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Nobel Laureates don't count?

I'm referring to Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR and his quite extensive use of LSD.

Lots of other examples out there too, but DARE won't be the first to tell you about these.

Interestingly, ATPase is a nano-scale rotor/generator. There are some great movies of the proposed operation from a berkley server. The ATP synthase motor is driven by the flow of protons from an area of high to a low concentration. Therefore it is not brownian motion directly, but osmosis that powers all life.

biobox

And while we are on the subject of plastics, this is also pretty cool. Instead of "lab on a chip" they are building a lab-on-a-CD. "The technology is already being exploited by Gyros, a spin-off created earlier this year by Amersham Pharmacia Biotech of Sweden. Gyros is betting that plastic compact discs are a better platform for future chemical and biological microdevices than are silicon chips. Apart from being much cheaper than silicon wafers, plastic discs are more compatible with biochemical substances. Also, embossing techniques for putting microstructures on a CD's surface already exist, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel."
In fact, the whole damn Technology Quarterly from The Economist is pretty damn interesting. I tried to get it submitted, but...(insert standard "Slashdot never posts my stories whine).

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And while we are on the subject of plastics, this is also pretty cool. Instead of "lab on a chip" they are building a lab-on-a-CD. "The technology is already being exploited by Gyros, a spin-off created earlier this year by Amersham Pharmacia Biotech of Sweden. Gyros is betting that plastic compact discs are a better platform for future chemical and biological microdevices than are silicon chips. Apart from being much cheaper than silicon wafers, plastic discs are more compatible with biochemical substances. Also, embossing techniques for putting microstructures on a CD's surface already exist, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel."
In fact, the whole damn Technology Quarterly from The Economist is pretty damn interesting. I tried to get it submitted, but...(insert standard "Slashdot never posts my stories whine).

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And while we are on the subject of plastics, this is also pretty cool. Instead of "lab on a chip" they are building a lab-on-a-CD. "The technology is already being exploited by Gyros, a spin-off created earlier this year by Amersham Pharmacia Biotech of Sweden. Gyros is betting that plastic compact discs are a better platform for future chemical and biological microdevices than are silicon chips. Apart from being much cheaper than silicon wafers, plastic discs are more compatible with biochemical substances. Also, embossing techniques for putting microstructures on a CD's surface already exist, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel."
In fact, the whole damn Technology Quarterly from The Economist is pretty damn interesting. I tried to get it submitted, but...(insert standard "Slashdot never posts my stories whine).

************************************************ ** *

And while we are on the subject of plastics, this is also pretty cool. Instead of "lab on a chip" they are building a lab-on-a-CD. "The technology is already being exploited by Gyros, a spin-off created earlier this year by Amersham Pharmacia Biotech of Sweden. Gyros is betting that plastic compact discs are a better platform for future chemical and biological microdevices than are silicon chips. Apart from being much cheaper than silicon wafers, plastic discs are more compatible with biochemical substances. Also, embossing techniques for putting microstructures on a CD's surface already exist, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel."
In fact, the whole damn Technology Quarterly from The Economist is pretty damn interesting. I tried to get it submitted, but...(insert standard "Slashdot never posts my stories whine).

************************************************ ** *

Einstein won his prize "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect" - see the relevant page on the Nobel website.

Einstein won his prize "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect" - see the relevant page on the Nobel website.

A few years back, when one of our chemistry profs won a fairly well-known prize (for the discovery of "buckyballs"), we elected him Homecoming Queen. (Don't believe me? Check out his C.V.!)

More info at NY Times (free registration required)on both the physics and the chemistry awards.

Its seems like kind of a down year for the Nobels. The physics award is for work that is closer to engineering than to pure research (not that there's anything wrong with that ;0) and similarly the chemistry award seems more like material science.

They already did, in 1998, to Robert F. Furchgott, Louis J. Ignarro and Ferid Murad "for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system". From the press release:

Impotence: NO can initiate erection of the penis by dilating the blood vessels to the erectile bodies. This knowledge has already led to the development of new drugs against impotence.

They already did, in 1998, to Robert F. Furchgott, Louis J. Ignarro and Ferid Murad "for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system". From the press release:

Impotence: NO can initiate erection of the penis by dilating the blood vessels to the erectile bodies. This knowledge has already led to the development of new drugs against impotence.

