Greying

Alfred Nobel’s fortune should, according to his will, endow “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”. But the committees that select the recipients of Nobel prizes often pick discoveries made, or books written, decades earlier. Partly as a result of that, winners’ ages have been inching steadily upwards. Since 2000 only 8% of those winning prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine have been under 50. This compares with 36% of those who received awards in those subjects in the 20th century. As of 2015 (the 2016 award had not been made when The Economist went to press) no one under 50 has yet won the economics prize—though this is not a real Nobel prize, and is therefore not covered by the will’s prescriptions. The peace prize is the lone exception to the trend. Its recipient in 2014, 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai, is the youngest Nobel laureate ever.

Source: Economist

Elevated intelligence

Source: Economist

The 2016 Nobel prize for chemistry goes to three nanotechnologists

BIGGER is not always better. Anyone who doubts that has only to look at the explosion of computing power that has marked the past half-century. This was made possible by continual shrinkage of the components from which those computers are made—and that success has, in turn, inspired a search for other areas where shrinkage might also yield dividends.

One such, which has been poised delicately between hype and hope since the 1990s, is nanotechnology. Though what people mean by this has changed over the years—to the extent that cynics might be forgiven for wondering if it is more than just a fancy rebranding of the word “chemistry”—nanotechnology did originally have a fairly clear definition. It was the idea that machines with moving parts could be made on a molecular scale. And this year’s Nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three researchers, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa, who have never lost sight of that original definition.

Dr Sauvage’s contribution was to link atoms together in a new and potentially useful way. Conventional molecules are held together by bonds in which electrons…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The 2016 Nobel prize for physics goes to three unexpected recipients

YOU cannot have half a hole. That is the essence of topology, a branch of geometry which deals in “invariants”, such as holes, that can exist in geometric shapes only in discrete, integer numbers. This year’s Nobel prize for physics has gone to three researchers who have applied topology to materials science, and have come up with theoretical explanations about the behaviour of unusual states of matter as a result.

The winners are David Thouless of the University of Washington, in Seattle, Duncan Haldane of Princeton University, in New Jersey, and Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. All three are products of the 20th-century “brain drain” that saw British-born researchers head west to the larger salaries and better laboratories of America.

Dr Thouless, who takes home half of the SKr8m ($930,000) prize, collaborated with Dr Kosterlitz, who shares the other half with Dr Haldane, in the 1970s, when both were still in Britain. The fruit of their collaboration was to overthrow the idea that superconductivity (a phenomenon in which the resistance of an electrical conductor vanishes, usually when it…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The 2016 Nobel prize for medicine goes to work on biological recycling

LONG before the green movement existed, evolution discovered the virtues of recycling. Cells cannot afford to waste materials, so they disassemble worn-out components for reuse. This happens in subcellular structures called lysosomes, which are bubble-like vesicles filled with digestive enzymes and surrounded by fatty membranes.

Moreover, in an emergency, even components that are still working may be recycled in this way to provide energy needed to keep a starving cell alive, rather as someone facing extremely cold weather may choose to burn his furniture rather than freeze to death. The process is called autophagy (from the Greek for “self-eating”), and the elucidation of its details has been the life’s work of Yoshinori Ohsumi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (pictured above), who is the winner of this year’s Nobel prize for physiology or medicine.

Before Dr Ohsumi’s studies, biologists knew that autophagy was a two-step process. First, the cellular components to be recycled are enclosed in a fatty membrane to create another type of vesicle, an autophagosome. Then the autophagosome merges with a lysosome, and the…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The 2016 Nobel prize for medicine goes to biological recycling

LONG before the green movement existed, evolution discovered the virtues of recycling. Cells cannot afford to waste materials, so they disassemble worn-out components for reuse. This happens in subcellular structures called lysosomes, which are bubble-like vesicles filled with digestive enzymes and surrounded by fatty membranes.

Moreover, in an emergency, even components that are still working may be recycled in this way to provide energy needed to keep a starving cell alive, rather as someone facing extremely cold weather may choose to burn his furniture rather than freeze to death. The process is called autophagy (from the Greek for “self-eating”), and the elucidation of its details has been the life’s work of Yoshinori Ohsumi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (pictured above), who is the winner of this year’s Nobel prize for physiology or medicine.

Before Dr Ohsumi’s studies, biologists knew that autophagy was a two-step process. First, the cellular components to be recycled are enclosed in a fatty membrane to create another type of vesicle, an autophagosome. Then the autophagosome merges with a lysosome, and the…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The world is not enough

“I’D LIKE to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Elon Musk has never been shy about his reasons for founding SpaceX, a rocketry firm that has become the flag-carrier for a buccaneering “New Space” industry. Although two recent rocket explosions have dented its halo, its launch prices are among the lowest in the world. It has pioneered the technology of returning expended rocket stages to Earth for later reuse, landing them back on special pads or on ocean-going barges, which should cut costs still further. As a result, it has a thick book of orders from private firms and the American government to fly satellites into orbit and cargo—and, eventually, astronauts—to the International Space Station.

But building better rockets has never been the real point. Mr Musk, who grew up on a diet of science fiction and video games, sees the various companies he has founded as ways to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Tesla, an electric-car maker, and Solar City, a solar-power firm, were set up to encourage a switch to cleaner forms of energy. SpaceX’s goal is loftier. Mr Musk has repeatedly said that he believes that human beings must learn how to live on…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Interplanetary travel

Source: Economist

In a whole new light

Once upon a time

FLICKERING lamps are normally a headache-inducing nuisance. But if the flickering happens millions of times a second—far faster than the eye can see or the brain respond to—then it might be harnessed to do something useful, like transmitting data. That, at least, is the idea behind a technology dubbed Li-Fi by its creators.

Li-Fi works with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), an increasingly popular way of illuminating homes and offices, and applies the same principle as that used by naval signal lamps. In other words, it encodes messages in flashes of light. It can be used to create a local-area network, or LAN, in a way similar to the LANs made possible by standard, microwave-based Wi-Fi.

Such LANs would, Li-Fi’s supporters believe, have two advantages over standard Wi-Fi. One is that light does not penetrate walls. A Li-Fi LAN in a windowless room is thus more secure than one using Wi-Fi, whose microwave signals pass easily through most building materials and can thus be listened to by outsiders. The other advantage is that light does not interfere with radio or radar signals in the way that…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Rehydration therapy

MAKING vaccines often involves growing bugs—and these days the bugs in question are frequently genetically modified. There are, with good reason, strict regulations about the use and transport of such modified organisms, for fear that something bad might escape and thrive in the wild. And this has led to vaccine-producing bugs being grown in secure, centralised “foundries”, whence their products are distributed to the wider world.

That works well when the relevant bits of the wider world have decent infrastructure for handling vaccines—particularly networks of reliable refrigerators, known as cold chains, to keep them stable. But this is not always so, especially in certain parts of the tropics, where vaccines are often needed most. So it would be nice to have a safe and robust way of making vaccines on site in such places, thereby shortening the cold chain. And, as he reports in Cell, James Collins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thinks that he may have developed one.

The fear of an engineered bug escaping and thriving does not extend to bits of bugs, since these cannot reproduce by themselves. Dr Collins…Continue reading
Source: Economist