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http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2010/
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This looks like it may simply be an implementation of the process described by Ahmed Zewail in the 90's, which also operates on femtosecond time scales. Perhaps this "pump-probe" deal is what makes this approach novel?

Yes, making graphene with pencils and scotch tape would have gotten you a nobel prize if you woulda thought of it a few years ago. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2010/press.html

Canadian scientists contribute their share. Pick up any major medical journal and you'll see important articles by Canadian researchers.

Like this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21488765 or this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21470008 or this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21388310 or this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21345102

Oh, yeah. Insulin. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1923/

Interestingly, a lot of the Canadian research is not for developing a new drug, but for figuring out whether a treatment that is widely used but has never been tested before actually works.

Don't ever tell me that Canadians are taking advantage of U.S. research.

The prize now has become so political that it's hard to take it seriously anymore.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to those who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Bitching about who was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize because the process "has become so political" is therefore absurd, because the very purpose and existence of this award is political. Wars are political, relations between nations are political, acts between states are political. Therefore, by it's very nature, it's quite obvious that the purpose of this award, and the only purpose it has, is to praise a specific type of political action, which is in itself a political act.

As a consequence, it's stupid to try to downplay the Nobel Peace Prize by complaining that it "has become so political". It's stupid because this sort of accusation reflects the ignorance of those who reiterate it regarding the Nobel Peace Prize, and it demonstrates a failure to understand it's intended purpose, as set by Alfred Nobel.

More depressing than this, this sort of accusation actually is meant to convey the following complaint: "I don't like the person who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, his award means that what he does or represent has been publicly praised to a world-wide audience, and as I don't like that person then I feel I'm forced to resort to pettiness to try to downgrade that achievement". After all, you don't complain that the Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless. Instead, your complains boil down to

1. X was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
2. I don't like X
3. Therefore this means Nobel Peace Prize isn't good anymore
4. As the Nobel Piece Prize isn't good anymore, X's award means next to nothing
5. As X's award means next to nothing, X isn't good, and everyone should hate X, just like I do

So, to sum things up, the Nobel Peace Prize is, and always was, political in nature. And nothing other than that. So bitching about it being political is just like bitching that the water is wet.

For good measure, see Eric R. Kandel's lecture http://nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=898&view=7

Nominations are kept secret for fifty years so there is no way to confirm whether or not some person has been nominated. The nominators are chosen by the Nobel committee; you can't just send a name in yourself or organize a campaign to nominate someone. All details of the nominations are also kept secret for 50 years, so there is no way to confirm whether or not Snorre Valen is a nominator.

See the Nobel Prize website's nomination facts.

Wonder why they never put Gandhi on that list.

He never won, but he was nominated five times with the last nomination coming days before he was murdered.

Reminds me of the Nobel peace prize that went to the chinese activist for human rights works.

In a sense, the west is asking China to move closer to our ideals. At the same time, the Norwegian government is planning on storing cellphone/Internet traffic metadata for 6-24 months for *every citizen* through the European Data Retention Directive, effectively moving Norway closer to China.

There are six different nobel prizes, and only one of them (the peace prize) is handed out in Norway.

It's all shameless promotion and marketing, whomever has the most to gain(biggest ego/deepest pockets/etc) buys the award.
I've read a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame runs $25,000, wonder what POTY costs?

Does anyone still think awards are recognitions of achievement? I thought we all learned that lesson last year...

Come to think of it, has there even been an invasion of the US?

Well, the British burned Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812, although the US initially declared war against Britain. And there's Pearl Harbor, although that wasn't technically an invasion.

And seriously, the US is only country that glorifies war, every other countries, especially the one that have been subject to war or invasion, understand it's something to be avoided at all costs

No, actually, there are lots of countries in recent memory that have directly instigated wars with little or no US involvement. Iraq invaded Kuwait; Egypt and other Arab states attacked Israel; Argentina attacked the UK in the Falklands; Iran and Iraq had a pretty big war; India and Pakistan.... The list goes on and on. And that's to say nothing of the numerous terrorist/guerilla groups thirsty for blood and power in conflicts around the world.

http://nobelprize.org/educational/peace/conflictmap/conflictmap.html

They may have a new method, but laser cooling itself is not new. There was even a Nobel prize awarded in 1997. It seems the advancement here is that they are using laser cooling on molecules (strontium monofluoride) instead of single atoms.

