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Nope:
"The Peace Prize is one of five prizes that have been awarded annually since 1901 under the auspices of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm for outstanding contributions in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace."

http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/about_peaceprize/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/

"How, exactly, did the DNA get *onto* the swab in the first place?"

How about looking in the factory where they made the contaminated cotton swabs. And presumably the PCR method is so sensitive that it picks up the merest trace element.

How can something that is not detected be seriously studied?

Gravitational waves have been shown to exist by observing binary pulsars. So we have both a theory which predicts them, and which up to now has survived every test, and an observation which confirms them (the binary pulsar).

Not so fast. The scientists at Fermilab might still face a heavy fine for their crime.

I quote Willis Lamb, Nobel Laureate,

"The finder of a new elementary particle used to be rewarded by a Nobel Prize, but such a discovery now ought to be punished by a $10,000 fine."

And that was in the 50s, so with the inflation, you can only guess how heavy the fine would be now.

No, it cannot. See Nobelprize FAQ

Yes. But you cannot be nominated posthumously. So in this case, the guy is out of luck.

http://nobelprize.org/contact/faq/index.html
(sorry for not using a wikipedia link)

Not all energy is heat. Got a lightbulb? Strangely, the filament is hotter than the wire leading to it, oh, and hotter than the coal burning at the power plant to power it. In simplest terms, the sun's corona is electrically conductive and is heated by electromagnetism. No violation going on.

As far as gravity not being able to overcome the other forces, I'd like to see a citation. One that knows what quantum mechanics is.

Also "On June 18, 2001 at 12:15 PM (eastern daylight time) a collaboration of Canadian, American, and British scientists made a dramatic announcement: they had solved the solar neutrino mystery." http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/bahcall/

Radar evidence? BS. Radar can't penetrate that much electrically conductive material. It can't even image the bottom of the Earth's oceans, much less thousands of miles of plasma.

There is no more evidence of that, than carbon emissions affecting pirate population.

Funny you should mention that, seeing as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore. In the acceptance speech, the Nobel committee chairman stated that the increased carbon emissions and climate change is causing political unrest in Africa. It's logical to say that this will effect the pirate population.

If there were any attempts from China at shaping the judges' selection, why does it have to mean that they were trying to GET an award? Couldn't it be possible that they were trying to PREVENT one? If that's the case, it seems they could have been successful. (that is, if Hu Jia would have been a contender against Martti Ahtisaari)

Let's not forget this man either:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1970/alfven-bio.html

Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis

"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis."

That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.

Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man's interests, here's the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. (LBNL, located in Berkeley, Calif., should be distinguished from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which does weapons research for the U.S. government.)

Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.

Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama's bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.

That said, Steven Chu is no stranger to Big Oil. He was instrumental in helping U.C. Berkeley land one of the biggest corporate bonanzas ever -- $500 million from British Petroleum to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute, an ambitious joint venture that has been controversial from the get-go at Berkeley because of its plans to use oil money to do research and development into energy crops and other biofuel wizardry.

And, as I noted after seeing him talk in early 2007 at a symposium titled "Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction," held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is on record as being a bit hyperbolic as to the potential of biofuels.

There is enough marginal, unused agricultural land in the United States to generate the biomass necessary to reach the one-third goal [of displacing annual American gasoline consumption with biofuels,] without displacing food production, said Steven Chu, the Nobel physics prize winner who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the laws of thermodynamics won't need to be broken -- there is more than enough energy hitting the earth every day as sunlight to supply all of humanity's energy needs.

You can find plenty of scientists who will dispute such assertions, right

Riiight, as another poster noted, via:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/

I looked back 30 years, through 1978. There is ONE -- yes, only ONE -- mention of a Nobel Prize for medicine in those 30 years (1984; Niels K. Jerne). In contrast, people from the USA are one or more of the named winners in most of the years.

I am glad you are proud of your conutry. That is worth automatic mod points here as long as it isn't posted by an American.

I take exception to your assertion that Denmark is better than the US. Using facts not in evidence only weakens your claim.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/

I clicked on the last 10 years or so and it seems to be dominated by people with the letters USA after their name. I didn't check on your other claims since I had already seen enough to question the validity of all your assertions.

