What is it like to win a Nobel Prize? Should you worry about picking something “important” to work on as a scientist? How can art help in trying to understand how the universe works? And what is the real key to success? You can find out by watching today’s Google Science Fair Hangout with Sir [...]

One of the pleasures of editing a magazine like Scientific American, with its 166-year history as the country’s longest continuously published magazine, is getting a “you are there” view of science as it was whenever I take a spin through our digital archives. The other day, while reading some 100-year-old prose, I was reminded of [...]

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, [...]

Tech investor Yuri Milner, who shook the physics world two months ago by dishing out $27 million to the nine inaugural awardees of his Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation’s namesake award, has just sweetened the pot. Milner’s organization today announced the addition of a new award, the Physics Frontiers Prize, which will place three individuals in [...]

Three million dollars may be small potatoes for an Internet billionaire, but it’s a lot of money for a physicist. Yesterday the Milner Foundation, founded by tech investor Yuri Milner, announced that it had awarded its inaugural Fundamental Physics Prize to nine researchers, along with a cash award of $3 million. That’s $3 million apiece, [...]

Felicitas Pauss, head of international relations at CERN in Geneva, asked for a show of hands from the audience of young scientists: Who worked on the ATLAS or CMS instruments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC? Many hands went up for each. And who worked as a theorist? More hands appeared—hundreds in all. Last, [...]

Norman F. Ramsey may not be a household name, but he was a giant of 20th-century experimental physics. His basic-science work earned him the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics and laid the foundation for technologies now used by millions of people. He died last Friday at the age of 96. In exploring how atoms and [...]

Information and media firm Thomson Reuters released its annual Nobel Prize predictions today, highlighting 24 researchers whose influential work could make them contenders for a Nobel in physics, chemistry, economics, or physiology or medicine. (The Thomson Reuters methodology, which tracks citations of research articles, does not work for forecasting the Nobels for literature or peace.) [...]

Two favorites for a Nobel Prize this year have picked up the 2010 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award—the so-called "American Nobel"—an honor that often precedes the winning of an actual Nobel. Douglas Coleman, of Jackson Laboratory, and Jeffrey Friedman, of Rockefeller University, discovered the hormone leptin, which plays an important role in the regulation [...]

The 2010 Nobel Prize announcements will not begin rolling out until October 4, but the speculation about who will be lauded this year has already begun. Thomson Reuters, the information and media giant, released its annual predictions of likely honorees September 21, based on an analysis of highly cited research papers in each field. The [...]

A couple of days ago I wrote a post discussing chemists who did significant work after receiving a Nobel Prize. The examples are few but noteworthy; accomplishing one significant piece of scientific work is hard enough, so if you manage more than one you should definitely be recognized. A commenter pointed out that there’s likely [...]

One of this year’s Nobel laureates in physics, Serge Haroche, has a few words of wisdom for fostering a good research environment. Our experiments could only have succeeded with the reliable financial support provided by the institutions that govern our laboratory, supplemented by international agencies inside and outside Europe. European mobility programs also opened our [...]

On his blog “In the Pipeline“, Derek Lowe has a contemplative post on the conditions necessary for seeing titans in particular fields, and whether these conditions can be replicated again. Building on examples from organic synthesis, music and art, he makes the case that every field has its heyday and you can never make the [...]

Brian Kobilka (Stanford) and Robert Lefkowitz (Duke) have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on one of the most important classes of proteins in living organisms, the G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). A lot of us had predicted this prize based on groundbreaking work done during the last decade on several [...]