Some matter is fermions, and fermion number is conserved. But the number of particles of matter is not conserved. A neutron (one particle) can decay into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino (three particles). Energy and matter are equivalent. Particle colliders such as the LHC work by putting lots of energy into particles and colliding them, generating thousands of new particles in the process.

Where do you come up with this conservation of particles bunk? You've just fabricated it. Look up any number of Feynman diagrams to see the number of subatomic particles changing. Matter and energy can be converted from one to the other. Every light bulb turns electricity into photons.

This kid went to Stockholm, Sweden, to remember playing with rockets:

By the time Watson and Crick were being honored here in Stockholm in 1962, I had been designing rockets with my adolescent companions for three years. For fuel, we discovered that a mixture of potassium nitrate and sugar could be very carefully melted over a charcoal stove and poured into a metal tube in a particular way with remarkable results. The tube grew larger with our successive experiments until it was about four feet long. My mother grew more cautious and often her head would appear out of an upstairs window and she would say things that were not encouraging. The sugar was reluctantly furnished from her own kitchen, and the potassium nitrate we purchased from the local druggist.
Back then in South Carolina young boys seeking chemicals were not immediately suspect. We could even buy dynamite fuse from the hardware with no questions asked. This was good, because we were spared from early extinction on one occasion when our rocket exploded on the launch pad, by the very reliable, slowly burning dynamite fuses we could employ, coupled with our ability to run like the wind once the fuse had been lit. Our fuses were in fact much improved over those which Alfred Nobel must have used when he was frightening his own mother. In one of our last experiments before we became so interested in the maturing young women around us that we would not think deeply about rocket fuels for another ten years, we blasted a frog a mile into the air and got him back alive. In another, we inadvertently frightened an airline pilot, who was preparing to land a DC-3 at Columbia airport. Our mistake. --Kary B. Mullis, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 1993
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1993/mullis-lecture.html

'She said that little was said at that point about exactly how they procured this method, but it is something possible only with new technologies that have evolved in the past decade.'

Yes, their method clearly depends on RNAi (RNA interference), for which the key paper only came out in 1998, and the Nobel Committee obviously didn't regard the discovery as 'simple enough'!:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2006/adv.html

It wasn't until 2001 that RNAi was demonstrated in mammalian cells, so its use as a standard tool in molecular biology only dates back to the last decade. To apply this sort of strategy to Ebola also requires knowledge of its genome sequence, which also wasn't complete until the 90s, as well as an effective method of getting the active molecules into infected cells (like the lipid-based packaging approach used here). There is indeed active research aimed at applying RNAi to other viruses, including HIV, but it's far from straightforward.

Some (publicly-funded) research found that ulcers were actually caused by bacteria not stomach acid, and could be cured with an extremely cheap course of ant-biotics. The drug companies had done some basic research on this and did not publish. There was more than half a decade when drug companies knew that cheap antibiotics could cure ulcers but did nothing about it. It finally took government-funded researchers to publish and within half a year, the anti-ulcer drugs fell off the top ten, and even the top 100 of prescribed drugs.

Since this is Slashdot, I'm not surprised to get a confused story, but if anyone is interested here's the Wikipedia entry on what actually happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori#History

Marshall and Warren did win a Nobel Prize for this, so it wasn't exactly ignored. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2005/index.html

No, the Internet is not addictive. Nor is texting.

Certain people are obsessive/compulsive.

Why can't it be addictive? The internet is about instant gratification which helps keep you on a dopamine high. The problem with a constant dopamine high is that when the source is removed (in this case the internet) your body goes into a with drawl. So suddenly you go into a with drawl of a dopamine source which leaves you craving for it, regardless the fact that nothing in introduced into your system on a physical level. It's one of the aspects that was shown from Pavlov's Dog experiments. Pavlov got his dog to show a physical reaction that they couldn't easily control (like an addiction would). Same concept could happen with the internet and such.

So was this the Nobel Prize you were talking about?

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1980/index.html

Yeah, okay... How come the telegraph isn't being nominated?

Because Wired magazine doesn't sell more copies when they spew idiotic hype about the telegraph?

Seriously. There are hundreds of distinct "nominees" for the Nobel Peace Prize each years. The committee solicits recommendations from thousands of people. Good for them that they cast a wide net to look for ideas. A lot of them will be at this level of idiocy; the Nobel committee will simply ignore them.

