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19 most recent scientific breakthroughs

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By scooby

 Scientists in many fields have been getting little attention over the last two years or so...

https://theweek.com/health-and-science/1019386/recent-scientific-breakthroughs

Comments

Anonymous said…


Can you feel it!? The odds of the NIF Nobel prize are looking good. I keep seeing NIF fusion all over the place.

I give it a good chance we are going to see a NIF Nobel this years. The buzz is there. What I am not sure who exactly would get it for NIF or laser fusion?

I think John Hopkin Nuckolls is still alive, so he would be good. Brunton, Ed Moses, Miller?

By the way I am serious that this could be a prize. Another prediction is it could be just one person for laser ignition in general, one for tokamaks, one for some laser plasma. Plasma is underrepresented in the prize. The Nobel committee also loves lasers, so it could be another laser years with someone from NIF and some other laser person.

9/24/2023 10:48 PM
Anonymous said…
This isn't a very good article, for example hasn't bempedoic acid been studied for a long time? And there are a number of approaches for malaria vaccines, as well as universal flu vaccines, this article is very selective, ignoring the long history, the varied efforts in progress, and the fact these are not really fully solved problems.

I don't know if the gravitational wave study they mentioned was really a breakthrough either, given that there were already Nobel prizes related to that -- binary pulsars and LIGO as I recall.

Also the original physics describing why nuclei fuse to form heavier elements in stars, was I think, worked out by people like Bethe, Gamow, Hoyle -- I thought Bethe won the Nobel prize for this! Wasn't that the main "fusion breakthrough", in terms of actual science and not technology?
9/25/2023 7:04 AM
Anonymous said…
This is a good article by the way about why Hoyle never won the Nobel --

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/oct/03/fred-hoyle-nobel-prize
9/25/2023 3:32 PM
Anonymous said…
This is an interesting story about Gamow too -- evidently Gamow predicted Big Bang nucleosynthesis (not stellar fusion as I thought) and the observed abundance of Helium:

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200804/physicshistory.cfm

It looks like he added Bethe's name to a paper, meaning his student would get less credit of course, whereas Hoyle irritated the Nobel committee by claiming that someone's student should have received credit in another prize, causing him to miss out himself:

https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/22/archives/hoyle-disputes-nobel-physics-award.html

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/oct/03/fred-hoyle-nobel-prize
9/26/2023 9:26 AM
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