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Nobel Prize For Medicine Awarded, Physics Soon To Follow
Nobel Prize season is here again, and the first award for Physiology or Medicine was split between two virologists who discovered HIV and one who demonstrated that a virus causes cervical cancer. Coming soon is the announcement for Physics. Look to the right for a chance to pit your selection wit against the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with a poll for which scientific achievement deserves the prize. Front runners, according to Reuters, are; Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, discovers of graphene, Vera Rubin, provider of the best evidence yet of dark matter, and Roger Penrose and Dan Shechtman, discoverers of Penrose tilings and quasicrystals.
This guy has done so much for physics, that at some point, he deserves it just from such an enormous body of work. He inspires Hawking, does all sorts of work with theories of everything, he then writes it all up in a simple book that explains how everything works without skimping too much on the math, what more do you need a man to do?
This is my sig.
Nobel prices in the sciences are usually very conservative. I don't think we will not see a Nobel price for dark matter until the responsible particle(s) has been discovered.
Who's getting the peace prize this year?
Nobel prices in the sciences are usually very conservative. I don't think we will not see a Nobel price for dark matter until the responsible particle(s) has been discovered.
Do you think the price for a Nobel Prize will be significantly higher than the prize itself?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Agreed, these are just the observations. Maybe dark matter and dark energy will be all captured at the same time.
Also, around the same time as Rubin's work (which was all optical), the HI (neutral hydrogen) data gave a far more convincing picture. The surprising flattness of e.g. M31 was already noted several decades before Rubin's work. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.
"And the Band Played On" was the title of a movie about the CDC tracking the first breakouts of AIDS in San Francisco and then all around the world. Alan Alda played one of the virologists that just got this nod. He played the American who was out to screw the French lab that was onto the same discovery that this was a hantavirus. Very interesting story with TONS of stars including a "young" Ian McKellen.
put the what in the where?
Don't worry, I'm sure the dark matter still likes you even if you do say such hurtful things.
More seriously, I used to hope that the evidence of gravity anomalies would be some recognisable pattern in the force itself rather than the matter distribution. ANything that threw a spanner in general relativity's works would give clues to a unified field theory. The evidence for invisible extra mass is pretty hard to argue with by now though, to the point where we can produce images of its distribution and work out how it got there.
What about knocking that gigantic garbage ball out of the sky?
That's HPV, not HIV. Please correct summary.
Wow! Only 4 responses until Bush is bashed, in a thread that has *ABSOLUTELY* nothing to do with him. Hate much?
Dark matter may be a cheap cop-out, but "Cowboy Neal's Excited State", that's just plain scary.
Is there a name for this trend? So we have Godwin's Law that describes how quickly a comparison will be made to the Nazi's in any (Usenet)online discussion. Perhaps we could name a new law, dubbed "Anonymous Coward's law" that describes how quickly a discussion will turn a) political or b) toward Bush bashing.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
I'm betting on Fidel Castro for the first peaceful transition in power in Cuba in 40 years.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"describes how quickly a discussion will turn a) political or b) toward Bush bashing."
On slashdot, that's a distinction without a difference.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
In the 80's Robert Gallo was celebrated as the discoverer of HIV and that, oh yeah, maybe
some French scientists helped too. Turns out Mr. Gallo either intentionally or mistakenly
(through cross-contamination in a sloppy lab) cultivated a sample of the French-discovered
strain of the virus. Even after he should have realized a mistake, he misled people and
caused the United States blood supply to use a much poorer HIV test (than the French one)
and as a result people needlessly died. His claims of original discovery ultimately fell
apart because HIV mutates with amazing rapidity, and so his HIV strains were traceable to
the French one his so closely matched.
The book "Science Fictions" by John Crewdson is worth your time to read. It's a long read,
not an easy read, but I got hooked.
Have you wondered why some less technically talented coworkers are able to influence
management and, even worse, make you the fall guy when things go wrong? I think this book
gave me insight into that.
If Mr. Gallo had only half the talent for science as he did for obfuscation, he would've
been a great scientist indeed.