Lars
__

I didn't get to see the original page, but I think that you are looking for the following: http://www.nobel.se/announcement/2000/index.html#M IRRORS

There is one given to Medawar & Burnet in 1960 in Physiology or Medicine back in the 50's on the mechanism of the immune system and it apparently is being refuted by work done by Polly Matzinger at the NIH. Also another guy, Stanley Prusiner, won the Nobel in 1997 for the discovery that prions can cause disease; This award is being criticized on the grounds that there is no real proof that unusual proteins cause disease. So at least two Nobels could be invalidated because of new research or having awarded the prize too quickly.

There is one given to Medawar & Burnet in 1960 in Physiology or Medicine back in the 50's on the mechanism of the immune system and it apparently is being refuted by work done by Polly Matzinger at the NIH. Also another guy, Stanley Prusiner, won the Nobel in 1997 for the discovery that prions can cause disease; This award is being criticized on the grounds that there is no real proof that unusual proteins cause disease. So at least two Nobels could be invalidated because of new research or having awarded the prize too quickly.

Sweden and Norway was in a union from 1814-1905
That is: Norway was under Danish government but was "given" to Sweden (who sought some compensation for the recent (1809) loss of Finland to Russia in 1814.

Nobel was indeed swedish, born in Stockholm 1833 if my memory is correct, but all his life (he died 10 dec 1896, the prizes are given the day of his death) Sweden and Norway was in union.

Now the norwegians may view the "union" a bit differently...

Actually, the Nobel Peace prize is awarded by a norwegian comittee, possibly a gesture by Nobel to improve the relations between Sweden and Norway.

Hey, I've found a link so I can end this rambling: www.nobel.se

Just when I thought that we already have more than enough overclocking news stories (on /. and everywhere else), here comes another one. What makes it worse is that it is not even a true overclocking news story at all: first, it has nothing to do with overclocking, second, this is not news, third, there is barely a story in this one -- at least not in the way it is presented.

Let's tackle the easy one first: the "news" part. As many have already pointed out, this is hardly news for anyone who knows his way around the field of modern physics. Even if you do not major in physics or read journals each month, you are supposed to remember that three researchers, Steve Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William D. Phillips received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics specifically for the development in laser cooling. I could understand that the editors at HOCP might not have the time or expertise to realize this fact (besides, they never really mentioned overclocking), and I could understand that some readers of /. might be unaware of such fact. But I really expect a lot more from our /. editors. If we need to post science stories, get somebody who knows the business instead of letting stuff posted just because some layman think it's "cool". It is unlikely that we cannot afford it, right?

Second, laser cooling has absolutely nothing to do with overclocking. This is pretty easy to understand after you see what the technology is all about. (I am not a physics major, but have read quite a lot about it a while ago when conducting some research. Still, please correct me if I am wrong.) There are a lot of ways to cooling, and most of them are based on the idea of using something colder to absorb the heat from the object we intend to cool. This works nice under normal conditions, but fails miserably when you need to cool something from 0.1K to 0.000001K -- because there is nothing cooler out there.

Microscopically, heat is represented by the vibration of molecules. The greater the vibration, the hotter it is. So if we could somehow reduce the vibration of molecules, we can effectively cool it. That is where laser comes in. When you have got hold of the vibration pattern of a molecule (or a small group of them), all you need to do is to fire a small burst of laser and use the momentum of the photons to cancel the momemtum of the atoms. So the atoms will slow down, and its temperature will reduce.

Obviously you do not want to (and cannot) do this with your processor, because it is too large, and freezing it to 0.000001K will do more harm than good. From another point of view, it is time for people to realize that there are much more forms of cooling in the field of science and engineering (cooling atoms to absolutely zero, cooling plasmas from destroying the whole research facility, cooling mirrors in high-energy laser facilities, etc.), most of which really have nothing to do with processors. It is naive to think otherwise.

Get a life, people. I mean a real one. If you do not wish to do that, maybe you should spend some of the time you saved and go study.

Perutz's conclusion is that many people previously involved in bio-warfare projects are now sowing FUD to enhance their own prestige and to generate opportunities in spurious counterterrorism (as Henry Sokolski notes below, fears of terrorism have generated $10 billion annually in spending by the U.S. government alone).

