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2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Posted on October 9, 2011  Comments (1)

photo of Dan Shechtman

Dan Shechtman, Israel Institute of Technology, 2011 Nobel Laurette in Chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2011 to Dan Shechtman, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel for the discovery of quasicrystals.

In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves. However, the configuration found in quasicrystals was considered impossible, and Dan Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter.

On the morning of 8 April 1982, an image counter to the laws of nature appeared in Dan Shechtman’s electron microscope. In all solid matter, atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated periodically over and over again. For scientists, this repetition was required in order to obtain a crystal.

Shechtman’s image, however, showed that the atoms in his crystal were packed in a pattern that could not be repeated. Such a pattern was considered just as impossible as creating a football using only six-cornered polygons, when a sphere needs both five- and six-cornered polygons. His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group. However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.

Aperiodic mosaics, such as those found in the medieval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra Palace in Spain and the Darb-i Imam Shrine in Iran, have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level. In those mosaics, as in quasicrystals, the patterns are regular – they follow mathematical rules – but they never repeat themselves.

When scientists describe Shechtman’s quasicrystals, they use a concept that comes from mathematics and art: the golden ratio. This number had already caught the interest of mathematicians in Ancient Greece, as it often appeared in geometry. In quasicrystals, for instance, the ratio of various distances between atoms is related to the golden mean.

Following Shechtman’s discovery, scientists have produced other kinds of quasicrystals in the lab and discovered naturally occurring quasicrystals in mineral samples from a Russian river. A Swedish company has also found quasicrystals in a certain form of steel, where the crystals reinforce the material like armor. Scientists are currently experimenting with using quasicrystals in different products such as frying pans and diesel engines.

Related: 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: the Structure and Function of the Ribosome – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 – Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2006)

Read more on the science he has worked on. Our understanding of science is built on the discoveries of our predecessors and on the discoveries that counter what we thought we knew.
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2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

Posted on October 4, 2011  Comments (3)

Photos of the 2011 Physics Nobel Prize Winners: Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess.

Photos of the 2011 Physics Nobel Prize Winners.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011 with one half to

Saul Perlmutter
The Supernova Cosmology Project, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

and the other half jointly to

Brian P. Schmidt
The High-z Supernova Search Team, Australian National University, Weston Creek, Australia

and

Adam G. Riess
The High-z Supernova Search Team, Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

“for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae”

Once again the USA dominates the physics category, Brian Schmidt is a USA and Australian citizen. It will be interesting to see if this starts to change in the next decade. I believe it will at some point fairly soon, the question is at what point.

“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…” Robert Frost, Fire and Ice, 1920

What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves.

In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Saul Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988. Brian Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Adam Riess was to play a crucial role.

The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called type Ia supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.

The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma – perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

As usually the Nobel committee does a great job of providing the public open scientific information. Others that claim to promote science can learn from them. They do a great job of making the science understandable to a lay person.

The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Nobel Laureates themselves. What they saw would be like throwing a ball up in the air, and instead of having it come back down, watching as it disappears more and more rapidly into the sky, as if gravity could not manage to reverse the ball’s trajectory. Something similar seemed to be happening across the entire Universe.

The growing rate of the expansion implies that the Universe is being pushed apart by an unknown form of energy embedded in the fabric of space. This dark energy makes up a large part of the Universe, more than 70 %, and it is an enigma, perhaps the greatest in physics today. No wonder, then, that cosmology was shaken at its foundations when two different research groups presented similar results in 1998.
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Related: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 – 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics – 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – Is Dark Matter an Illusion? – 5% of the Universe is Normal Matter, What About the Other 95%?
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Bronx High School of Nobel Prize for Physics Laureates

Posted on November 10, 2010  Comments (0)