Is it inconceivable that anything good can come from academia and business where profit is the motive? I think not.

Yes, but again, you'd be adding a whole layer of complexity there: regulation of transgenes. I'd be suprised if we currently knew how to do that with plants. It would not be an issue with microbes. And any way of collecting the weeped diesel would require much more complex systems than a vat, which is what would be needed with my system.

attaching the expression of genes to only certain parts of an animal or under certain times/ environmental changes is old hat. the guys who won the nobel prize this year for chemistry discovered how to manipulate the expression of green fluorescent protein:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2008/index.html

why is this a big deal? because after their discovery, thousands of genetic researchers around the globe have attached that gene to specific biological pathways, to see how and when and where and why the pathway is expressed, simply by watching an organism fluoresce. for example, neuroscientists wondering at the genes for axon growth and formation will attach the gfp protein code to a certain gene he suspects of involvement, and confirm that gene's involvement in axon growth by seeing green fluoresence whenever an axon grows

in fact, it would be HARDER to have a gene expressed globally, all over an organism, then it would be to attach the gene expression to only certian areas, or certain times, or under certain environmental changes

I'm not sure they can call this a "memory molecule" so much as a "molecule responsible for changing the receptors at the synapse to make a memory."

I'll never ask you to write a headline.
--
"In describing genetic mechanisms, there is a choice between being inexact and incomprehensible" http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1965/press.html

One of the downsides of free markets is the inevitability of boom and bust cycles

That is NOT a downside of free markets. That is a downside of having a central bank issuing fiat currency at essentially arbitrary interest rates that do not necessarily reflect current savings and consumer preferences.

F.A. Hayek won an Economics 'Nobel' on that work, by the way.

People fail and succeed all the time in a free market, that's good and healthy for the economy, but when everyone fails at once, you can be sure there's a central bank and an Alan Greenspan fucking everything from up on his planner's high tower.

What's wrong with your argument is that you're focusing on the symptoms and ignoring the cause. Companies DO have accountability, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, AIG is broke on Federal life support, everybody who indulged in that binge is now dead or dying. Except the government isn't allowing the failures to fail, and in doing so they're rewarding idiocy and punishing competence. I say it is government that needs accountability.

I hear where your coming from. The thing is, the banking, financial and housing sectors were already regulated and the bubble still grew and burst. Regulate more? Deregulate and re-regulate differently? I don't believe that's the answer.

I think the current crisis shines a very positive light on F.A. Hayek's Nobel awarded theory of the business cycle being caused by central bank artificial manipulation of interest rates. I don't think anyone today can deny that.

On the other argument you make of the 'problems' arising from the failure of a competitor, yea, I think you make a pretty good point. But I'd say it's a good problem to have. Like you said, Company C benefitted from A and B's failed arrangement. It's just as wrong to bail GM out for just GM's sake as it is to bail out GM for, say, both Honda and GM sake. These kinds of things happen in a free market, and it's a good thing they do. Company A will be more careful in the future of tying it's own production to the fate of another company. That's the way I see it anyway. :-)

Quote from Nobel's will "The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part 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." http://nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/short_testamente.html

It's not actually "good enough for them"

http://nobelprize.org/nomination/economics/nominators.html

The Prize in Economics is not a Nobel Prize.

Besides, it is on the Nobel website, equivalent to all the other prizes. If it's good enough for them...

So you might be technically right, but only in the pedant's sense.

It should be noted that this prize is NOT awarded by the Nobel Foundation.

The actual title of this award is The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and it is awarded by a bank.

http://nobelprize.org/nomination/economics/nominators.html

"The Prize in Economics is not a Nobel Prize."

There's actually a good explanation here.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2008/ Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago âoefor the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.â and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, both in Japan, âoefor the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.â

This might help - http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/gandhi/index.html

Some would say that the peace prize gets undue respect from sharing it's name with the science prizes.

