Israeli wins chemistry Nobel for quasicrystals

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for a discovery that faced skepticism and mockery, even prompting his expulsion from his U.S. research team, before it won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough.

While doing research in the U.S. in 1982, Shechtman discovered a new chemical structure — quasicrystals — that researchers previously thought was impossible.

Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman poses for
photographers during a news conference at the
Haifa Technion, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011.
Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry
on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals,
a mosaic-like chemical structure that researchers
previously thought was impossible. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

He was studying a mix of aluminum and manganese in an electron microscope when he found the atoms were arranged in a pattern — similar to one in some traditional Islamic mosaics — that never repeated itself and appeared contrary to the laws of nature.

He concluded that science was wrong — but it would take years for him and other researchers to prove that he was right.

Since then, quasicrystals have been produced in laboratories and a Swedish company found them in one of the most durable kinds of steel, which is now used in products such as razor blades and thin needles made specifically for eye surgery, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Quasicrystals are also being studied for use in new materials that convert heat to electricity. They were first discovered in nature in Russia in 2009.

Despite the initial reluctance in the scientific community to accept his discovery, it "fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter," the academy said in its citation for the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award.

"The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks," Shechtman, 70, told a news conference Wednesday at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.

Shechtman is a professor there and at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He will receive the award along with the other Nobel Prize winners at a Dec. 10 ceremony in Stockholm.

Israel has won 10 Nobel prizes, a source of great pride in the country of just 7.8 million people. Schechtman was congratulated by Israeli President Shimon Peres, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize as Israel's foreign minister in 1994, and by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Every citizen of Israel is happy today and every Jew in the world is proud," Netanyahu said.

In chemical terms, a crystal is traditionally defined as a regular and repeating arrangement of atoms within a material. A quasicrystal presents a pattern that scientists had thought was impossible. The pattern of atoms within a material influences the material's physical properties.

"His battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter," the academy said.

Nancy B. Jackson, president of the American Chemical Society called Shechtman's discovery "one of these great scientific discoveries that go against the rules." When Shechtman announced it, other experts hesitated.

"People didn't think that this kind of crystal existed," she said. "They thought it was against the rules of nature."

Only later did some scientists go back to some of their own inexplicable findings and realized they had seen quasicrystals but not realized what they had, Jackson said.

Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy said Shechtman's discovery was one of the few Nobel Prize-winning achievements that can be dated to a single day.

Crystallographers always believed that all crystals have rotational symmetry, so that when they are rotated, they look the same. On April 8, 1982, while on a sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards and Technology in Washington, D.C., Shechtman first observed crystals with 10 points — pentagonal symmetry, which most scientists said was impossible.

"I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me," Shechtman said in a description of his work released by his university.

For months he tried to persuade his colleagues of his find, but they refused to accept it. Finally he was asked to leave his research group, and moved to another one within the institute.

Shechtman returned to Israel, where he found one colleague prepared to work with him on an article describing the phenomenon. The article was at first rejected, but finally published in November 1984 — to uproar in the scientific world. Double Nobel winner Linus Pauling was among those who never accepted the findings.

"He would stand on those platforms and declare, 'Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.'" Shechtman said.

In 1987, friends of Shechtman in France and Japan succeeded in growing crystals large enough for x-rays to repeat and verify what he had discovered with the electron microscope.

"It borders on art," academy member Sara Snogerup Linse said of the quasicrystal patterns. "Humans have created similar patterns in macroscopic scale with the help of ceramic tiles, quilts, etc. But what was new was that it was found also in the world of molecules and atoms."

Cesar Pay Gomez, a structural chemistry expert at Uppsala University in Sweden and an adviser to the prize committee, said research on quasicrystals is ongoing "in the field of thermal-electric applications, where waste heat can be converted to electrical currents or energy."

The Nobel Prize in chemistry announcement capped this year's science awards.

Immune system researchers Bruce Beutler of the U.S. and Frenchman Jules Hoffmann shared the medicine prize Monday with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman, who died three days before the announcement. U.S.-born scientists Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess won the physics prize on Tuesday for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.

The Nobel Prizes are handed out every year on Dec. 10, the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Source:

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 

Read More

Studies of universe's expansion win physics Nobel

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for overturning a fundamental assumption in their field by showing that the expansion of the universe is constantly accelerating. Their discovery created a new portrait of the eventual fate of the universe: a place of super-low temperatures and black skies unbroken by the light of galaxies moving away from each other at incredible speed. 

