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摘要

Coral reefs are worth $172 billion per year to the world economy. They attract tourists, act as sanctuaries for commercial fish species and protect coasts from storm surges. Pavan Sukhdev of the United Nations Environment Programme presented this as an argument for saving coral reefs from climate change at the Diversitas biodiversity conference in Cape Town, South Africa, last week. Issac Newton has held it and so has Stephen Hawking. Now the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge is set to pass to Michael Green. He helped trigger the "first superstring revolution", which showed string theory can describe elementary particles and their interactions.