That's rich, considering the peace prize was stipulated in Nobel's will, and the "the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" (which "some critics" might find more politically agreeable) was designed half a century later to ride on the Nobel coattails.

science prizes are given a long time after the fact, for discoveries that has really truly held up

Except for the frontal lobotomy

Giving out prizes contemporaneously is always risky, it's much easier when history has been written; that's why it took so long to give Luc Montagnier the award.

The problem with the Economics prize (and to a lesser extent with the Peace prize) is that they're too contemporary.

For Peace, it's probably inevitable that selection will be driven by current events.

For Economics, they've just ran out of worthwhile awardees. Perhaps this year they should give it to the EU bank regulators for managing to avoid the destruction of their economy thus far.

You know, first I thought that that whole 'big bang never happened' idea was ridiculous.

I have to admit that at that time I had not really looked into things. Then I stumbled upon the Electric Universe / Plasma Cosmology approach and I must say that I find it very intriguing:

Electric Universe Predictions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRrAswC4CYo

News:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php

Interview The Electric Universe Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iasEwhBHyyU

Interview The Electric Sky: Donald E. Scott Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRqNdpKxq_0

Perhaps it's time to give some more time to these ideas that were founded by people like Nobel prize winner Hannes Alfven.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1970/alfven-bio.html

We're actually using Maxwell-HEAVISIDE equations all over the world after Oliver Heaviside rewrote Maxwell's original equations from quaternion notation into a much simpler vector notation.. throwing out some interesting stuff along the way.

Oh regarding those Electric Universe 'wackos':

You do realize that you're also calling a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics a wacko, right?

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1970/alfven-bio.html

And so far their successful predictions should at least be called _interesting_ and not 'wacko' for anyone who follows the scientific approach with components like theory, predictions, verification, modification etc.

http://thunderbolts.info/predictions.htm

While the ideas of plasma cosmology seem radical. At this point to me they don't seem any more radical than the ideas put forth by standard cosmologists of multiple universes, dark matter, multiple dimensions, black holes, neutron stars spinning from 1.4ms(!!) to thirty seconds, strange matter, dark energy, etc..

I remember reading something like this in Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb, where he postulated that if we didn't limit growth of humans on Earth, either famine, disease or war would limit our population for us. Great read.

One could argue that it already is: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html (halfway down the page, look for the text that starts: "As a by-product of this same view, I received a telephone call one day..."

Ok. This paper contains one; http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1989/dehmelt-lecture.pdf It's a single barium atom in a penning trap. They managed to get it to emit enough photons to be naked eye visible.

At the time, Hitler wasn't considered all that bad in Germany. Until the late 1930's he wasn't considered too bad by most of the world.

One member of Swedish Parliament even thought Hitler deserved the nobel peace price! For some reason the same MP member withdrew his nomination sometime in 1939 :)

The first part of this is going to sound antagonistic, but its meant to be helpful.

Are you a superstar company? Really? What product do you work on? Is it cutting edge/interesting/socially minded? Is it going to present a new challenge every day for your programmers?

How top-heavy is your company? Are the salaries of the managers 3x more than the programmers? How about the top-level execs? Are they getting $1.5M bonuses every year while solving no problems themselves? Do their salaries go up 12% every year while programmers get 2% raises? Do the execs get their own parking spaces while the programmers have to park on the street? Is the disparity noticeable and constantly rubbed in the face of your programmers? Do the execs act snooty and drive $60,000 dollar cars? If these qualities apply to your company, there is no hope. If not, read on.

People who can really solve tough problems (i.e. "superstars") know who they are. Their minds don't work linearly and they see patterns in everything. They make suggestions and observations only to get ridiculed because the small minds around them can't understand what they are saying. But they usually get vindicated:

People often ask me why I persisted in doing research on a subject that was so controversial. I frequently respond by telling them that only a few scientists are granted the great fortune to pursue topics that are so new and different that only a small number of people can grasp the meaning of such discoveries initially. I am one of those genuinely lucky scientists... --Stanley Prusiner

The unfortunate thing is that superstars, as you call them, experience this pattern again and again. You need to recognize that this pattern is common for them. You need to cater to their intellectual needs, make sure they are payed well, and, yes, appeal to their egos. This doesn't mean a constant suck-up, which is a common misconception. You need to give your damn best to understand what they are saying, to understand that their insight might be better than yours and to recognize that they have shown insight through a solid record of achievement. Superstars are players and not coaches (i.e. cheerleaders) and they can point to success, but you don't need to acknowledge it directly. If you want to employ them, you need to show that you can be student instead of master, because superstars are also teachers.