Anyone but...Sau Lan Wu. I'm sure even now she's ensconced in her office, hovering over a small shrine decorated with J/psi and gluon Phys Rev articles, praying to the gods of physics that she'll win this year. /Former Wuon
Roger Penrose just happened to discover a phenomenon that has the same name as he does? Wow. What are the odds?
That is the closest to absolute zero ever achieved.
The 1996 Nobel prize was already given for the discovery of Buckyballs. Graphene is the same field (so the general area is already covered), and not really a surprize. It is just a monolayer of graphite. Preparing it and measuring its properties is (highly interesting) engineering, but not groundbreaking science.
HPV does not cause cervical cancer and FDA documents admit it.
The FDA news release of March 31, 2003 acknowledges that "most infections (by HPV) are short-lived and not associated with cervical cancer", in recognition of the advances in medical science and technology since 1988. In other words, since 2003 the scientific staff of the FDA no longer considers HPV infection to be a high-risk disease when writing educational materials for the general public whereas the regulatory arm of the agency is still bound by the old classification scheme that had placed HPV test as a test to stratify risk for cervical cancer in regulating the industry.
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dockets/07p0210/07p-0210-ccp0001-01-vol1.pdf
As the reclassification petition reveals, HPV infections are naturally self-limiting -- meaning that they are controlled naturally, without requiring intervention with drugs or vaccines. It is not the HPV virus itself that causes cervical cancer but rather a persistent state of ill-health on the part of the patient that makes her vulnerable to persistent infections.
As the petition states:
Based on new scientific information published in the past 15 years, it is now generally agreed that identifying and typing HPV infection does not bear a direct relationship to stratification of the risk for cervical cancer . Most acute infections caused by HPV are self-limiting [1, 4-7]. ...Repeated sequential transient HPV infections, even when caused by "high-risk" HPVs, are characteristically not associated with high risk of developing squamous intraepithelial lesions, a precursor of cervical cancer.
A woman found to be positive for the same strain (genotype) of HPV on repeated testing is highly likely suffering from a persistent HPV infection and is considered to be at high risk of developing precancerous intraepithelial lesions in the cervix . It is the persistent infection, not the virus, that determines the cancer risk."
Taking Gardasil can actually make you 44.6% more likely to get pre-cancerous lesions if you already have HPV (many sexually active people do).
PCR-based HPV detection device with provision for accurate HPV genotyping is more urgently needed now because vaccination with Gardasil of the women who are already sero-positive and PCR-positive for vaccine-relevant genotypes of HPV has been found to increase the risk of developing high-grade precancerous lesions by 44.6%, according to an FDA VRBPAC Background Document : Gardasil HPV Quadrivalent Vaccine. May 18, 2006 VRBPAC Meeting. www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/06/briefing/2006-4222B3.pdf
Not only that, but cervical cancer is one of the most treatable forms of cancer out there. If you are healthy and get regular testings you should have no problem. There is no need for this vaccine.
This guys work was done in the early 80's and is obviously out of date.
Where is my Nobel Prize? :)
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Gallo! Thanks for the name - I did a whole paper on that ass in 1990 and couldn't remember the name.
"If Mr. Gallo had only half the talent for science as he did for obfuscation, he would've been a great scientist indeed."
Don't worry too much about Gallo's fate - the NIH built him a whole new building to house his little empire.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Come on, they've discovered hugely dangerous things through their "scientific" discoveries. HIV and HCV kill millions of people every year and these people are being praised for discovering them. Much like the lauded Newton who discovered gravity which has led to millions of deaths through falling and having heavy things land on people it is typical of the scientific community to reward these people who discover things that only give harm to people. These claims of "evolving" viruses are really just more proof that scientists are waging a war against normal people.
Only the other day I was hearing that scientists were poisoning our children by suggesting that di-Hydrogen Monoxide should be drunk instead of Sunny Delight, its appalling what we let these scientists get away with.
Brought to you by the people who think that Evolution is a scientific conspiracy.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
> a) political or b) toward Bush bashing.
