Gore and Peace

Despite having a UK high court judge rule this week that there were nine errors in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore is quite clearly having a good week.

Cue outrage from US climate change delusionists (and probably some complaints from sceptics that the film is over-the-top, which it is, rather than a pack of lies, which it isn't)

As for the nine errors - that's also open to debate if they were errors...

Nobel Prize for Literature goes to someone I've heard of

Yes, it's the two cultures problem again (and have I only heard of Doris Lessing because she's from the same country as me?). Although any arts-type person who would be offended at me for not having heard of, say, Orhan Pamuk before last year should be able to honestly swear they'd heard of Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg before this week if they're going to even *think* of sneering at me (and I can easily prove I had).

Back to the literature - Doris Lessing is quoted as saying that in the 1960's they "sent one of their minions" to tell her she'd never get the prize, and then

"So now they've decided they're going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?"

Well, the distinguished gentlemen who didn't like you then were probably over 40. Add 50 years and... well, they're dead, or at least long retired.

Surface scientist gets a birthday present

The surface chemist in my office seems pretty happy that a man in his field (the man who built the field?) Gerhard Ertl has won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

He did express some suprise that it was awarded alone - while Ertl is clearly worthy, he did think that Gabor Somorjai would share the award. Would have been interesting to hear that discussion.

Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Fert and Grünberg

The award is "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance" - for the non-scientific, this could mean "making modern hard drives possible". iPods, digital camcorders, YouTube, Flickr, etc. etc - all these owe their commercial success to Fert and Grünberg's discovery in 1988.

Nobel Prize goes to stem cell group

I see on Reuters (the Nobel Foundation website itself having gone down) that Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on Stem Cells / gene targeting.

Evans, now at University of Wales, Cardiff,, derived embryonic stem cells with Matt Kaufman at Cambridge in the 1980s. Capecchi (University of Utah, Salt Lake City) and Smithies (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) used homologous recombination to target specific genes in cells.

The same researchers had won the Lasker Prize in 2001.