Wired apparently chose to nominate "The Internet," a transparently self-serving attempt to make the subject of their reporting seem more important. The Nobel committee itself won't release lists of who's been recommended for 50 years (see http://nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/), but Wired is free to announce that they nominated it, then cover a story which they created themselves. This is entirely consistent with their tradition a tradition of superficial gee-whiz features about things that sound possibly intriguing in a summary and are found to be inaccurate, irrelevant or meaningless after two seconds of thought.

what really counts is who is doing the research and producing the health-improving drugs and diagnostic/treatment systems of tomorrow

On this we can agree. Check out the list of nobel prize winners in medicine at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/. You will find it is about 70% Americans (who I might add comprise about 5% of the world's population). And that 70% is in the last 25 years -- I didnt' go back farther because the discussion is about America in decline and so only recent data is relevent. So the research to which you refer is still, today, predominantly done in America by Americans.

Unfortunately, I do believe you are correct regarding the future of health care innovations, because once the health care "reform" goes through the research advantage will abate. When government beaurocrats start squeezing medical providers, there will be little if anything left for research. Frankly I'm amazed other countries aren't doing their level best to torpedo the US health care bill, since they have been beneficiaries of the research as well. Mark my words ... should US health care reform go through, the whole world will suffer.

When Harry S. Truman, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler got nominated.

On a bright side, Hitler's nomination was withdrawn AND it took place before the WWII.
Stalin and Truman got their nominations after the WWII.

Is it worthy of wider attention and discussion?

Why do you talk about it? Find someone in this list:

University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes;

Willing to Submit him for it and go back to coding. Don't go campaigning for some person to win the Nobel peace prize, call up your contacts at Washington University and discuss it with them. If you can't convince them to nominate him, it's probably not going to work.

This is not an elected award so I wouldn't waste my time trying to impose outside influence on a committee for a Nobel prize. The committee decides, not the community. I'm sure every profession has their savior/icon that they think deserves this award for revolutionizing something and altering humanity for the better. You're free to talk all you want but it's not going to change anything. Discussing it online is nothing but a waste of time unless your intentions are to embarrass Linus.

Oh, I was thinking of Varnish because:

1. It's currently quite hot in the Drupal world.
2. It's part of the secret Norwegian plan for world domination by proxy. Oh God, did I really say that?

People from Slashdot. From the actual site:

Every year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee sends out thousands of letters inviting qualified people to submit their nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. The names of the nominees and other information about the nominations cannot be revealed until 50 years later.

As members of governments are allowed to send in nominees, I am pretty sure that G. W. Bush and any POTUS before him has been nominated for this particular prize every year they were in office. No this doesn't imply that they decide on the nomination date. Why do you think that? Are you stupid?

The Illinois Governor who won the peace prize is in prison for selling CDLs to people who couldn't drive or speak English and who ultimately killed a fmaily in a fiery death on the highway.

That one wasn't a joke, it was just pathetic.

Mod parent down, as it's main claim is false. The dude did not win the Nobel Peace Prize, and your link to wikipedia is misleading, and even that wikipedia page does not even claim that he won.

He merely was nominated in 2005. You can trivially confirm that in 2005 the Peace Prize went to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency shared the price in 2005. That's this guy, btw.

You can also find out on that site that the nominations are the result of their requests to thousands of people...."send individual invitations to thousands of members of academies, university professors, scientists from numerous countries, previous Nobel Laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies and others, asking them to submit candidates for the Nobel Prizes for the coming year". So, seriously, as News For Nerds, we need to honest about distinguishing between "nomination" (one of thousands of people said yeah him) versus "winning" the Peace Prize. Which he didn't do.

A basic google search would find you this page that lists all the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. And obviously George Ryan is demonstrably not on the list.

Mod parent down.

The Illinois Governor who won the peace prize is in prison for selling CDLs to people who couldn't drive or speak English and who ultimately killed a fmaily in a fiery death on the highway.

That one wasn't a joke, it was just pathetic.

Mod parent down, as it's main claim is false. The dude did not win the Nobel Peace Prize, and your link to wikipedia is misleading, and even that wikipedia page does not even claim that he won.

He merely was nominated in 2005. You can trivially confirm that in 2005 the Peace Prize went to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency shared the price in 2005. That's this guy, btw.

