How to explain science Nobels

Freud and the Nobel trauma

STOCKHOLM, Oct 1, (AFP): What do a pretzel, a lock of hair and a scream have in common? They’ve all been used to explain the highly complex scientific research honoured with a Nobel Prize to the general public.

In recent years, the various Nobel science prize committees have gone to great lengths to make the pioneering discoveries understandable to a broad audience, occasionally finding creative and amusing ways of getting their message across.

“I think we’re sometimes a little scared of being too adventurous when presenting the Nobel Prize because it’s serious and important,” Sven Lidin, who served for 12 years as a member of the Nobel chemistry committee, told AFP.

This year’s Nobel Prize season kicks off on Oct 2 with the medicine prize, followed by the physics prize on Oct 3 and the chemistry prize on Oct 4. The prizes for literature, peace and economics will be announced in the days that follow.

The tough task of conveying the prizes’ significance beyond academic and scientific circles is one the various committees take seriously.

“If you’re going to reach out to others than scientists then you have to make a lot of effort and also make sure it’s accurate,” said Lidin, who chaired the Nobel chemistry committee from 2012 to 2014.

Currently a chemistry professor at Lund University, Lidin stunned the audience and elicited laughs when he shouted “Boo!” under a painting inspired by Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” to explain the 2012 Nobel

are trying to identify those who lived outside the danger zone.” (AP)

Warm weather prevent spawning runs:

The summerlike weather at the end of chemistry prize.

“Do you remember the last time you got really scared? The dryness of the mouth, the heart that skips a beat... These are signs that your body is getting ready for flight or fight,” he said at the time.

Lidin was explaining the discovery of “G-protein-coupled receptors”.

Not many people may know what they are, but they’re crucial: they help our cells react to adrenaline and hormones, explaining how cardiac cells know to raise the heart rate when we are startled, for example.

And in 2014, the chemistry Nobel honoured “the development of superresolved fluorescence microscopy”, according to the prize citation.

Hmmm. Once again, you’re not alone if you don’t know what that is.

Surprised

To explain it, Lidin surprised the audience by pulling out a lock of his own hair to show how the prizewinners had laid the foundations for the development of nanoscopy, an ultrapowerful microscope that enables scientists to closely look at the inner workings of a cell, revolutionising disease research.

“It’s very important to not just make a show out of (the announcement), but to also make it relevant,” he said. Specialised Thors Hans Hansson, a member of the Nobel physics committee, made headlines last year when he brought a cinnamon bun, a pretzel and a bagel to explain the field of topology, a highly specialised mathematics field studying

September is keeping some of the landlocked Atlantic salmon in Lake Champlain from making the runs up the Winooski River to their traditional spawning grounds, a biologist says.

In the last week, no salmon have been

In this July 6, 2015 file photo, Thai customs officials display seized ivory, being smuggled from Congo to Laos, in Bangkok, Thailand. The illegal sale of African ivory in Laos is surging even as neighboring China phases out its own legal ivory market, highlighting the challenge of curbing wildlife trafficking across porous

borders, a conservation group said on Sept 28, 2017. (AP)

unusual phases or states of matter.

Referring to the two holes in the pretzel, the one hole in the bagel, and the shape of a bun, Hansson demonstrated that topology explains how a material’s shape can be completely deformed into a new one without losing its core properties.

The committees are also keen to explain why the public should care about the research, providing examples of practical applications.

The G-protein-coupled receptors discovery, for instance, has led to lifechanging methods for antihistamines and psychiatric medications with fewer side effects.

And for topology, the physics committee noted that it may one day yield superfast and small computers.

Sigmund Freud, a man of letters or the mind? Neither, according to the Nobel committees, which not only gave the father of psychoanalysis the cold shoulder but even criticised his work.

Nominated for the Nobel Medicine Prize for the first time in 1915 by US neurologist William Alanson White, Freud went on to be nominated for a Nobel a total of 13 times until 1938, one year before his death in London.

Freud’s name was put forward 12 times for a Medicine Prize and once for a Literature Prize.

In 1937, no fewer than 14 prominent scientists, including several Nobel laureates, backed the nomination of the Austrian doctor, who liked to compare himself to Copernicus and Darwin.

found in the fish lift at the Winooski One hydro-electric plant at the waterfall between the cities of Burlington and Winooski, where they would be moved to a truck that would carry them to a spot in the river in North Williston, where they are released.

“Right now they are probably not thinking about coming up the river till things cool off a little bit,” said Nicholas Staats, a fish biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. (AP)

Poland rejects EU evidence:

Poland on Friday rejected evidence put before the European Court of Justice to prove illegal logging in the Bialowieza forest, a protected UNESCO site that includes Europe’s last primeval woodland.

During a court hearing in Luxembourg on Sept 11, the European Commission’s representative showed satellite images of Bialowieza to show that Warsaw is defying the court’s temporary injunction to suspend logging there.

Poland has “found that the documents brought by the Commission have no value as evidence given their poor quality,” the environment ministry said in a statement.

The satellite images are “imprecise and there’s no way of verifying when and where they were taken, which calls into question their reliability”, it added. (AFP)