New tools will link papers by concepts, not just by the citations they contain, and this will help users without advanced expertise -- including some outside the scientific community -- understand the significance of new research, said Ginsparg.
Leggett said, "We can all tell when a movie of some everyday event, such as a kettle boiling or a glass shattering, is run backwards.
"Similarly, we all feel that we can remember the past and affect the future, not vice versa. So there is a very clear "arrow" ( direction ) of time built into our interpretation of our everyday experience.
"Yet the fundamental microscopic laws of physics, be they classical or quantum-mechanical, look exactly the same if the direction of time is reversed. So what is the origin of the "arrow" of time?
"This is one of the deepest questions in physics; I will review some relevant considerations, but do not pretend to give a complete answer."
Albert HUBO is an android robot. It is composed of a head, which takes after Dr. Albert Einstein, and HUBO’s body. The development period took about 3 months, and it had been finished at November, 2005. The head part was developed by Hanson-Robotics. Its skin is a special material, Frubber, often used at Hollywood.
Geneva, 23 November 2009. Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the lookout for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.
"It's a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "But we need to keep a sense of perspective - there's still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme."
Beams were first tuned to produce collisions in the ATLAS detector, which recorded its first candidate for collisions at 14:22 this afternoon. Later, the beams were optimised for CMS. In the evening, ALICE had the first optimisation, followed by LHCb.
"This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance," said ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.
"The events so far mark the start of the second half of this incredible voyage of discovery of the secrets of nature," said CMS spokesperson Tejinder Virdee.
"It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions," said ALICE spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. "This is simply tremendous."
"The tracks we're seeing are beautiful," said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, "we're all ready for serious data taking in a few days time."
These developments come just three days after the LHC restart, demonstrating the excellent performance of the beam control system. Since the start-up, the operators have been circulating beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450 GeV. The beam lifetime has gradually been increased to 10 hours, and today beams have been circulating simultaneously in both directions, still at the injection energy.
Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments' calibrations.
Removing body parts from the corpse was an echo of a practice common with saints, whose digits, tongues and organs were revered by Catholics as relics with sacred powers.
There is an irony in Galileo's having been subjected to the same treatment, since he was persecuted by the Catholic Church for advocating the theory that the earth circles the sun, rather than the other way around. The Inquisition forced him to recant, and jailed him in 1634.
The people who cut off his fingers essentially considered him a secular saint, Galluzzi said, noting the fingers that were removed were the ones he would have used to hold a pen.
Dr. Crewe's breakthrough image of an atom was taken in 1970 with a scanning transmission electron microscope of his own invention at the U. of C., where he taught until 1996.
The uranium and thorium atoms that Dr. Crewe captured were magnified 1 million times. It was a significant breakthrough -- an atom is incredibly tiny, approximately 4 billionths of an inch in diameter. The event was met with quiet satisfaction by Dr. Crewe and his fellow Hyde Park physicists.
Dear Colleagues,
ATLAS has recorded successfully the first beam-splash events of 2009. You can admire them at the following sites:
http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/public/EVTDISPLAY/events.html
https://atlas-live.cern.ch
Keep an eye on these sites, as they will be refreshed regularly.
This very exciting moment and great achievement for the machine and our experiment are the results of the outstanding work of many people !
Kind regards
Fabiola Gianotti
The physicist and mathematician, who went to Trinity College, won 23.6 per cent of the vote in the poll by student newspaper Varsity.
Charles Darwin, who attended Christ's College, came a close second with 20.6 per cent and poet Lord Byron, who was a student at Trinity College, came third with 10.8 per cent.
How did she become a prostitute? She studied anthropology and mathematics in Florida: “I wanted to be a physicist, but that just didn’t work out.” After Florida, her family lived in Sheffield, where she studied some more: “By the time I got to Sheffield it was for doctoral study at the department of forensic pathology.”
The film - previously called Schrodinger's Girl - centres on Rebecca Hunter, a disgraced scientist conducting research into alternate universes. She discovers a way to travel between realities and then finds her parallel-world counterparts have their own agendas: Anastacia Hunter is the science director for a gulag in the People's Republic of Great Britain, while Sarah Hunter-Gibson is a professor in a utopian hi-tech society.