Bronx physics

Bronx Science owes its historic status to the fact that seven future Nobel-prize-winning physicists went through its doors – more than any other high school in the world and more than most countries have ever achieved. The school, which opened in 1938, was founded by the educator Morris Meister, who believed that if a school put bright students together, it would kindle ill-defined but valuable learning processes. The school seems to have proved him right: according to the Bronx laureates, their physics learning took place mainly outside the classroom.
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Leon Cooper, who shared the 1972 prize for work on superconductivity, recalls physics lessons as boring, and was far more enchanted by his biology classes, which lured him to stay late after school designing and running experiments “until they threw me out”. Indeed, the school’s basic-physics textbook was written by a certain Charles E Dull, whose work, though widely used in US high schools, lived up to his name. The future particle physicist Melvin Schwartz, who shared the 1988 Nobel gong, once told me his classmates’ excited discussions – not his teacher – were what first awakened his interest in physics.
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[today] the school’s most fearsome physics module – Advanced Placement Physics C – is tougher than most college-physics courses. Its dynamic instructor is Ghada Nehmeh, who was born in Lebanon and studied nuclear physics. Diminutive – smaller than most of her students – and scarf-clad, she jumps rapidly from lab table to lab table, helping piece together equipment and analyse results. Famous for being ruthlessly demanding, she tests the students on their first day by assigning them 40 calculus problems, due back the next day. “I’d never seen derivatives before,” says Kezi Cheng, a senior interested in theoretical physics. So Cheng did what most Bronx Science students do – she asked her classmates to give her a crash course on the subject. “They’re always willing to help.”

Sounds like a great place to go to school. The article also has some good anecdotes about how these students learned by seeking knowledge themselves not passively sitting and being lectured to.

Related: Science Education in the 21st Century – Feynman “is a second Dirac, only this time human” – The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 – Letting Children Learn, Hole in the Wall Computers

Microcosm by Carl Zimmer

Posted on December 26, 2009  Comments (0)

cover of Microcosm by Carl Zimmer

Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer is an excellent book. It is full of fascinating information and as usual Carl Zimmer’s writing is engaging and makes complex topics clear.

E-coli keep the level of oxygen low in the gut making the resident microbes comfortable. At any time a person will have as many as 30 strains of E. coli in their gut and it is very rare for someone ever to be free of E. coli. [page 53]

In 1943, Luria and Delbruck published the results that won them the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in which they showed that bacteria and viruses pass down their traits using genes (though it took quite some time for the scientific community at large to accept this). [page 70]

during a crisis E coli’s mutation rates could soar a hundred – or even a thousandfold… Normally, natural selection favors low mutation rates, since most mutations are harmful. But in times of stress extra mutations may raise the odds that organisms will hit on a way out of their crisis… [alternatively, perhaps] In times of stress, E coli. may not be able to afford the luxury of accurate DNA repair. Instead, it turns to the cheaper lo-fi polymerases. While they may do a sloppier job, E coli. comes out ahead [page 106]
Hybridization is not the only way foreign DNA got into our cells. Some 3 billion years ago our single-celled ancestors engulfed oxygen-breathing bacteria, which became the mitochondria on which we depend. And, like E. coli, our genomes have taken in virus upon virus. Scientists have identified more than 98,000 viruses in the human genome, along with our mutant vestiges of 150,00 others… If we were to strip out all our transgenic DNA, we would become extinct.

I highly recommend Microcosm, just as I highly recommend Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer.

Related: Bacteriophages: The Most Common Life-Like Form on Earth – Foreign Cells Outnumber Human Cells in Our Bodies – Amazing Designs of Life – Amazing Science: Retroviruses – One Species’ Genome Discovered Inside Another’s

Protein Synthesis: 1971 Video

Posted on December 2, 2009  Comments (1)

The above webcast shows protein synthesis, from a 1971 Stanford University video with Paul Berg (Nobel Laureate – 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and National Medal of Science in 1983). The film does not exactly present the traditional scientist stereotype. It does pretty much present the typical California 1970′s hippie stereotype though.

Related: Friday Fun – CERN Version – Roger Tsien Lecture On Green Florescent Protein

Feynman “is a second Dirac, only this time human”

Posted on December 1, 2009  Comments (0)

Oppenheimer recommendation of Feynman, page 1

Great quotes from Oppenheimer’s recommendation of Richard Feynman

“He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. He is a man of thoroughly engaging character and personality, extremely clear, extremely normal in all respects, and an excellent teacher with a warm feeling for physics in all its aspects. He has the best possible relations both with the theoretical people of whom he is one, and with the experimental people with whom he works in very close harmony.”

“Bethe has said that he would rather lose any two other men than Feynman from this present job, and Wigner said, ‘He is a second Dirac, only this time human.”

Oppenheimer recommendation of Feynman, page 2

Images of letter from Oppenheimer to the University of California – Berkeley Recommending Richard Feynman for a position, November 4, 1943 (from Big Science at Berkeley).

via: He is a second Dirac, only this time human.

