Searching through the LHC data flood for dark matter
As we mentioned in recent coverage, a hypothesis called supersymmetry is one of the leading candidates to fix the problems that have appeared in the Standard Model, which explains the behavior of the fundamental components of mat...
Astronomy and particle physics race to replace Standard Model
If energy issues seem to be attracting the attention of a lot of physicists, the Large Hadron Collider seems to be drawing the attention of many of the rest of them, including people in fields...
Energy, sustainability, and public understanding of climate
One of the interesting things that the Lindau Meeting made clear is that (if you'll excuse a gross generalization), the physics community is splitting in two. A large chunk of it, from theoreticians to cosmologists, is focused on...
What happens when we run out of oil and coal?
Many of the plans for addressing climate change rely on 20- to 50-year roadmaps of increased efficiency and use of renewable energy. But, as Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin pointed out in his talk at the Lindau Meeting, we're...
Paragon of science or crackpot? Life after winning a Nobel
The public generally views winning the Nobel Prize as reaching the pinnacle of scientific achievement, which raises an awkward question: does that mean it's inevitably downhill from there? For many laureates, research careers con...
Cells have many ways to live, only a couple of ways to die
Robert Horvitz's Nobel Prize came largely for his work in turning a small, transparent worm that lives in the dirt into an experimental system that has won several others Nobel Prizes since. But his pioneering use of C....
How to win a Nobel Prize: fail, persist, iterate
To hear Oliver Smithies tell it, there was a direct line from one of his first lab projects to the experiments that won him a Nobel Prize. Smithies showed that it was possible to target genes for disruption in...
A short history of the history of the Universe
John Mather, along with George Smoot, won the Nobel Prize for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), the probe that first caught glimpses of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) left over...
The origin of life: putting chemistry inside a cell
The fact that RNA appears to play a role in the chemical reactions that take place at a ribosome was one of the pieces of evidence that helped point to our current model for the origin of life: ...
Building better antibiotics (by understanding the ribosome)
This week (and possibly a bit beyond), Nobel Intent will be bringing you coverage of a rather exceptional event, the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, being held in Germany. It's an annual meeting that brings together scientists in ......