Rebecca takes a terrifying trip into the People's Republic, a dystopian alternative Britain, where her encounter with a totalitarian regime is only the beginning of her problems as the multiverse begins to unravel around her. She has to use her sharp intellect and mastery of quantum physics to save the entire universe.
Toward this end, researchers from the University of Stuttgart in Germany laid very thin films of gold onto pieces of glass and then used ion beams to etch the film with holes arranged in a regular, square array. These holes were smaller than the wavelength of light and, despite being so tiny, are just the kind of openings that have been shown to let light through the thicker, opaque film used in the 1998 experiment. But in the new experiment, the gold film was so thin--only 20 nanometers--that light could already shine through it. And surprisingly, less light went through the holey gold than through the original semitransparent film.
"I have been thinking about how I can make use of such a prominent position to benefit my colleagues. It is difficult to find funding at the moment, especially for subjects which don't obviously have an immediate application for something that will make money.
"But the people who discovered magnetism and electricity had no idea what they could be used for. The MRI scanner wouldn't exist without particle physics. There are so many spin-off industrial investments in things that are being researched, and we need more of this."
Vafa traveled to CERN in late October to discuss with teams of scientists at the two main detectors on what else they might see. If the assumptions that he and Heckman make in the context of string theory are valid, Vafa said, the two lightest of the new particles are the gravitino and the stau. The gravitino, however, is so weakly interactive that it is hard to produce directly, Vafa said. A stau particle, however, is easier to produce and should be semi-stable, lasting as long as a minute. And it should leave a signature track — unexplainable by any of the already-observed particles — as it streaks across the LHC’s detectors.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Council of the American Physical Society has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to replace the Society’s 2007 Statement on Climate Change with a version that raised doubts about global warming.
The Council’s vote came after it received a report from a committee of eminent scientists who reviewed the existing statement in response to a petition submitted by a group of APS members. The petition had requested that APS remove and replace the Society’s current statement. The committee recommended that the Council reject the petition.
The committee also recommended that the current APS statement be allowed to stand, but it requested that the Society’s Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) examine the statement for possible improvements in clarity and tone. POPA regularly reviews all APS statements to ensure that they are relevant and up-to-date regarding new scientific findings.
Appointed by APS President Cherry Murray and chaired by MIT Physicist Daniel Kleppner, the committee examined the statement during the past four months. Dr. Kleppner’s committee reached its conclusion based upon a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research. APS members were also given an opportunity to advise the Council on the matter. On Nov. 8, the Council voted, accepting the committee’s recommendation to reject the proposed statement and refer the original statement to POPA for review.
Swear-by-it stories and anecdotal reports of benefit are one thing. Proving a treatment helps is quite another. Many alternative medicine studies have not included a placebo group — people who unknowingly get a dummy treatment so its effect can be compared.
Acupuncture is especially hard to research. Positive studies tend to lack comparison groups that have been given a sham treatment. Or they are often done in China, where the treatment is an established part of health care.
One U.S. study found that true acupuncture relieved knee arthritis pain better than fake acupuncture, in which guide tubes were placed but no needles were inserted. But a European study involving twice as many patients and using a more realistic sham procedure found the fake treatment to be just as good. The conclusion: Pain relief was due to the placebo effect.
Carter used a wonderful scientific vocabulary and showed some facts that were true.
However, blinded by science jargon, he put up facts and figures with little truth to them, no way to verify them (or if he did, they were not accurate and considered fraudulent in the scientific community), nor accuracy to the science actually used.
This man performed a wonderful show, and is an outstanding example of how the public will believe almost anything that has numbers and graphs in it with no scientific proof.
Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva noticed that the system’s carefully monitored temperatures were creeping up.
Further investigation into the failure of a cryogenic cooling plant revealed an unusual impediment. A piece of crusty bread had paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.
The American Association of Physics Teachers urges that every physics and astronomy department provide its majors and potential physics majors with the opportunities and encouragement to engage in a meaningful and appropriate undergraduate research experience.