Related: Vega Science Lectures: Feynman and More – The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman and Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands – posts on physics

Energy Secretary Steve Chu Speaks On Funding Science Research

Posted on November 11, 2009  Comments (2)

Energy Secretary Steve Chu (and Nobel Laureate) speaks with Google CEO Eric Schmidt about science research. One of the things Steve Chu is doing is funding high risk experiments that have great potential. This is something that is often said should be done but then people resort to safe investments in research. Taking these risks is a very good idea.

This is another example the remarkable way Google operates. The CEO actually understands science and the public good. Google also provides a huge amount of great material online in the form of webcasts of those speaking at Google. Google behaves like a company run by engineers. Other companies have engineers in positions of power but behave like companies run by any MBAs (whether they are lawyers, accountants, marketers or engineers).

Related: President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology – Scientists and Engineers in Congress – Eric Schmidt on Google, Education and Economics – Larry Page on How to Change the World – Diplomacy and Science Research – Google Investing Huge Sums in Renewable Energy and is Hiring

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009

Posted on October 8, 2009  Comments (1)

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics honors three scientists, who have had important roles in shaping modern information technology, with one half to Charles Kuen Kao and with Willard Sterling Boyle and George Elwood Smith sharing the other half. Kao’s discoveries have paved the way for optical fiber technology, which today is used for almost all telephony and data communication. Boyle and Smith have invented a digital image sensor – CCD, or charge-coupled device – which today has become an electronic eye in almost all areas of photography. The Nobel prize site includes great information on the science behind the research that has been honored:

The first ideas of applications of light guiding in glass fibers (i.e. small glass rods) date from the late 1920′s. They were all about image transmission through a bundle of fibers. The motivation was medicine (gastroscope), defense (flexible periscope, image scrambler) and even early television. Bare glass fibers were, however, quite leaky and did not transmit much light. Each time the fibers were touching each other, or when the surface of the fibers was scratched, light was led away from the fibers. A breakthrough happened in the beginning of the 1950′s with the idea and demonstration that cladding the fibers would help light transmission, by facilitating total internal reflection.
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Optical communication of today has reached its present status thanks to a number of breakthroughs. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) and especially diode lasers, first based on GaAs (800-900 nm) and later on InGaAsP (1-1.7 m), have been essential. The optical communication window has evolved from 870 nm to 1.3 m and, finally, to 1.55 m where fiber losses are lowest. Gradient-index fibers were used in the first optical communication lines. However, when moving towards longer wavelengths and longer communication distances, single-mode fibers have become more advantageous.

Nowadays, long-distance optical communication uses single mode fibers almost exclusively, following Kao’s vision. The first such systems used frequent electronic repeaters to compensate for the remaining losses. Most of these repeaters have now been replaced by optical amplifiers, in particular erbium-doped fiber amplifiers. Optical communication uses wavelength division multiplexing with different wavelengths to carry different signals in the same fiber, thus multiplying the transmission rate. The first non-experimental optical fiber links were installed in 1975 in UK, and soon after in the US and in Japan. The first transatlantic fiber-optic cable was installed in 1988.

Related: How telephone echoes lead to digital cameras – 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics – 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics – posts on Nobel laureates

2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: the Structure and Function of the Ribosome

Posted on October 7, 2009  Comments (0)

graphic image of the components of a cellCross section of a cell by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. A ribosome is about 25 nanometters (a millionth of a millimeter) in size. A cell contains tens of thousands of ribosomes.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life’s core processes: the ribosome’s translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life.

The blueprints become transformed into living matter through the work of ribosomes. Based upon the information in DNA, ribosomes make proteins: oxygen-transporting haemoglobin, antibodies of the immune system, hormones such as insulin, the collagen of the skin, or enzymes that break down sugar. There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body and they all have different forms and functions. They build and control life at the chemical level.

Related: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 – 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry – 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry – posts on chemistry – basic research posts

Details from the Nobel Prize site (which continues to do a great job providing scientific information to the public openly).
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2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Posted on October 5, 2009  Comments (1)

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists who have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes – the telomeres – and in an enzyme that forms them – telomerase.

The long, thread-like DNA molecules that carry our genes are packed into chromosomes, the telomeres being the caps on their ends. Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak discovered that a unique DNA sequence in the telomeres protects the chromosomes from degradation. Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn identified telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomere DNA. These discoveries explained how the ends of the chromosomes are protected by the telomeres and that they are built by telomerase.