I know that that last one is going to hurt, especially in the hierarchical realm of corporate politics. However, your ability to be a student of your employees will separate you from mere mediocre employers and will get you those superstars you want so badly.

I'm going to conjecture that no real scientists have commented here. I've read a few dozen comments and I've read a lot of "scientists use big words for their own egos". I want to dispel that notion. First, scientists do have big egos. I am a scientist and I am confident that mine is one of the biggest. However, with such big egos, we feel little need to find means to inflate them even further by gratuitously selecting big words. No, big words exist for a reason--namely, they are used to refer to complex concepts. We can not get around this necessity.

For example, let's examine the word "dideoxy chain terminator". This is a big word no doubt, but to understand it fully, we would need to know what DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is, its molecular composition, and its structure. We would need to understand how one might synthesize DNA in vitro using a template and how a dideoxy chain terminator would interfere with extension, and to complete the understanding, that we would want this extension terminated because we could glean valuable information from this termination. Since all of this explanation would be beyond your average person's patience to learn or even perhaps even beyond thier ability to understand, we might say something like "we want to sequence your genes". And then the person would say, "they are dockers" and think that you are an idiot for wasting their time.

Since the two neutron stars in PSR1913+16 are moving so fast and close together they should, according to General Relativity, emit large amounts of gravitational radiation. This makes them lose energy: Their orbits will therefore shrink and their orbiting period will shorten.

Indirect evidence: The binary pulsar has been observed continuously since its discovery, and the orbiting period has in fact decreased. Agreement with the prediction of General Relativity is better than 1/2%. This is considered to prove that gravitational radiation really exists. This in turn is currently one of our strongest supports for the validity of the General Theory of Relativity.

GP-B scientists expect to announce the final results of the experiment in december 2007, follow-
ing eight months of further data analysis and refinement. Today, Everitt and his team are poised to
share what they have found so far--namely that the data from the GP-B gyroscopes clearly confirm
Einstein's predicted geodetic effect to a precision of better than 1 percent.

The absence of a gravitational-wave signal meant GRB070201 could not have originated in this way in Andromeda. Other causes for the event, such as a soft gamma-ray repeater or a binary merger from a much further distance, are now the most likely contenders.

As a matter of interest what would be the consequences to modern physics if Gravity waves do not exist?

They do exist. There have been measurements done of the slowing down of a rotating binary pulsar, which is a prediction of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, where the system will emit gravitational radiation and slowly lose energy. This was the subject of the 1993 Nobel prize in Physics.

What powers the Sun?

Here is a good overview, written in 1996, of the standard solar model (SSM) (http://www.ap.stmarys.ca/~guenther/Level01/solar/what_is_ssm.html).

In a nutshell, the SSM matches a wide range of relevant observables, from the Sun's mass, its 'sound spectrum' (helioseismology - the solar equivalent of seismology), its radius, its energy output, the constancy of that energy output (time periods of years to billions of years), its (estimated, inferred) composition, and so on*.

In 1996, there was one, very annoying, exception - the flux of neutrinos from the Sun seemed to be way too low!

This very nice article by John Bahcall^, on the Nobel website, tells the story of how 'the solar neutrino problem' was solved (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/bahcall/index.html; it turns out that the original author of the the 'MSW' neutrino oscillation theory was actually Bruno Pontecorvo ... but as he published it, in Russian, in a physics journal that had essentially no circulation outside the (then) USSR, in the 1950s, he missed getting the glory for it).

There is, as SD readers know from pln2bz's comments, an alternative view of what powers the Sun: giant electric currents throughout the galaxy. As far as I know, this 'Electric Universe' idea (EU) has no basis, either in terms of quantitatively matching any significant subset of the relevant observations, or in terms of the underlying theory (ask an EU proponent about how much experimental support there is for the EU idea of what supports the Sun against gravitational collapse, to take just one example; or to characterise the current which powers the Sun, in terms of charge carriers, flux, speeds, and so on, and how well this characterisation matches what inter-planetary probes such as Ulysses or Galileo or Cassini have detected).

