacks on ‘﻿minimal surfaces’, a mathematical theory of how soap films arrange themselves into shapes that minimize their energy. Uhlenbeck is the first woman to win the 6-million-kroner (US$702,500) prize. “We were told that we couldn’t do math because we were women,” she wrote in a 1996 essay. “I liked doing what I wasn’t supposed to do, it was a sort of legitimate rebellion.”

Nature | 5 min read

US President Donald Trump has proposed slashing spending across the board at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in his 2020 budget request. The biggest decreases would hit funding for research in Antarctica and the Arctic, the geosciences, maths and physical sciences. But it’s unclear whether Congress will go along with Trump’s plan: Republican and Democrat lawmakers were unwilling to approve similar cuts in previous years.

Nature | 5 min read

Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the UK Institute of Physics have launched a graduate-student fund supported by her US$3-million Breakthrough Prize. “I’ve been concerned about the shortage of women in physics for a very long time,” says Bell Burnell, who co-founded the pioneering Athena SWAN diversity programme. “But I never thought I’d have this kind of money, so it was all a bit hypothetical.”

Physics World | 10 min read

Read more: Pulsar discoverer Jocelyn Bell Burnell wins $3-million Breakthrough Prize

FEATURES & OPINION

Florida citrus farmers are set to start a controversial experiment in a desperate bid to save their trees: they will spray their crops with hundreds of thousands of kilograms of antibiotics. They hope that regular treatments with two common drugs, streptomycin and oxytetracycline, will slow the bacterial disease, known as citrus greening, that has crippled the industry. But there’s little evidence about what the spraying will do to the other microbes in the environment, how it might contribute to antibiotic resistance — or whether it will even work.

Nature | 8 min read

When NASA’s InSight lander touched down on Mars, its progress was reported back to Earth in near real time by its little helpers: two shoebox-sized ‘cubesat’ satellites. The small spacecraft are already popular for getting everything from budget-conscious government projects to student science experiments into Earth orbit. After their Martian success, a cubesat might soon take a trip to Jupiter — or beyond.

The New York Times | 8 min read

Go deeper: On the verge of an astronomy CubeSat revolution (Nature Astronomy, 19 min read, from May)