Nobel Prizes winner for physics Saul Perlmutter smiles as he poses with his daughter's telescope at his home in Berkeley, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2011 after hearing he had won. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said American Perlmutter would share the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award with U.S.-Australian Brian Schmidt and U.S. scientist Adam Riess. Working in two separate research teams during the 1990s, Perlmutter in one and Schmidt and Riess in the other, the scientists raced to map the universe's expansion by analyzing a particular type of supernovas, or exploding stars. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

Physicists had assumed for decades that the expansion of the universe was getting ever-slower, meaning that in billions of years it would resemble today's universe in many important ways. Then, working in separate research teams during the 1990s, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess found that the light from more than 50 distant exploding stars was far weaker than they expected, meaning that galaxies had to be racing away from each other at increasing speed. The acceleration is driven by what scientists call dark energy, a cosmic force that is one of the great mysteries of the universe. 

The Nobel-winning discovery implies instead that the universe will get increasingly colder as matter spreads across ever-vaster distances in space, said Lars Bergstrom, secretary of the Nobel physics committee. He said galaxies that are 3 million light years away from Earth move at a speed of around 44 miles per second (70 kilometers per second). Galaxies that are 6 million light years away move twice as fast. 

The research implies that billions of years from now, the universe will become "a very, very large, but very cold and lonely place," said Charles Blue, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. 

In contrast to the big bang, that fate has been called the "big rip" to indicate how galaxies would be torn apart, he said. Galaxies will be flying away so quickly that their light could not travel across the universe to distant observers as it does today, making the sky appear black, he said. "For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago," the citation said. "However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the universe will end in ice." 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Perlmutter would receive half of the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award, with Riess and Schmidt, a U.S.-born Australian, splitting the other half. Perlmutter, 52, heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley. Schmidt, 44, is the head of the High-z Supernova Search Team at the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia. Riess, 41, is an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Schmidt said he was just sitting down to have dinner with his family in Canberra, Australia, when the phone call came from the academy. "I was somewhat suspicious when the Swedish voice came on," Schmidt told The Associated Press. 

"My knees sort of went weak and I had to walk around and sort my senses out." Riess said his "jaw dropped" when he received an early-morning call at his home in Baltimore from a bunch of Swedish men and realized "it wasn't Ikea," the Swedish furniture retailer. "I'm dazed," he told AP. The discovery was "the biggest shakeup in physics, in my opinion, in the last 30 years," said Phillip Schewe, a physicist and spokesman at the Joint Quantum Institute, which is operated by the University of Maryland and the federal government. 

"I remember everyone thinking at the time (that) there was some mistake," Schewe said. But there was no mistake, and in fact the basic finding was confirmed later by other measurements. For example, other scientists found evidence for it when they analyzed the microwave radiation left over from the big bang that still bathes the universe, he said. 

Perlmutter told AP his team made the discovery in steps, analyzing the data and assuming it was wrong. "And after months, you finally believe it," he said. "It's not quite a surprise anymore. I tell people it's the longest "aha!" experience that you've ever had." Fred Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, said the prize confirmed an idea from Albert Einstein, called the cosmological constant, that Einstein inserted in his general theory of relativity, a cornerstone of modern physics. 

Einstein later repudiated that idea as his "biggest blunder," but it did lead to a lot of theoretical and experimental studies, Dylla said. The physics prize was the second Nobel to be announced this year. On Monday the medicine prize went to American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann who shared it with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman for their discoveries about the immune system. 

Steinman died three days before the announcement but since his death was not known to the committee, they decided he should keep the Nobel. Since 1974, Nobels have been awarded only to living scientists. The Nobel Prizes were established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, and have been handed out since 1901. 

Last year's physics award went to Russian-born scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for groundbreaking experiments with graphene, the strongest and thinnest material known to mankind. The prizes are handed out every year on Dec. 10, on the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

Source:
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Read More

Dead scientist awarded Nobel in medicine

STOCKHOLM (AP) — A Canadian-born scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for his discoveries about the immune system but hours later his university said that he had been dead for three days.

The Nobel committee had been unaware of Ralph Steinman's death and it was unclear whether the prize would be rescinded because Nobel statutes don't allow posthumous awards.

Steinman, 68, who shared the prize with American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann, died on Sept. 30 of pancreatic cancer, according to Rockefeller University, which said he had been treated with immunotherapy based on his discovery of dendritic cells two decades earlier.

The cells help regulate adaptive immunity, an immune system response that purges invading microorganisms from the body.

FILE - In this April 24, 2009 photo, Dr. Ralph Steinman of Rockefeller University speaks during a news conference in Albany, N.Y., Friday, April 24, 2009. The Nobel committee says American Bruce Beutler and Luxembourg-born scientist Jules Hoffmann have shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in medicine with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman on Monday, Oct. 3, 2011. Beutler and Hoffman were cited "for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity." Steinman was honored for "his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity." (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

The Nobel statutes don't allow posthumous awards unless a laureate dies after the announcement but before the Dec. 10 award ceremony. That happened in 1996 when economics winner William Vickrey died a few days after the announcement.