* If any reader is interested in reading more on this, right up to the latest ApJ papers, just holler!
^ Bahcall was one of the greats of 20th century astronomy; although he didn't share the Nobel for discovering the solution, his decades-long work on the problem (including his encouragement of Davis, who did get the Nobel) was crucial to that solution.

... I knew some of the Cyc people back in the 1980s, when they were pursuing the same idea. They're still at it. ... But after twenty years of their claiming "Strong AI, Real Soon Now", it's probably not happening.

The path Cyc is following may be a dead-end by itself until neuroscientists figure out how Nature makes brains work or hardware engineers figure out how to interconnect 100 billion transistors to approximate brain-sized neural networks. But the encoding of "world knowledge" and "common sense" by Cyc is definitely useful for future scientists. It would be nice if that knowledge and representation were open-sourced.

this has always puzzled me.
i can't see believing in god as something that can withstand simple questions.

"Colossus wasn't used against Enigma"

Don't be a bloody pedant, the work on cracking Enigma went into designing Colossus. Who's going to play Alan Turing in the movie, Jeff Goldblum, or no wait, Turing was a woofter, it would have to be Harvey Fierstein.

Incidentally, Goldblum got the part of Seth Brundle in the Fly because he once played James Watson in a BBC documtary, once a mad scientist always a mad scientist appariently .. :)

was Re:didn't Harvey Keitel crack Enigma

Ah, information asymmetry. (One party to a transaction knows more about the value of the items exchanged than the other) Perhaps you are not all aware that it has been proven scientifically that in markets information asymmetry is all it takes to throw off a free market's ability to function.

2007 Nobel Prize in Economics

Why, being all free and open would effectively say "Let's let free markets decide whether islamists or western capitalists are right." How far would that fly? "Let's roll!" *crash* *burn*.

1) I am engaging you in this exchange so I do not understand what you mean by come out of hiding and stand for what I believe. I thought that is what I am expressing.

2) Use your dictionary. There are many online. I thought these were words you learn in high school but I guess not to some (I guess the british school system is better). And I am not opposed to the exchange of ideas - just close-mindedness and unsupported distortions.

3)In any year there are always those who feel someone else deserves the prize in any category, the decision is up to the selection committee. I can bet that you have not read their entire selection statement before coming to your conclusion. Your mind had been made up way before he was even being considered for this.
What I am espousing is to at least see the good in what whomever has been selected is doing instead of demonizing simply because we do not agree with their POV. Your opposition to Gore's selection seems to be based on politcal difference, that is being simple minded. I do not for a second believe Gore plans to hurt the global economy, that sounds like a sound bite from Fox News. As I stated before I believe he overstates his case, but that does not negate his efforts at bringing awareness to an issue that most of the scientific community has agreed on.

Please use your dictionary where necessary and I have tried to refrain from using words that might make you swallow your gum in the process of trying to comprehend them. I am also including a link so you at least see the selection committee's reasoning for coming to this decision.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/press.html

BTW: I do not agree with their decision as well. I believe there are more deserving people though different from those that have been stated here, but I respect their decision.

Respectfully,
Anonymous Coward

Easy mistake to make since they are listed on the Nobel Prize's official web page. They are listed as receiving a price in economics though, not a Nobel price in economics, even though they are under the "Nobel Prizes" banner.

From the Nobel Peace Prize press release, I quote:

"Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/press.html

The prize for peace was to be awarded 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 of peace congresses."

The NPP hasn't meant anything in a long time. I was proud about last year's winner. He does some amazing things. But now? They've proven just how silly their award is once again. Dear God let the other Nobel awards not be tainted by this idiocy. Funny thing is, I think Global Warming is a big deal. Al Gore is just not the person I want evangelizing about this problem because he's got so many things wrong and that makes people not take him seriously. We need people to take this seriously. He's not helping.