Perutz quotes an article by Henry Sokolski, the director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, saying:

Last year President Clinton announced the US would spend $10 billion on countering terrorism, including biological and chemical threats, for fiscal year 2000. Would there be better things to spend such large sums of money on? As for biological attacks worldwide, seventy have occurred in the last century causing nine deaths, but only eighteen of these seventy attacks were made by terrorists. There are risks not only in underestimating the chemical and biological domestic terrorist threat, but in overestimating it as well.

A central part of Mills's theory explains the basis of the traditional, and paradoxical, "duality" concept of the electron as both a particle and a wave with a model where electrons are charges that travel as two-dimensional disks and wrap around nuclei like fluctuating soap bubbles. He calls them "orbitspheres."

BlackLight Power boosters scoff that they've seen no practical application of quantum theory since the atomic bomb and nuclear power, and say they have little time for theorists who call Mills a charlatan while teaching that the fundamental mechanics of cause and effect are subverted at the subatomic level. Mills's camp responds: Fraud? Let's talk about fraud. Quantumists have us living in myriad dimensions filled with "probability waves" and unobservable "virtual particles" that flit in and out of existence

Yeah, you're right. I meant he didn't got a lot of money, but I think he did actually got some. The Nobel prize was in 1993.

As for the patent, his name wasn't in the article and the process is a little too straightforward to be invalidated by technical arguments like that. It was new, it worked, it wasn't obvious, we knew for sure who invented it. There's not much space for invalidation there.

Despite the suggestion to the contrary in the MSNBC story, gravitational waves have already been shown to exist. Joe Taylor and Joel Weisberg and their collaborators have demonstrated, using a binary star system, that Einstein's prediction of the rate at which energy is radiated away by accelerating masses is correct to better than one half of one percent. (This was the subject of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Taylor and Hulse.) These results also prove, for example, that gravitational waves travel at the same velocity as electromagnetic waves (ie, the speed of light, or 300,000 km/s).

LIGO is an exciting project that may open a whole new field of gravitational wave astronomy and directly probe the properties of such exotic objects as black holes and neutron stars. But it will do it using well-established physical principles.

While Portfolio Theory provided quite unsurprising results, the way that Black/Scholes provides differential equations that usefully analyse what was thought of as statistical matters was pretty amazing, and has helped employ a surprising number of theoretical physicists in finance.

I would put index funds at the top of my list of "investments to consider" simply based on Harry Markowitz's 1952 Journal of Finance paper, Portfolio Selection. He didn't anticipate index funds yet at that time, but they're a pretty ideal representation of his construction of "efficient frontiers" and "optimal portfolios." (And I had his paper quite specifically in mind when I used the words "efficient" and "portfolio" in the same sentence...)

For the "compleat idiot," an excellent book on investing is A Random Walk Down Wall Street; it provides a reasonably friendly walk through modern finance theory, and happens to rank index funds fairly highly for use by "nonprofessional investors."

I like the idea of starting with a portfolio that's largely index funds, and gradually adding to that a reasonably diverse stock portfolio, as that allows avoiding the administration fees that mutual funds (of whatever variety) charge; that of course requires taking Buffet's position of "buying stock in order to hold it indefinitely."

(See http://www.nobel.se/awarding/)

I'm sure biographers have had a wonderful time guessing what influences in his life led him to favor those particular five fields.

In any case, Nobel himself specified it that way; you can't just add another prize for your favorite field. At best, you could try to establish another "memorial" prize, like the one for economics. This is probably good: if you could, everyone would be agitating for their favorite hero to get the coveted Nobel prize. And if they succeeded, then the prize wouldn't exactly be coveted any more...

Here is the Nobel Prize in Chemistry given for the discovery of carbon atoms in a ball. It shows how you can make your own and play ball with them.

You're full of it. The laser was a direct follow-on to the maser, and was developed at Bell Labs. See here.

Talk all you want about "some college kid"... it just ain't so...

PS - Charles Townes and the other inventors won the joint 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention.

"In fact, it would be insane to suggest that anyone would."

Jean-Paul Sartre (1964 Nobel Prize for Lit) and Le Duc Tho (1973 Nobel Prize for Peace) did, for ideologically sound reasons thou.
Sartre's reason. Searching around at www.nobel.se will show a few other who didn't want to get, or were forced to refuse, the prize.