While anticipating his 50th birthday, Shri Kulkarni, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, realized that he was closing in on his 50th Nature paper.

Kulkarni says that he owes his productivity mainly to his postdocs and graduate students, who he helps to motivate by guaranteeing them a good shot at getting first authorship. He has also kept the publications coming by learning new techniques and by trying not to focus too much on one topic.

Although about half of his Nature publications report on various gamma-ray-burst phenomena — something routinely described as 'mysterious' before 1997, he has had a lot of variety as well. His most recent paper establishes an observational basis for the linking of white dwarfs and classical novae (see page 159).

He says that he first got into the Nature habit by his discovery of a millisecond pulsar, but the most interesting object he found was the first brown dwarf, which now outnumber the stars.

He and his lab plan to celebrate the milestones both his birthday and his 50 Nature papers represent later this spring. “It'll be called a 'going downhill party,'” Kulkarni says. “It will be hard to keep up this level of productivity.”