If the telomeres are shortened, cells age. Conversely, if telomerase activity is high, telomere length is maintained, and cellular senescence is delayed. This is the case in cancer cells, which can be considered to have eternal life. Certain inherited diseases, in contrast, are characterized by a defective telomerase, resulting in damaged cells. The award of the Nobel Prize recognizes the discovery of a fundamental mechanism in the cell, a discovery that has stimulated the development of new therapeutic strategies.

Scientists began to investigate what roles the telomere might play in the cell. Szostak’s group identified yeast cells with mutations that led to a gradual shortening of the telomeres. Such cells grew poorly and eventually stopped dividing. Blackburn and her co-workers made mutations in the RNA of the telomerase and observed similar effects in Tetrahymena. In both cases, this led to premature cellular ageing – senescence. In contrast, functional telomeres instead prevent chromosomal damage and delay cellular senescence. Later on, Greider’s group showed that the senescence of human cells is also delayed by telomerase. Research in this area has been intense and it is now known that the DNA sequence in the telomere attracts proteins that form a protective cap around the fragile ends of the DNA strands.

Many scientists speculated that telomere shortening could be the reason for ageing, not only in the individual cells but also in the organism as a whole. But the ageing process has turned out to be complex and it is now thought to depend on several different factors, the telomere being one of them. Research in this area remains intense.

The 3 awardees are citizens of the USA; two were born elsewhere.
Read more about their research at the Nobel Prize web site.

Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn–one of Time magazine’s 100 “Most Influential People in the World” in 2007–made headlines in 2004 when she was dismissed from the President’s Council on Bioethics after objecting to the council’s call for a moratorium on stem cell research and protesting the suppression of relevant scientific evidence in its final report.

Related: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008 – 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Webcast of Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn speaking at Google:
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Norman E. Borlaug 1914-2009

Posted on September 14, 2009  Comments (1)

The Father Of the Green Revolution

Norman E. Borlaug, 95, an American plant pathologist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for starting the “Green Revolution” that dramatically increased food production in developing nations and saved countless people from starvation, died Saturday at his home in Dallas.

“More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world,” the Nobel committee said in honoring him. “Dr. Borlaug has introduced a dynamic factor into our assessment of the future and its potential.”
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In his lecture accepting the Nobel Prize, he said an adequate supply of food is “the first component of social justice. . . . Otherwise there will be no peace.”
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In 1977, Dr. Borlaug received the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor of the U.S. government.

Billions Served: Norman Borlaug interviewed by Ronald Bailey

As a matter of fact, Mother Nature has crossed species barriers, and sometimes nature crosses barriers between genera–that is, between unrelated groups of species. Take the case of wheat. It is the result of a natural cross made by Mother Nature long before there was scientific man. Today’s modern red wheat variety is made up of three groups of seven chromosomes, and each of those three groups of seven chromosomes came from a different wild grass. First, Mother Nature crossed two of the grasses, and this cross became the durum wheats, which were the commercial grains of the first civilizations spanning from Sumeria until well into the Roman period. Then Mother Nature crossed that 14-chromosome durum wheat with another wild wheat grass to create what was essentially modern wheat at the time of the Roman Empire.

Durum wheat was OK for making flat Arab bread, but it didn’t have elastic gluten. The thing that makes modern wheat different from all of the other cereals is that it has two proteins that give it the doughy quality when it’s mixed with water. Durum wheats don’t have gluten, and that’s why we use them to make spaghetti today. The second cross of durum wheat with the other wild wheat produced a wheat whose dough could be fermented with yeast to produce a big loaf. So modern bread wheat is the result of crossing three species barriers, a kind of natural genetic engineering.
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I see no difference between the varieties carrying a BT gene or a herbicide resistance gene, or other genes that will come to be incorporated, and the varieties created by conventional plant breeding. I think the activists have blown the health risks of biotech all out of proportion.
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the data that’s put out by the World Health Organization and [the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization], there are probably 800 million people who are undernourished in the world. So there’s still a lot of work to do.

I am a bit more cautious about supporting genetic engineering in our food supply but I agree with him that we need to remain focused on the lives of hundreds of millions of hungry people (which is far too often ignored). I am worried about the risks to the environment and human health. I am also worried about the concentration of food plants in a greatly reduced genetic varieties that are more productive in general but increase the risks of massive food failures (due to limited genetic varieties).

Related: 20 Scientists Who Have Helped Shape Our World – 2004 Medal of Science Winners – Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity – Five Scientists Who Made the Modern World – Wheat Rust Research – Norman Borlaug and Wheat Stem Rust

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