You can also find out on that site that the nominations are the result of their requests to thousands of people...."send individual invitations to thousands of members of academies, university professors, scientists from numerous countries, previous Nobel Laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies and others, asking them to submit candidates for the Nobel Prizes for the coming year". So, seriously, as News For Nerds, we need to honest about distinguishing between "nomination" (one of thousands of people said yeah him) versus "winning" the Peace Prize. Which he didn't do.

A basic google search would find you this page that lists all the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. And obviously George Ryan is demonstrably not on the list.

Mod parent down.

This is, I think, a general reaction from a lot of people, but it doesn't really line up with the history of the prize. In 1987, for example the prize was awarded to Óscar Arias, a Costa Rican president, for making some strong gestures that he would stop the Nicaraguan war that had been raging for a decade, fueled by the United States. This raised Arias' profile, and gave him the political capital to broker a peace deal in 1988.

What deal, exactly, are you referring to? His prize was given "for his work for peace in Central America, efforts which led to the accord signed in Guatemala on August 7 this year" http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1987/

This would refer to the Esquipulas II Accord, signed in August of the year that he won the prize.

While I agree with you and several (sub-)responses here in that he has not actually accomplished much (yet??), you guys seem to be ignoring the actually summary of the article here ["the Norwegian committee is honoring his intentions more than his achievements"] as well as the statement from the committee [they are recognizing "his extraordinary efforts"].

From the Nobel website:

On 27 November 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his last will and testament, giving the largest share of his fortune to a series of prizes, the Nobel Prizes. As described in Nobel's will, one part was dedicated to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".

While you may not think he has done a damn thing to deserve it, apparently the committee thinks otherwise.

You should look things up before you open your mouth, and remove all doubt of your understanding of the subject.

The first nobel prize was awarded in 1969. Ghandi died in 1948. Obviously you are ignorant to the specifics of the nobel peace prize, that the prerequisites for even being nominated for it contain this;

The prizes in Peace, on the other hand, are often awarded within a few years of the events they recognize.

The Nobel Foundation also has explicit rules about giving the award to a person posthumously. Here is the relevant section right out of the Foundations guidlines;
4. Work produced by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award. If, however, a prizewinner dies before he has received the prize, then the prize may be presented.

Explain to everyone WHY you find it interesting that a man who died 21 years before the prize even existed, hasnt won it.

Read the technical discussion from the Nobel committee. It was Kao who showed that purified glass fibers had the required properties for replacing and eventually replacing coaxial fibers. He didn't invent the concept of glass fibers or fiber waveguides (that actually goes back more than a hundred years); but before his work, few believed that they would ever be practical for telecommunications.

Gravitational waves are found as a 'natural solution' from Einstein's General Relativity, more or less like electro-magnetic waves are a solution to Maxwell's equations. Since GR so far seems to be solid as a rock (supported by many experiments), there is little doubt among theoreticians that GWs exist. Moreover, a binary system containing a pulsar observed by Hulse and Taylor is spinning down at exactly the rate that you would expect if the system loses energy by gravitational waves. This is not a direct observation of a GW, but it is circumstantial evidence. This observation was awarded with a Nobel prize in 1993, which would suggest that the according to the judges, the existence of GWs is more than a little presumptuous.

However, the Russian system -- with its corruption and massive budget cuts (afte 1991) in government-funded research and development -- has hampered Russians scientists and engineers in their effort to produce breakthrough technology. NASA's collaboration with the Russian scientific community (and possible NASA funding for it) will help the Russians to achieve what they can not achieve in their own system.

If only President Dmitry Medvedev and Dictator Vladimir Putin created a Western society (with its intellectual freedom and clean government) in Russia and generously funded government research and development, then the Russians would likely dominate the winners of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences and of the Fields Medals in mathematics.

IBM has stopped to innovate (sic)

Did they stop before or after the work which won the 2007 Nobel prize in physics, and is one of the technologies that make it possible for your average consumer to walk down to the corner office supply store and buy a 1 TB disk for less then $200?

Just because they aren't innovating in the fields you know about, doesn't mean they aren't innovating at all.

The Japanese have made a tremendous amount of scientific contributions to mankind -- despite specious claims that the Japanese are not "creative". Such accomplishments include the blue light-emitting diode, part of the foundation of quantum physics, etc.

