When Brian Schmidt got his PhD in astrophysics in 1993, he was one of less than a handful of people that year that graduated with a thesis on supernovae. Five years later, still working on exploding stars, he would be part of one of two teams that independently discovered that the universe was not only [...]

Heather Gray, a researcher working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, was at this year’s Lindau meeting. I spoke to her over email before it started to find out about her expectations, and afterwards she told me about her impressions of the meeting and what it was like to watch the announcement from CERN with [...]

If you don’t know English, you can still understand Shakespeare’s stories, Sir Harold Kroto told me after his lecture at Lindau on Thursday. But, crucially, “you cannot understand his use of language, because language is a cultural thing – and the culture is lost in translation.” ‘Lost in translation’ was the title of Kroto’s lecture [...]

By their very nature, those discoveries that most change the way we think about nature cannot be anticipated This was Douglas Osheroff’s claim at the start of his lecture on Wednesday morning, where he promised to tell the young researchers at Lindau “how advances in science are made”. In his talk Osheroff offered five things [...]

“From a dream with atoms and spins and electrons dancing around, to a device that we use in our daily life” is how Albert Fert described the link between fundamental physics and its applications. His talk during the Tuesday morning session at Lindau focused on how fundamental research could be spun off into new electronic [...]

Heather Gray, originally from South Africa and currently working at CERN, is one of the attendees producing a video diary to document her time at the Lindau meeting this year. I caught up with her over email just before the start of the meeting to find out what a day’s work at CERN is really like [...]

In less than two weeks time I’ll be boarding a plane from London to Zurich and then zipping across the Swiss-German border to Lindau by train. I’m pretty excited about it – it will be the first time I’ve stepped foot outside of the UK since before I started my Physics degree five years ago, [...]

What can be done about global health? It’s the question on everyone’s minds following Peter Agre’s moving talk on malaria ‘without borders’ earlier in the week and Christian De Duve handing the baton of all the world’s challenges to the young researchers in the last lecture: "Our generation has made a mess of it… the future [...]

The future of medicine is contained in "The Four P’s": Personalised, Predictive, Preventative, and Participatory. Aaron Ciechanover, speaking on a panel on the future of biomedicine at the Lindau meeting, explains: "We may have the ability to profile patients before they get sick, therefore we may have the ability to predict diseases – and also ‘preventative’ [...]

I fear I have already offended Professor Torsten Wiesel only one question into our interview. The softly spoken man and gentle man sitting in front of me is a Nobel Laureate for his work on identifying specialist cell functions in the visual cortex. The Swedish laureate won the prize in 1981, and I am speaking to him [...]

Joke van Bemmel (imagine how to say it with a Dutch accent – ‘y’ for ‘j’), is a researcher from The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. The enthusiastic 29-year-old van Bemmel is nearing the end of her PhD, and is currently applying to find the ideal postdoc position. The dream is to: "just be doing nice, [...]

Even if you adore red meat, you’ll put off your big juicy steak by hearing what Harald zur Hausen has to say about it. At the 61st Lindau meeting, the Nobel laureate spoke about his current hypothesis about why beef causes colorectal cancer. He thinks it might contain a nasty pathogen that infects us that then causes [...]

It was an accidental mutation of the Tetrahymena thermophila (left), a pond organism, during a lab experiment that revealed that the enzyme telomerase keeps the protective caps on the end of chromosomes long. Speaking at the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates at Lindau, Elisabeth Blackburn compared the caps, called telomeres, to the tips on the [...]

Madhurima Benekareddy  is a 27-year-old researcher standing at the cross-roads of psychology and neuroscience. She researches the effects of trauma on the brain in its delicate stages of development, when we are children and adolescents, at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research  in Mumbai , India. The young brain is more plastic , and therefore [...]

On the last day of formal plenary talks at the 62nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, the laureates dispensed several lessons while describing their research experiences to the attending students, from developing expertise to enduring in the face of doubt. (You can read all our coverage of the Lindau meeting this week, including the “30 under [...]

With excitement building about an announcement due tomorrow from scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider, today’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting talks kicked off with the Higgs, explored some mysterious anomalies with neutrinos and looked forward to some practical applications of spintronics coming soon in information and communication technologies. (You can read all our coverage [...]

LINDAU, Germany—A vaccine to prevent infections of cancer-causing human papilloma virus (HPV) is currently approved for use in the U.S. in boys and girls and in the U.K. in girls. The U.S. public health campaign focuses on vaccinating girls. The virologist who won a Nobel Prize for confirming that HPV causes cervical cancer supports educational [...]

LINDAU, Germany—Microsoft founder Bill Gates thrilled a crowd of 566 young researchers from 77 countries gathered here June 26 for the opening ceremony of the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates, and he wasted no time in telling them what to do. His advice was borne of his own trajectory from technologist to billionaire to philanthropist. [...]

LINDAU, Germany—Play hard. Learn to explain what you do to people who know nothing about science. Put your collaborators’ needs first. A Thursday panel here at the 60th annual Nobel Laureate Lectures at Lindau gave young scientists tips—sometimes counterintuitive—about what it takes to succeed. Play Hard. “I really don’t think you have to work hard,” [...]

LINDAU, Germany—Quick: What do MRI machines, rockets, fiber optics, LCDs, food production and welding have in common? They all require the inert, or noble, gas helium for their use or at some stage of their production. And that helium essentially could be gone in less than three decades, Robert C. Richardson, winner, along with Douglas [...]

LINDAU, Germany—What steps led to the origin of life on Earth? Scientists may be zeroing in on that most profound of questions. “We’ve gone a long way to showing” the processes that “set the stage” for cellular life on Earth, Jack Szostak said Tuesday here in his talk at the 60th annual Nobel Laureate Lectures [...]

LINDAU, Germany–What’s the best way to address a politically charged topic such as the future of energy? Remove the politics. “We’re going to skip over the politics,” Robert P. Laughlin, who won a Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, told a rapt audience of young scientists and others here at the 60th annual Nobel Laureate [...]

LINDAU, Germany–An astronomer once told me about how he was often miserable growing up as the picked-on nerd. Nobody, he said, had ever told him the big secret: that if you stick with science, you win. You will have a fascinating career, meet and collaborate with intelligent and passionate people, and even get to travel [...]