The engineers used a men’s basketball for the study; it is heavier and a bit larger than basketballs used in women’s games. They also assumed that the basketball player doing the shooting was 6 feet 6 inches tall, and that he released the ball 6 inches above his head, so the “release height” was set to 7 feet. The free-throw line is 15 feet from the backboard, a cylinder-shaped opening that is 10 feet off the ground. Though it looks smaller, the diameter of a regulation basketball hoop is 18 inches; the diameter of a men’s basketball is a bit more than 9 inches.
According to a presentation held Tuesday at West Virginia University, evolutionist Charles Darwin did not know geology, biology, or Jesus.
Dr. Robert Carter, has a doctorate in marine biology and is currently the head speaker and scientist for Creation Ministries International (USA) in Atlanta, Ga., gave a presentation listing in detail what Darwin did not know at that time. Carter argued evolution theory, therefore, cannot be held as the true explanation of the history of the natural world.
Watching a metal transform into a superconductor, it may not be obvious that this transition provides access to some of the same physics that governed the cooling of the universe following the Big Bang. Yet at the root of both of these phenomena—albeit at astronomically different energy scales—is the question of how defects form in a continuous phase transition. In a paper appearing in Physical Review B [1], Roberto Monaco at the Università di Salerno in Italy, Jesper Mygind at the Technical University of Denmark, Ray Rivers at Imperial College London, UK, and Valery Koshelets at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow have taken ideas about the early development of the universe and applied them to the dynamics of the superconducting phase transition in metal rings. In doing so, they introduce an elegant way to measure the tiny flux quanta that are trapped at the centers of these rings, and develop a new understanding of how the cooling process works in mesoscopic systems.
The second innovation is to emulate a charged-particle beam by means of a waveguide with a periodic array of slots, instead of using real charged particles [Fig. 1, right]. By doing so, Xi et al. solved the problem of extremely weak Čerenkov radiation in the microwave frequencies associated with moving charged particles. As an electromagnetic wave travels inside the waveguide, it emerges at each slot with a fixed phase retardation relative to the neighboring slots. This leaking radiation from the waveguide is equivalent to the radiation from a phased antenna array. The Fourier transform of the electric current carried by a moving charged particle results in a broad spectrum in the frequency domain. But as long as a single frequency is concerned, the current of the charged particle is equivalent to that of a phased dipole array, as mathematically proved by the authors. In this analog, the phase velocity of the electromagnetic wave propagating inside the waveguide corresponds to the moving speed of the charged particles in a regular Čerenkov radiation configuration.
In the experiment, the authors designed a waveguide with comparatively low refractive index of n ~0.5, which is equivalent to a charged particle moving with a speed twice as great as that of light in a vacuum. With this new experimental configuration, the radiation signal can be many orders of magnitude stronger than the traditional Čerenkov radiation induced by a fast charged-particle beam, and thus the Čerenkov radiation was directly observed along the backward direction within the left-handed frequency range of the metamaterials. It is worth noting that Grbic and Eleftheriades carried out an experimental attempt earlier at the University of Toronto, in which they observed the backward radiation from a low-index left-handed microwave transmission line into free space [8]. However, considering the fact that it is the phase velocity rather than group velocity of the electromagnetic wave propagating in the transmission line that corresponds to the speed of an equivalent moving charge, the Čerenkov radiation observed by Grbic et al. was indeed in the forward direction with respect to the direction of the equivalent moving charge.
In the hands-on astronomy exhibit, my oldest son devoted about ten minutes to making a comet. Ingredients include: water, ammonia, dirt, corn syrup, and dry ice … plus some sarcasm and melodrama. A couple hours later, the comet didn’t look as pretty, but it retained enough mass to make it to our freezer. I fear this may be a summer snow ball accident waiting to happen.
The Society of Physics Students at Chico State University held its 22nd annual Pumpkin Drop in front of Butte Hall Thursday. Students portray historical characters such as Einstein, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Igor as they explain and illustrate the theory of gravity to a large crowd of students.