Isn't (b) a subset of (a)?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I got your responsible particle(s) right here (makes a crude, vulgar gesture).... Oh wait, this isn't digg, is it
How much physics do you know? Dark matter is not a "cheap cop-out". It is a simple model that accounts for observations on many, many scales: from the rotation curves of galaxies, through lensing in galaxy clusters, via cosmic flows, the distance to high-redshift supernovae and all the way up to the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Why do you believe that all matter must be barionic? Or luminous?
For an example of a real cop-outs consider the various "MOND" proposals: in order to account for the rotation curves of galaxies, you change Newtonian gravity at the right length scale. This is easy to do -- and obviuosly by making the right modification you can get the rotation curve exactly on the nose -- but then you'd need a different epicycle for the lensing, yet another one for the fluctuations in the CMB, etc.
In case you are still sceptical, consider the neutrino. Much like today's dark matter, this particle was proposed because laws of mechanics (conservation of momentum in neutron decay) seemed to be violated. Since they are so weakly interacting, it was only much later that neutrinos were observed directly. So was the neutrino a "cheap cop-out"? Should physicists instead have assumed that the laws of mechanics are wrong?
I'm going to have to disagree. I know this sounds trollish, but I'm really not trying to start a flamewar, and I ask that you keep it civil in telling me how wrong I am. Here goes:
I'm just jumping in here, sorry to crash the party. And I'm only being civil because you're a basketball fan (not really, but nice username anyway).
Is it going too far to count his unscientific theory against his previous successes? No. Scientific committees need to consider not just the immediate, but also the long-term consequences of giving their endorsement to individuals. While they should give out degrees to people who like to hold unscientific beliefs in their spare time, they should not hold them out as shining examples of "someone doing it right".
By that reasoning, you'd be stripping Einstein of his prize as well. Had the Prize been around, Isaac Newton would have been excluded with extreme prejudice. Indeed, that line of reasoning would be tantamount to restricting the Prize to athiests.
There are many scientists who happen to be religious, and it causes many a brilliant scientist degrees of consternation in attempting to reconcile his religion's creation story with his own science. Penrose's attempts seem no different than Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice with the universe".
While I agree with your analysis of why the null state for any hypothesis should be rejected rather than accepted, I don't think that's sufficient reason to ban Penrose or anyone else from consideration for the Prize. Indeed, I would say that all creeping politicization of the Prize should cease, as it has been all too prevalent lately (assuming it ever was otherwise). In this case, while I personally believe in maintaining a barrier between religion and science, I think the pendulum has swung too far against religion in general - indeed, the anti-religious sentiment is so common in the sciences to pretty much amount to bigotry. I've seen it firsthand, and it's disgusting coming from people who claim to be open-minded. So long as your opinion matches theirs, presumably.
In other words, let's accept Penrose's religious choices and not hold it against him with regard to his scientific contributions. Anything else would smack of extreme religious intolerance that is not in keeping with the overall ideals of Prize in advancing humanity.
I do respect your opinion and the civil way in which you've presented it, but I'd strongly urge you to reconsider what you're advocating.
please announce the nobel for economics this year, so we can tar and feather him, and set him afire as he protests that its like blaming the weatherman for a bad hurricane
maybe then the gods will be happy and we can get free houses and credit cards again
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Although dark phlogiston actually increases the mass of combustible residua by leaving behind oxidized molecules, just as the so-called "Lavoisier Combustion Theory" predicts, just not as much, until the LHC it was impossible to determine that the mass gained actually exceeds the contribution of oxygen less light pressure by a significant delta, leading to the darkly immaterial conclusion that mentioning Schödinger's Cat without actually examining it requires it to be simultaneously alive or dead in wherever fine products are sold.
FEE, FIE, FOE, FOO... >*Poof!*
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
As the reclassification petition reveals, HPV infections are naturally self-limiting -- meaning that they are controlled naturally, without requiring intervention with drugs or vaccines.
Where did you see that? It says most acute infections are self-limiting, not all.
It is not the HPV virus itself that causes cervical cancer but rather a persistent state of ill-health on the part of the patient that makes her vulnerable to persistent infections.
It's not the vulnerability to persistent infection that causes cervical cancer, ti's the persistent infection to certain high-risk strains of HPV. Regardless, the vaccine removes the vulnerability and helps prevent roughly 70% of cervical cancers. In addition, it also prevents infection of many strains that don't cause cancer, but still cause genital warts...it's a win all around.
