An inspiration from the birth of aviation A few weeks ago I visited the small coastal town of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. Kitty Hawk is where the Wright brothers made their epoch-making first powered flight. Big stones mark the start and end points of the flight. There is a huge monument on top of […]
In the early 1940s, as war raged over the continent, the British mathematician Freeman Dyson and the Indian physicist Harish Chandra were taking a walk in Cambridge. Harish Chandra was studying theoretical physics under the legendary Paul Dirac while Dyson was getting ready to spend a depressing time calculating bombing statistics at Bomber Command. “I […]
Ada Yonath won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 for her work on the structure and function of the ribosome. Born in Jerusalem, she has spent the majority of her scientific career in Israel and is currently Director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann […]
After the lecture session on Thursday, I had a 15 minute slot to ‘interview’ Jean-Marie Lehn. who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Donald Cram and Charles Pederson for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity. Prof. Lehn is more commonly known as the father of supramolecular chemistry. […]
Francoise Barré-Sinoussi won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for her role in the discovery of HIV. As she detailed in her plenary lecture on Monday 28th June, she considers a combined approach of mainly Western-led lab-based research and locally based education and treatment centres in developing countries as crucial for the control of […]
Edmond Fischer shared the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edwin Krebs "for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism". I had the chance to talk to him in Lindau last week. My name is Edmond Fischer, but everybody calls me Ed. I’m a retired professor at the University of Washington […]
A little over a week ago at the Lindau conference Theordor Hanch hinted at new measurements of the size of the proton which may impact the fundamental theory of quantum electrodynamics. Hansch’s lecture was an overview of the history of lasers progressing from our realization of the wave/particle duality nature of light to new research […]
Before I can get to the conversation with David Gross and the work he did to receive the Nobel Prize for I have to talk about quarks. Three or two quarks in concert together make up a class of particles known as hadrons which include protons and neutrons. Hence the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a collider of protons and […]
When you throw together six distinguished physicists (David Gross, John Mather, Carlo Rubbia, George Smoot, Gerardus ’t Hooft, and Martinus Veltman) into debate on what CERN will teach us about the dark energy and dark matter you can’t guarantee the same kind harmony that these physicists strive for in their own theories. There was a majority agreement […]
Harald zur Hausen’s discovery of the link between infection and cancer provides a window into what may turn out to be one of the most fascinating lines of inquiry in twenty-first century medical research: the link between microorganisms and what have been traditionally considered chronic diseases. This line of inquiry is founded on an evolutionary […]
This is a translation of Bastian Greshakes article "Evolution – auf ein Ziel hin?" in the German blog posts Werner Arber is at the Lindau meeting for the tenth time this year and again he has been giving a lecture. His topic for this year’s meeting was “Genetic and Cultural Impacts on the Course of […]
We’ve all had bad experiences of sitting in lectures, trying to focus on the slides while feeling like we’re really missing out on the key points of the subject. You want to stay motivated and learn something new, but somehow the speaker doesn’t make it easy for you. How to encourage good science communication was […]