As pumpkins were loaded into homemade trebuchets, launched into the air, and obliterated by the earth, students shivered in their Viking helmets and Scottish kilts and worried about their grades.
Trebuchets, physics, medieval warfare and pumpkins all contributed to a memorable learning experience for a trio of ninth-grade physics classes at Roy Junior High School.
Joining the fun this year are students from Mundelein High School, who along with physics instructor Michael Hickey and student teacher Mark Michalski created "Peter" the catapult (named after the nursery rhyme, "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater"). Painted bright red for Mundelein High, Peter spans nearly 10 feet across. Watch the pumpkins soar after being loaded onto Peter and launched into the air.
The supply has actually remained steady over the past 30 years, the researchers conclude from an analysis of six longitudinal surveys conducted by the U.S. government from 1972 to 2005. However, the highest-performing students in the pipeline are opting out of science and engineering in greater numbers than in the past, suggesting that the threat to American economic competitiveness comes not from inadequate science training in school and college but from a lack incentives that would make science and technology careers attractive.
The researchers—led by Lowell and Harold Salzman, a sociologist at the Urban Institute and Rutgers University, New Brunswick—argue that boosting the STEM pipeline may end up hurting the United States in the long-term.
This happens, they say, by depressing wages in S&T fields and turning potential science and technology innovators into management professionals and hedge fund managers.
Susan Traiman of the Business Roundtable criticizes the new study, saying that it gives an illusion of a robust supply because it bundles all STEM fields together. There may be an oversupply in the life sciences and social sciences, she argues, but there is no question that there are shortages in engineering and the physical sciences. The findings "are not going to make us go back and re-examine everything we've been been calling for," she says.
Granot and colleagues studied the radiation from a gamma-ray burst – associated with a highly energetic explosion in a distant galaxy – that was spotted by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on 10 May this year. They analysed the radiation at different wavelengths to see whether there were any signs that photons with different energies arrived at Fermi's detectors at different times. Such a spreading of arrival times would indicate that Lorentz invariance had indeed been violated; in other words that the speed of light in a vacuum depends on the energy of that light and is not a universal constant. Any energy dependence would be minuscule but could still result in a measurable difference in photon arrival times due to the billions of light years that separate gamma-ray bursts from us.
The Fermi team used two relatively independent data analyses to conclude that Lorentz invariance had not been violated. One was the detection of a high-energy photon less than a second after the start of the burst, and the second was the existence of characteristic sharp peaks within the evolution of the burst rather than the smearing of its output that would be expected if there were a distribution in photon speeds. The researchers arrived at the same null result when studying the radiation from a gamma-ray burst detected in September last year, but could only reach about one-tenth of the Planck energy. Crucially, the shorter duration and much finer time structure of the more recent gamma-ray burst takes this null result to at least 1.2 times the Planck energy.
But behind the scenes, smaller and more modest accelerators have been cutting big swaths through the lives of ordinary Americans.
For instance, “The argument’s been made that accelerators have saved more lives than any other biomedical device,” with an estimated 10,000 of them being used to treat cancer, Tom Katsouleas of Duke University told the audience.
More than 18,000 industrial accelerators have been built over the past half-century and most of them are still in use, according to a commentary by Robert W. Hamm in the Oct 09 issue of symmetry; they sterilize medical supplies, analyze materials, toughen the rubber in tires, play a key role in manufacturing the semiconductor chips at the hearts of electronic devices, and even create shink-wrap, among many other things.
The irony, of course, is that Einstein could have found that escape route months earlier, simply by reading the referee's report that he had dismissed so hastily. The referee had also observed that casting the Einstein–Rosen metric (as we now call this solution of the Einstein equations) in cylindrical coordinates removes the apparent difficulty.
Brinkman, who took over the $4.9 billion science office in late June, also had some harsh words for advocates of the International Linear Collider, a 30-kilometer-long straight-shot particle smasher that would study in detail the new particles and phenomena physicists hope to glimpse at the LHC. "With all the contingencies, you're talking about $20 billion. In my opinion, that price pushes it way out into the future, and onto the backburner."
Since last year’s event drew such a big crowd, this year’s event has been expanded to two campus buildings. Visitors will be allowed to take a tour of the labs in the Faraday Hall West. There will also be activities located in Faraday Hall.
The two buildings, which are adjacent to one another, are connected by a tunnel, which will be used for traveling between the two buildings.
The program’s original motive was to attract young people’s interest in science, technology, engineering and math before they reach the age where they can attend college.
Green, who works in the same department as Hawking, played a major role in developing a form of string theory that describes all of the different types of particles in the universe and how they interact with each other.
YouTube viewers worldwide have the unique opportunity to "Ask a Nobel Laureate" a question on the official Nobel Prize YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/thenobelprize). Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2006, John Mather, an astrophysicist from NASA, is the first Nobel Laureate to participate and he will answer a selection of questions from the online community.
Nobelprize.org, the official web site of the Nobel Foundation, manages The Nobel Prize YouTube channel, and disseminates content from their vast archives gathered since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901. Besides spreading information about all the amazing discoveries, achievements and inspirational stories that have been rewarded by the Nobel Prize, Nobelprize.org is now offering anyone the chance to pose their questions directly to a Nobel Laureate via their YouTube channel.
Over the past few years, members of Kansas Wesleyan's Physics Club have launched five high-altitude balloons in order to study various aspects of altitude and the atmosphere. Most recently, the group attempted to set an amateur balloon altitude record with its spring 2009 launch.
The balloons also have been equipped with cameras and GPS transmitters. The GPS transmitters allow team members to track the balloons during flight. Some of the team members have remained on campus and tracked the balloons via the Internet, while others have formed chase teams to follow the balloons.
If components are to continue shrinking, physicists must eventually code bits of information onto ever smaller particles. Smaller means faster in the microelectronic world, but physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University in Massachusetts, have slapped a speed limit on computing, no matter how small the components get.
"If we believe in Moore's laW ... then it would take about 75 to 80 years to achieve this quantum limit," Levitin said.
"No system can overcome that limit. It doesn't depend on the physical nature of the system or how it's implemented, what algorithm you use for computation … any choice of hardware and software," Levitin said. "This bound poses an absolute law of nature, just like the speed of light."
The problem the country faces is that the conditions in which Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and George Smith made their breakthroughs are harder to come by today. Kao, for example, made his breakthroughs in fiber optics (the thin glass threads that now carry a vast chunk of the world's phone and data traffic) while at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in the U.K. Similarly, Boyle and Smith designed the first digital imaging technology while working at Bell Labs, the legendary research organization that was once part of AT&T.
What was so special in these corporate labs of the 1960s?
In these settings, world-class scientists were allowed to work on deep-going, "basic" research quite freely, albeit in close proximity to commercial product development. The result was uniquely productive. No wonder Energy Secretary Steve Chu — another Nobel laureate — often recalls fond memories of his time at Bell Labs, calling it a special place that promoted high-intensity collaboration and empowered scientists to conduct long-term basic research that could lead to new breakthroughs while also holding them accountable for delivering products to the parent company. Indeed, millions of jobs have resulted from such contributions to science and technology, including such Bell Labs inventions as the transistor, photovoltaic cells, and cell phone technology.
Unfortunately though, this sort of corporate research platform is in trouble today. As noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article, the tyranny of shorter-term horizons means big companies now spend much less on potentially risky long-term basic research. Meanwhile, much of the action in long-term research has shifted to universities that have a mixed record in commercializing breakthroughs for the good of the regional and national economy. The upshot: Corporations' shorter-term focus combined with universities' variable record at commercialization serves to limit society's overall innovation capacity and so its capacity for high-quality job creation.
Andrei and her team have finally spotted electrons in graphene getting together in the right way. To do it, the team suspended micrometer-sized bits of graphene to avoid interference from the underlying substrate. The researchers then used a special arrangement of electrodes to keep from shorting out their own measurements, they report online this week in Nature. They observed quasiparticles with 1/3 an electron's charge. In fact, Andrei says, the researchers saw the effect at higher temperatures and lower magnetic fields than are needed to see it in semiconductors, suggesting that the electrons in graphene interact especially strongly.
According to research from Britain's University of Warwick, published last January, scientific migration is common, and vastly beneficial to the United States.
"Nearly half of the world's most-cited physicists work outside their country of birth," the study said.
A survey of 158 of the most highly cited physicists showed systematic migration to nations with large research and development spending, most notably the United States.
"At birth, 29.7 percent of physicists are in the USA. This increases to 43.4 percent at first degree, to 55.1 percent at PhD, and to 67.1 percent presently," the report said.
Here's an open invitation to a new talk show-turned-seminar series called "Head + Heart Walking Together!" The first event, on the topic of "Crisis of Thailand and Beyond from a Quantum Physics Perspective", will be held from 1 to 5.30pm, on Sunday, October 18 in the LT Room, Faculty of Law, Thammasat University, Tha Phra Chan campus. The speakers will be Sivinee Sawatdiaree, a physicist from the National Institute of Metrology; Attakrit Chatputi, founder of Vcharkarn.com and the Thai translator of Fabric Cosmos; and Pramual Pengchan, philosopher and writer of Walk to Freedom. Thammasat law academic Kittisak Prokati will deliver a closing speech under the theme of "Scientific Worldview in Social Science".
Messages about the troubles smart women have in science or engineering careers—channeled through perky, TV “weather girl” intern Sam Sparks—are also part of the lesson. “Meatballs” grabbed the alpha spot 2 weekends in a row since opening in September and is still holding a strong second place. A lot of kids—many of them girls—are seeing that film.
Conflicted about her intelligence and beauty, Sam (voiced by Anna Faris) reins in her left-brain for eye-batting cuteness to gain acceptance—until she meets Flint Lockwood, a lovable but misunderstood brainiac inventor, as both contemplate their failures at the end of the local pier.
According to government studies, interest in science between boys and girls is similar until about fourth grade. Soon after, though, many girls turn away from science, math and technology subjects like computing and engineering. High-school girls make up only 17 percent of students in AP computer science and 7 percent in AP physics.
Can a scientist just decide to do audacious science? It looks as though a person with a solid foundation and a good mind can, indeed, decide to become a bold scientist. Our conversations with, and the careers of, a few audacious scientists offer some rough guidelines. Scientific audacity starts with a passion for a topic. It requires the judicious selection of an institution and a mentor. And it necessitates searching for an important problem. Do these things and your chances of doing important science improve?
Charles Kao, a Shanghai-born British-American, won half the prize for research that led to a breakthrough in fiber-optics, determining how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers.
Willard Boyle, a Canadian-American, and George Smith of the United States shared the other half for inventing the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor.
Since 1901 when the first Nobel prizes were awarded, a total of 35 women have been honoured and 754 men. Since its creation in 1968, no woman has won the economics prize. In the past 10 years, two women have won the literature prize, and two have won the peace prize. No woman has won the physics prize since 1963, or the chemistry prize since 1964.
....a light-hearted, behind-the-scenes account of what this sort of thing can do to a family.
One occasionally sees a spouse's-point-of-view title on the bookshelf, but this is likely the first such endeavor regarding the Nobel Prize. Says Laughlin: "It demystifies, clarifies and humanizes the Nobel experience."
More to the point, he said, he and Savage attack their work with greater clarity now, and have a better sense of what the best process is for attacking a myth. Oddly, instead of doing better science, or making things stronger or taking more risks, it all begins with the very concepts for each myth.
"The most important thing to get straight is the question you're trying to ask in the first place," Hyneman said. "It seems like a simple thing, but it's hard to get to that point and, a lot of times now, we're spending much more time defining that question before we do anything else."
The Nobel Prizes need an overhaul, according to a panel of scientists assembled by New Scientist magazine. In an open letter to the Nobel Foundation published today, the scientists say that the prizes, scheduled to be awarded next week, don’t sufficiently reflect today’s science. Too many important areas of research are left out of the categories that Alfred Nobel specified in his 1896 will, they say. They ask the foundation to establish two new prizes, one for the Global Environment and one for Public Health advances, and for both they suggest allowing organizations to be eligible, as they are for the Peace prize.