Nobel officials said they believed it was the first time that a laureate had died before the announcement without the committee's knowledge.

"I think you can safely say that this hasn't happened before," Nobel Foundation spokeswoman Annika Pontikis told the AP.

Nobel committee member Goran Hansson said the Nobel committee didn't know Steinman was dead when it chose him as a winner and was looking through its regulations. "It is incredibly sad news," Hansson said. "We can only regret that he didn't have the chance to receive the news he had won the Nobel Prize. Our thoughts are now with his family." The trio's discoveries have enabled the development of improved vaccines against infectious diseases. In the long term they could also yield better treatments of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and chronic inflammatory diseases, Hansson said. Beutler and Hoffmann were cited for their discoveries in the 1990s of receptor proteins that can recognize bacteria and other microorganisms as they enter the body, and activate the first line of defense in the immune system, known as innate immunity.

The discoveries have helped scientists understand why the immune system sometimes attacks its own tissues, paving the way for new ways to fight inflammatory diseases, Hansson said.

"They have made possible the development of new methods for preventing and treating disease, for instance with improved vaccines against infections and in attempts to stimulate the immune system to attack tumors," the committee said. No vaccines are on the market yet, but Hansson told AP that vaccines against hepatitis are in the pipeline. clinical trials are being done today," he said. Beutler, 53, is professor of genetics and immunology at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California. Hoffmann, 70, headed a research laboratory in Strasbourg, France, between 1974 and 2009 and served as president of the French National Academy of Sciences between 2007-2008. Steinman, 68, had been affiliated with Rockefeller University in New York since 1970, and headed its Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases. "We are all so touched that our father's many years of hard work are being recognized with a Nobel Prize," Steinman's daughter, Alexis Steinman, said in the Rockefeller University statement. "He devoted his life to his work and his family, and he would be truly honored." Hoffmann's discovery came in 1996 during research on how fruit flies fight infections. Two years later, Beutler's research on mice showed that fruit flies and mammals activate innate immunity in similar ways when attacked by germs. Steinman's discovery dates back to 1973, when he found a new cell type, the dendritic cell, which has a unique capacity to activate so-called T-cells. Those cells have a key role in adaptive immunity, when antibodies and killer cells fight infections. They also develop a memory that helps the immune system mobilize its defenses next time it comes under a similar attack. The medicine award kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements, and will be followed by the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The winners of the economics award will be announced on Oct. 10. The coveted prizes were established by wealthy Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel — the inventor of dynamite — except for the economics award, which was created by Sweden's central bank in 1968 in Nobel's memory. The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, on the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896. Last year's medicine award went to British professor Robert Edwards for fertility research that led to the first test tube baby.

Source: 

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Read More

Nobel Prize nomination for WikiLeaks

A Norwegian politician has nominated WikiLeaks for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, saying that its disclosures of classified documents promote world peace by holding governments accountable for their actions.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee keeps candidates secret for 50 years, but those with nomination rights sometimes make their picks known.

Snorre Valen, a 26-year-old legislator from Norway's Socialist Left Party, told The Associated Press on Wednesday he handed in his nomination in person on Tuesday, the last day to put forth candidates.
'I think it is important to raise a debate about freedom of expression and that truth is always the first casualty in war,' Valen said. 'WikiLeaks wants to make governments accountable for their actions and that contributes to peace.'

Valen also announced his choice on his blog, where he wrote that WikiLeaks had advanced the struggle for human rights, democracy and freedom of speech, just like last year's winner, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
Valen cited disclosures of nepotism and corruption in Tunisia's presidential family, saying WikiLeaks 'made a small contribution to bringing down' that regime.

The prize committee typically receives more than 200 nominations, so being nominated doesn't say anything about a candidate's chances of actually winning. And there's no way of knowing for sure that people who announce candidates actually submitted a legitimate nomination to the award committee.

Kristian Harpsviken, a leading Nobel-watcher and director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said he didn't consider WikiLeaks as a strong candidate for the 10 million kronor ($A1.59 million) award.
'The reason I think it's unlikely is that there has been so much criticism of WikiLeaks, not least how they have handled identification issues of people in the documents,' he said. 'I don't think it quite does the trick.'
Harpsviken keeps a list of 'possible and confirmed nominations,' based on public announcements and his own sources. His list this year includes WikiLeaks as well as Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of leaking material to the website.

Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva, Afghan human rights advocate Sima Samar, and several rights groups including US-based Wings of Hope and Cuban opposition movement Damas de Blanco are also on the list.
His own top guess is Russian rights group Memorial, followed by activists Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Ory Okolloh of Kenya.

The committee will announce the winner in October.

Source: Sky News

Read More