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Showing posts with the label nobel prize

Solar plane lands in New York City

A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said.  The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website.  Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...

The discovery of Neutrino 'flip' wins physics Nobel Prize

Takaaki Kajita and  Arthur McDonald Neutrinos are ubiquitous subatomic particles with almost no mass and which rarely interact with anything else, making them very difficult to study.  Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald led two teams which made key observations of the particles inside big underground instruments in Japan and Canada.  They were named on Tuesday morning at a news conference in Stockholm, Sweden.  Goran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which decides on the award, declared: "This year's prize is about changes of identity among some of the most abundant inhabitants of the Universe."  Telephoning Prof McDonald from the conference, he said: "Good morning again - I'm the guy who woke you up about 45 minutes ago."Prof McDonald was in Canada, where he is a professor of particle physics at Queen's University in Kingston. He said hearing the news was "a very daunting experience". "For...

The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine split two ways for groundbreaking work on parasitic diseases

Nobel prize ceremony William C Campbell and Satoshi ÅŒmura found a new way of tackling infections caused by roundworm parasites. Youyou Tu shares the prize for her discovery of a therapy against malaria.  The Nobel committee said the work had changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people affected by these diseases.The mosquito-borne disease malaria kills more than 450,000 people each year around the world, with billions more at risk of catching the infection. Parasitic worms affect a third of the world's population and cause a number of illnesses, including river blindness and lymphatic filariasis.