Why have the Japanese accomplished so much, yet the Africans have accomplished so little? Is the difference in accomplishments due to a difference in IQ? Average African IQ is about 20 points less than average Japanese IQ.

A visit to the web site of the Nobel committee reveals that most of the winners of the Nobel prize in physics is European. People of Japanese ancestry also deserve accolades. In fact, the 2008 Nobel prize in physics went exclusively to 3 Japanese geniuses.

Notably missing from the technical accomplishments are Africans and African-Americans. Not surprisingly, the IQ of the typical African is about 20 points lower than the IQ of the typical Japanese or European.

Next, some African supremacist will claim that IQ measures nothing or that IQ is biased in favor of "Whites". Well, as for the last claim, the Japanese -- who are quite un-White -- do quite well on IQ tests.

As for the first claim, let us not waste time on refuting this nonsense. Let's agree with it -- only in the case of African-Americans. What do I mean? A large class of medicines is banned from use because they cause neural damage that lowers IQ. In the case of African children, we should prescribe those drugs to them. Since IQ measures nothing, these medicines must -- by the logic of African supremacists -- be quite safe. Those drugs should continue to be banned for use by non-Black children. However, we should feed those drugs to Black children. On this matter, we in the non-Black intelligentsia should be be willing to meet African-Americans "halfway" -- for the sake of racial harmony.

If only these laws had been around earlier. It might have protected us from the likes of people like Martin Luther King Jr who alone was arrested over 20 times! I'm sure the British would also agree with you that hardened criminals like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi should have been thrown in jail with the key tossed away after being arrested numerous times.

Why have Germans accomplished so much in engineering and science? Here, "German" includes Germans of all religious groups, including Judaism.

Why have Africans made little contribution to engineering and science?

Yes it was.
From the linked page:

The good agreement between the observed value and the theoretically calculated value of the orbital path can be seen as an indirect proof of the existence of gravitational waves.

you should give up your internet access, move to a trailer, and accept a job that takes 1/10th of your current salary and still be ecstatically happy.

There you go again, telling others what they should do.

you're contradicting yourself by saying you couldn't live without those things and be as happy.

There's no reason, other than to falsify your ridiculous thought experiment, to voluntarily surrender my internet access. But if it were forcibly taken away from me, my reaction would be thus: I would be a marginally less happy person, and at the same time I would still be quite grateful that my overall standard of living is higher than King George III's. There is no contradiction here.

you're a libertarian, now I understand the posts. You lack any reasonable understanding of economics, as most libertarians do.

I prefer the term "classic liberal." I guess Milton Friedman and I should have never expressed our opinions, because "LateArthurDent" asserts that we are economic rubes. LOL

the working conditions are bad, the employee can't threaten to quit

Unless a gun is held to the employee's head (or similar coercive measure, which of course I'm opposed to), any employee is free to stop providing labor as soon as he or she perceives that the arrangement is no longer advantageous to them. Employees who foolishly continue to work in an arrangement that's no longer to their advantage deserve no sympathy. Asking an employee to work on a weekend is not coercive, LOL. Neither is asking an employee to use unsafe equipment in a filthy, hot environment -- as long as that employee is free to hit the exit and never return.

In my life I've been fortunate enough to encounter several employers who made offers that I agreed to, because I felt they'd be advantageous to me. Invariably, those employers controlled huge amounts of resources. Ohh, I'm so oppressed!

the moment anyone actually puts some thought into it, they realize monopoly anti-trust regulations are necessary

I never argued against these. It's clear that if a company like AIG is going to (a) use faulty risk models or (b) fail to hedge against the worst-case scenario predicted by those risk models, it should be broken up before it becomes "too big to fail."

taxation that performs some amount of wealth redistribution is necessary

Taxation is the coercive, inefficient form of wealth redistribution (the aid recipients get what's left over after countless layers of bureaucracy take their cut); voluntary charitable contributions are the noble, effective form of wealth redistribution. Do you realize that lower taxation results in a net increase in wealth redistribution? I doubt it; seems like the coercive form is the only kind you care about.

If the medium-class / upper-class gap rises too much, that means the unhappy middle-class outnumbers the upper-class

You're still class-obsessed, I see. They're only unhappy when the likes of you tells them they're supposed to be. The likes of me, who point out how much better off they are than 99.8% of the people who have lived throughout human history, are a mortal threat to your agenda.