Taking Gardasil can actually make you 44.6% more likely to get pre-cancerous lesions if you already have HPV (many sexually active people do).
So start vaccination earlier, before they're sexually active. Actually, this is the biggest problem with the vaccine, and I suspect it plays a big role in why some people are against it. The virus is sexually transmitted, so idiots start thinking, "My daughter isn't sexually active! She's not going to be sexually active until she marries! Only sluts need this so-called vaccine!"
Not only that, but cervical cancer is one of the most treatable forms of cancer out there.
Prevention is always better than the cure, even if the cure is available.
If you are healthy and get regular testings you should have no problem.
Says you. Regular testing helps catch the problem early on. Vaccines help you never get the problem in the first place.
There is no need for this vaccine.
There's a clear benefit to taking the vaccine, and no disadvantages as long as it's started early enough so that you can be assured to not already have HPV. Why the hell would you avoid it?
Yes, I've never seen any politician except for Bush bashed on Slashdot. It's simply inconceivable.
Oh, wait...
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
...was made sublime when Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. It became downright ethereal when Yasser Arafat received one in 1994.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
As long as they leave Bawls (with an 's' ScuttleMonkey!) the hell alone. The only way to improve upon it is to make the bottles bigger.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Have you wondered why some less technically talented coworkers are able to influence
management and, even worse, make you the fall guy when things go wrong? I think this book
gave me insight into that.
Because they are (corporate) psychopaths, and therefore very persuasive when lying, apt at manipulation and very charismatic.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Nobel prize, at least for peace, has no credibility to almost all Indians, as Mahatma Gandhi the absolute paragon of peace and non-violence in modern history, was never awarded the prize. In all sincerity, it would have honored the prize and not the person, in this case. Indians are generally highly divided about most issues, but, on Mahatma Gandhi's commitment to peace and non-violence, there is almost unanimous agreement. Please note that, there were dissenters who thought non-violence wasnt the best way to attain freedom, but nobody doubted Mahatma's non-violent credentials.
Nobel prize, like most western institutions, has an enormous western bias and is unable to see beyond the borders of western civilization, for most parts. This is not a complaint, it is just a fact!!
A liquid form would be nice. I know it's hypothesized to exist but import tariffs preclude its existence (and thus observation of its existence) in Europe. The only state Bawls can exist in in Europe is a solid granulate - and no matter what ThinkGeek says, putting that in anything will not yield a delicious drink.
A liquid Bawls vendor in Europe would be worth, well, some kind of prize at least.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The evidence for invisible extra mass is pretty hard to argue with by now though, to the point where we can produce images of its distribution and work out how it got there.
Who would of thought that the Nobel Prize would go to your next post wherein you lay your images of the distribution of dark matter, stating how it got there - and of course as you know how - and what exactly its nature is.
Wow. Colour me amazed, here's me thinking this was still an open question.
[... don't worry, next week I'm getting surgery to remove my tongue from my cheek]
Nice how Slashdot omitted the nationalities of the recipients. They were two Frenchmen and one German woman. Had any of them been American, I highly suspect that it wouldn't had gone unmentioned.
Cowboy Neal was really excited for awhile there.
Here's your Nobel, fatty.
Who said anything about the nature of dark matter? It is detectable in astronomy only by its gravity so the best we can say is that it has mass, doesn't emit light and interacts feebly at best by any force other than gravity. What I claim is that there's good evidence that there is unseen mass out there other than boring things like cold gas and brown dwarfs.
a link to one of the prettier pictures of mass distribution, and another link showing a collision between galaxy clusters in which most visible matter collided and slowed, but which gravitational lensing shows that most of the invisible mass of the galaxies continued on its path unaffected by the collision.
Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail for the first confirmed discovery of an extrasolar planet.
I don't think we will not see a Nobel prize
I think you mean "I don't think we won't not see a Nobel prize".
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
That's a significant discovery, but doesn't really do much to broaden our understanding of the way the universe works. All they did was verify that other suns have planets too — something that's been widely accepted for centuries. Compare that with the following recent awards: