WASHINGTON – Earth's first nearly full look at Mercury reveals that the tiny lifeless planet took a far greater role in shaping itself than was thought, with volcanoes spewing "mysterious dark blue material."
New images from NASA's Messenger space probe should help settle a decades-old debate about what caused parts of Mercury to be somewhat smoother than it should be. NASA released photos Wednesday, from Messenger's fly-by earlier this month, that gave the answer: Lots of volcanic activity, far more than signs from an earlier probe.
Astronomers used to dismiss Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, as mere "dead rock," little more than a target for cosmic collisions that shaped it, said MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber.
"Now, it's looking a lot more interesting," said Zuber, who has experiments on the Messenger probe. "It's an awful lot of volcanic material."
New images of filled-in craters — one the size of the Baltimore-Washington area and filled in with more than a mile deep of cooled lava — show that 3.8 to 4 billion years ago, Mercury was more of a volcanic hotspot than the moon ever was, Zuber said.
But it isn't just filled-in craters. Using special cameras, the probe showed what one scientist called "the mysterious dark blue material." It was all over the planet. That led Arizona State University geologist Mark Robinson to speculate that the mineral is important but still unknown stuff ejected from Mercury's large core in the volcanic eruptions.
That material was seen with NASA's first partial view of Mercury by Mariner 10 in the 1970s. It was spotted again in Messenger's first images of Mercury's unseen side earlier this year. The latest Messenger images, added to earlier photos show about 95 percent of the planet, and the blue stuff was in many places, more than astronomers had anticipated.
Although Robinson described the material as "dark blue," it only looks that way to special infrared cameras. In normal visible light, it would have "a soft blue tinge and it would be less red" than the rest of Mercury, he said.
It's too early to tell what that material is, but it may have iron in it, Robinson said. That would be a surprise because Mariner 10 didn't find much iron, he said
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – 2 hrs 39 mins ago
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
India launches unmanned moon mission
SRIHARIKOTA, India, Oct 22 - India launched its first unmanned moon mission on Wednesday following in the footsteps of rival China, as the emerging Asian power celebrated its space ambitions and scientific prowess.
Chandrayaan-1 (Moon vehicle), a cuboid spacecraft built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) blasted off from a southern Indian space centre shortly after dawn in a boost for the country’s ambitions to gain more global space business.
Chinese astronauts were feted as national heroes last month after their country’s first space walk, and India did not want to be left behind.
”What we have started is a remarkable journey,” G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of ISRO, told reporters.
India’s national television channels broadcast the event live. Some scientists thumped their chests, hugged each other and clapped as the rocket shot up into space.
Greeted with patriotism in the media, the launch appeared to have helped India regain its self-confidence, which has taken a beating in recent weeks amid signs of an economic slowdown as well as international criticism over Hindu attacks on Christians. Perhaps remarkably in a country where hundreds of millions of people still live in desperate poverty and millions of children remain malnourished, the cost of the moon mission has scarcely been questioned.
”Destination Moon ... Historic Day For India” blazed one TV channel on its screen.
Barring any technical failure, the spacecraft will reach the lunar orbit and spend two years scanning the moon for any evidence of water and precious metals.
A gadget called the Moon Impactor Probe will detach and land on the moon to kick up some dust, while instruments in the craft analyse the particles, ISRO says.
A principal objective is to look for Helium 3, an isotope which is very rare on earth but is sought to power nuclear fusion and could be a valuable source of energy in the future, some scientists believe.
It is thought to be more plentiful on the moon, but still rare and very difficult to extract.
The project cost $79m, considerably less than the Chinese and Japanese probes in 2007 and ISRO says the moon mission will pave the way for India to claim a bigger chunk of the global space business.
The mission is also expected to carry out a detailed survey of the moon to look for precious metals and water.
For many Indians, the launch is another notch in India’s ambitions to be a global player. India recently signed a civil nuclear deal with the United States, effectively making it a defacto nuclear power.
In April India sent 10 satellites into orbit from a single rocket, and ISRO says it is planning more launches before a proposed manned mission to space and then onto Mars in four years time.
ISRO is collaborating with a number of countries, including Israel on a project to carry an ultra-violet telescope in an Indian satellite within a year.
It is also building a tropical weather satellite with France, collaborating with Japan on a project to improve disaster management from space, and developing a heavy lift satellite launcher, which it hopes to use to launch heavier satellites by 2010.
India has launched 10 remote sensing satellites since 1998, has several broadcast satellites in space to control 170 transponders and has also launched light-weight satellites for Belgium, Germany, Korea, Japan and France.
Chandrayaan-1 (Moon vehicle), a cuboid spacecraft built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) blasted off from a southern Indian space centre shortly after dawn in a boost for the country’s ambitions to gain more global space business.
Chinese astronauts were feted as national heroes last month after their country’s first space walk, and India did not want to be left behind.
”What we have started is a remarkable journey,” G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of ISRO, told reporters.
India’s national television channels broadcast the event live. Some scientists thumped their chests, hugged each other and clapped as the rocket shot up into space.
Greeted with patriotism in the media, the launch appeared to have helped India regain its self-confidence, which has taken a beating in recent weeks amid signs of an economic slowdown as well as international criticism over Hindu attacks on Christians. Perhaps remarkably in a country where hundreds of millions of people still live in desperate poverty and millions of children remain malnourished, the cost of the moon mission has scarcely been questioned.
”Destination Moon ... Historic Day For India” blazed one TV channel on its screen.
Barring any technical failure, the spacecraft will reach the lunar orbit and spend two years scanning the moon for any evidence of water and precious metals.
A gadget called the Moon Impactor Probe will detach and land on the moon to kick up some dust, while instruments in the craft analyse the particles, ISRO says.
A principal objective is to look for Helium 3, an isotope which is very rare on earth but is sought to power nuclear fusion and could be a valuable source of energy in the future, some scientists believe.
It is thought to be more plentiful on the moon, but still rare and very difficult to extract.
The project cost $79m, considerably less than the Chinese and Japanese probes in 2007 and ISRO says the moon mission will pave the way for India to claim a bigger chunk of the global space business.
The mission is also expected to carry out a detailed survey of the moon to look for precious metals and water.
For many Indians, the launch is another notch in India’s ambitions to be a global player. India recently signed a civil nuclear deal with the United States, effectively making it a defacto nuclear power.
In April India sent 10 satellites into orbit from a single rocket, and ISRO says it is planning more launches before a proposed manned mission to space and then onto Mars in four years time.
ISRO is collaborating with a number of countries, including Israel on a project to carry an ultra-violet telescope in an Indian satellite within a year.
It is also building a tropical weather satellite with France, collaborating with Japan on a project to improve disaster management from space, and developing a heavy lift satellite launcher, which it hopes to use to launch heavier satellites by 2010.
India has launched 10 remote sensing satellites since 1998, has several broadcast satellites in space to control 170 transponders and has also launched light-weight satellites for Belgium, Germany, Korea, Japan and France.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Finland's Martti Ahtisaari Wins Nobel Peace Prize
Morning Edition, October 10, 2008 · The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday that Finland's former president Martti Ahtisaari has won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was cited for his long career of peace mediation work including a 2005 accord between Indonesia and rebels in its Aceh province.
by Rob Gifford and Renee Montagne
by Rob Gifford and Renee Montagne
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Nobel Panel Decides Against U.S. HIV Discovery
All Things Considered, October 6, 2008 · This year's Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine recognizes two landmarks in the history of viral diseases. Two French researchers won for discovering the virus that causes AIDS. And a German scientist got the prize for showing that human papilloma viruses cause most cases of cervical cancer. The scientists will split the $1.4 million prize.
This year's medical Nobel ends decades of speculation about who would win the everlasting credit for discovering HIV — the deadliest virus of our time.
The surprise is not that French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier won the Nobel, but that American Robert Gallo did not share in it. Throughout most of the 1980s, the American and French researchers fought bitterly over who deserved the credit. Eventually, President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac signed a declaration that they were co-discoverers.
Today Gallo directs the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland. Its Web site identifies him as the co-discoverer of HIV. But the Nobel committee said no, the French got there first.
Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said that's the way the scientific cookie crumbles.
"When the Nobel committee looks at it, they look and they say, 'First observation, 1983.' Boom, that's it," Fauci said. "I respect that. It's just too bad, because Bob's contribution was very important. But there's a limited number of people that can get the prize."
The rules say only three people can share a Nobel. And the Nobel committee chose to split the award this year between the HIV and papilloma virus discoveries rather than include Gallo in a singular HIV prize.
Fauci says that while the French were first to isolate the virus, Gallo did a lot of the work that proved it causes AIDS.
"The actual intellectual link between the virus and HIV as the cause of AIDS was really very much slam-dunk in the series of papers in 1984 by Gallo's group" in the journal Science, Fauci said.
Today, Gallo told a reporter he was disappointed. Montagnier, who is in Africa, said his old rival deserved to share the prize. But San Francisco researcher Jay Levy — the third scientist to publish the discovery of AIDS — was content.
"In the end, what they did was quite, quite fair," Levy said. "And I congratulate them."
No such questions hover over this year's other medical Nobel laureate, German scientist Harald zur Hausen. He's worked since 1970 to convince skeptics that human papilloma viruses cause cervical cancer. Bennett Jenson, a scientific colleague at the University of Louisville, says zur Hausen has been in the running for a Nobel for a long time.
"He's the founding father, and we would have been sorely upset if he hadn't been the Nobel Prize laureate for medicine this year," Jenson said.
Fauci says zur Hausen was way ahead of his time. It's been 24 years since he first tried to persuade drug companies to develop a vaccine against cervical cancer.
Two years ago, the first such vaccine won approval. Zur Hausen wasn't available Monday. But Jensen says his friend hopes the $350 cost of the vaccine can be brought way down so millions of women around the world can avoid cervical cancer.
by Richard Knox
This year's medical Nobel ends decades of speculation about who would win the everlasting credit for discovering HIV — the deadliest virus of our time.
The surprise is not that French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier won the Nobel, but that American Robert Gallo did not share in it. Throughout most of the 1980s, the American and French researchers fought bitterly over who deserved the credit. Eventually, President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac signed a declaration that they were co-discoverers.
Today Gallo directs the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland. Its Web site identifies him as the co-discoverer of HIV. But the Nobel committee said no, the French got there first.
Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said that's the way the scientific cookie crumbles.
"When the Nobel committee looks at it, they look and they say, 'First observation, 1983.' Boom, that's it," Fauci said. "I respect that. It's just too bad, because Bob's contribution was very important. But there's a limited number of people that can get the prize."
The rules say only three people can share a Nobel. And the Nobel committee chose to split the award this year between the HIV and papilloma virus discoveries rather than include Gallo in a singular HIV prize.
Fauci says that while the French were first to isolate the virus, Gallo did a lot of the work that proved it causes AIDS.
"The actual intellectual link between the virus and HIV as the cause of AIDS was really very much slam-dunk in the series of papers in 1984 by Gallo's group" in the journal Science, Fauci said.
Today, Gallo told a reporter he was disappointed. Montagnier, who is in Africa, said his old rival deserved to share the prize. But San Francisco researcher Jay Levy — the third scientist to publish the discovery of AIDS — was content.
"In the end, what they did was quite, quite fair," Levy said. "And I congratulate them."
No such questions hover over this year's other medical Nobel laureate, German scientist Harald zur Hausen. He's worked since 1970 to convince skeptics that human papilloma viruses cause cervical cancer. Bennett Jenson, a scientific colleague at the University of Louisville, says zur Hausen has been in the running for a Nobel for a long time.
"He's the founding father, and we would have been sorely upset if he hadn't been the Nobel Prize laureate for medicine this year," Jenson said.
Fauci says zur Hausen was way ahead of his time. It's been 24 years since he first tried to persuade drug companies to develop a vaccine against cervical cancer.
Two years ago, the first such vaccine won approval. Zur Hausen wasn't available Monday. But Jensen says his friend hopes the $350 cost of the vaccine can be brought way down so millions of women around the world can avoid cervical cancer.
by Richard Knox
Jellyfish Protein Researchers Win Chemistry Nobel
All Things Considered, October 8, 2008 · The scientific work that gets a Nobel Prize these days is often hard to understand and describe. But this year's chemistry award is a crowd pleaser: It went to one Japanese and two American scientists who made things glow in the dark — with a jellyfish gene.
Roger Tsien, a professor at the University of California San Diego; Martin Chalfie of Columbia University; and Osamu Shimomura, a Japanese researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., were recognized for their work in advancing understanding of the machinery inside living cells.
Life is essentially an intricate dance of proteins inside every cell of our bodies — proteins that were too tiny to be seen.
So for decades, scientists have been trying to find a way to make that invisible world visible.
Fifteen years ago, Tsien tried attaching chemical dyes to a protein. It didn't work very well, and he thought what he really needed was a gene that makes the protein visible.
"Nobody knew of such a thing in the literature, but I sort of vaguely remembered that there was this protein thing called 'green fluorescent protein,'" Tsien says.
The protein came from a type of jellyfish and had been purified and described by Shimomura in the 1960s. It also glowed green when exposed to ultraviolet light.
Both Tsien and Chalfie tried inserting the gene that produced the protein into cells. No one knew if the technique would work, Tsien says, but "the amazing thing is that nature suddenly smiled."
The gene worked beautifully in bacteria, worms and lots of other creatures. Under ultraviolet light, it made proteins in the cell glow a ghostly shade of green. Thousands of researchers worldwide now use it to track proteins; they can watch cancer cells or viruses multiply and spread.
Tsien, Chalfie and Shimomura all got telephone calls from the Swedish Academy of Sciences early this morning.
Chalfie says he slept through his call. At a news conference later, he explained that he'd accidentally set his phone to ring very softly. When he got out of bed, though, he remembered it was the day the Nobel Prize in chemistry was to be announced.
"So I decided to find out who the schnook was that won it this year, so I opened up my laptop and found out that I was the schnook," Chalfie says. "The other two people are very good scientists."
Chalfie's research group was the first to insert the gene that produces the green florescent protein into another cell.
Tsien expanded the technique, creating an entire toolbox of glowing genes. He tinkered with the gene, creating dozens of new versions that glow in many colors. This allows researchers to tag different proteins with distinctive colors and observe their interactions.
"This is a practical Nobel Prize. This is something that has transformed medical research," says John Frangioni of Harvard Medical School.
"When we're able to cure terrible human diseases such as cancer and neurologic diseases, we're going to be able to trace that back to research that at some point used these fluorescent proteins," Frangioni says.
Tsien was thinking that maybe it was time to stop working on florescent proteins and move on to something new. But he says he recently discovered something else about them that's worth pursuing.
"The science calls," he says, "I can't quite punt this one away."
by Dan Charles
Roger Tsien, a professor at the University of California San Diego; Martin Chalfie of Columbia University; and Osamu Shimomura, a Japanese researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., were recognized for their work in advancing understanding of the machinery inside living cells.
Life is essentially an intricate dance of proteins inside every cell of our bodies — proteins that were too tiny to be seen.
So for decades, scientists have been trying to find a way to make that invisible world visible.
Fifteen years ago, Tsien tried attaching chemical dyes to a protein. It didn't work very well, and he thought what he really needed was a gene that makes the protein visible.
"Nobody knew of such a thing in the literature, but I sort of vaguely remembered that there was this protein thing called 'green fluorescent protein,'" Tsien says.
The protein came from a type of jellyfish and had been purified and described by Shimomura in the 1960s. It also glowed green when exposed to ultraviolet light.
Both Tsien and Chalfie tried inserting the gene that produced the protein into cells. No one knew if the technique would work, Tsien says, but "the amazing thing is that nature suddenly smiled."
The gene worked beautifully in bacteria, worms and lots of other creatures. Under ultraviolet light, it made proteins in the cell glow a ghostly shade of green. Thousands of researchers worldwide now use it to track proteins; they can watch cancer cells or viruses multiply and spread.
Tsien, Chalfie and Shimomura all got telephone calls from the Swedish Academy of Sciences early this morning.
Chalfie says he slept through his call. At a news conference later, he explained that he'd accidentally set his phone to ring very softly. When he got out of bed, though, he remembered it was the day the Nobel Prize in chemistry was to be announced.
"So I decided to find out who the schnook was that won it this year, so I opened up my laptop and found out that I was the schnook," Chalfie says. "The other two people are very good scientists."
Chalfie's research group was the first to insert the gene that produces the green florescent protein into another cell.
Tsien expanded the technique, creating an entire toolbox of glowing genes. He tinkered with the gene, creating dozens of new versions that glow in many colors. This allows researchers to tag different proteins with distinctive colors and observe their interactions.
"This is a practical Nobel Prize. This is something that has transformed medical research," says John Frangioni of Harvard Medical School.
"When we're able to cure terrible human diseases such as cancer and neurologic diseases, we're going to be able to trace that back to research that at some point used these fluorescent proteins," Frangioni says.
Tsien was thinking that maybe it was time to stop working on florescent proteins and move on to something new. But he says he recently discovered something else about them that's worth pursuing.
"The science calls," he says, "I can't quite punt this one away."
by Dan Charles
France's Le Clezio wins Nobel literature prize
STOCKHOLM, Sweden October 9, 2008, 01:12 pm ET · France's Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for works characterized by "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" and focused on the environment, especially the desert.
Le Clezio, 68, is the first French writer to win the prestigious award since Chinese-born Frenchman Gao Xingjian was honored in 2000 and the 14th since the Nobel Prizes began in 1901.
The decision was in line with the Swedish Academy's recent picks of European authors and followed days of vitriolic debate about whether the jury was anti-American.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed Le Clezio's win as a sign of France's worldwide cultural influence.
"A child in Mauritius and Nigeria, a teenager in Nice, a nomad of the American and African deserts, Jean-Marie Le Clezio is a citizen of the world, the son of all continents and cultures," Sarkozy said. "A great traveler, he embodies the influence of France, its culture and its values in a globalized world."
The academy called Le Clezio, who also holds Mauritian citizenship, an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
Le Clezio made his breakthrough as a novelist with "Desert," in 1980, a work the academy said "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants."
That novel, which also won Le Clezio a prize from the French Academy, is considered a masterpiece. It describes the ordeal of Lalla, a woman from the Tuareg nomadic tribe of the Sahara Desert, as she adapts to civilization imposed by colonial France.
The Swedish Academy said Le Clezio from early on "stood out as an ecologically engaged author, an orientation that is accentuated with the novels 'Terra Amata,' 'The Book of Flights,' 'War' and 'The Giants.'"
Speaking to reporters in Paris, Le Clezio said he was very honored and described feeling waves of emotion upon hearing the news.
"(I felt) some kind of incredulity, and then some kind of awe, and then some kind of joy and mirth," he said.
Asked if he deserved the prize, he replied "Why not?"
Le Clezio said he would attend the prize ceremony in December in Stockholm and was already planning to travel to Sweden later this month to receive another award — the Stig Dagerman prize, which honors efforts to promote the freedom of expression.
Since Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe won the award in 1994, the selections have had a distinctively European flavor. Since then 12 Europeans, including Le Clezio and last year's winner Doris Lessing of Britain, have won the prize.
The last U.S. writer to win the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993.
Last week, Academy Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl told The Associated Press that the United States is too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world. The comments ignited a fierce reaction across the Atlantic, where the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation offered to send Engdahl a reading list.
"I was very surprised that the reaction was so violent. I don't think that what I said was that derogatory or sensational," Engdahl told AP after Thursday's prize announcement.
He added his comments had been "perhaps a bit too generalizing."
Asked how he thought the choice of Le Clezio would be received in the United States, he said he had no idea.
"He's not a particularly French writer, if you look at him from a strictly cultural point of view. So I don't think this choice will give rise to any anti-French comments," he said. "I would be very sad if that was the case."
Richard Howard, an award-winning poet who has translated many works from French, including a couple of early short stories by Le Clezio, called him "a very gifted and remarkable writer."
"I loved the first books and I regard him with a great deal of respect and affection," Howard said.
Le Clezio has spent much time living in New Mexico in recent years. He has long shied away from public life and often traveled, especially to the world's deserts. The academy said he and his Moroccan wife, Jemia, split their time between Albuquerque, N. M., Mauritius and Nice.
He has published several dozen books, including novels, essays and children's books. His most famous works are tales of nomads, mediations on the desert and childhood memories. He has also explored the mythologies of native Americans.
The academy said Le Clezio's long stays in Mexico and Central America in the mid-70s had a decisive influence on his work.
Engdahl called Le Clezio a writer of great diversity.
"He has gone through many different phases of his development as a writer and has come to include other civilizations, other modes of living than the Western, in his writing," Engdahl said.
Le Clezio was born in Nice in 1940 and at eight the family moved to Nigeria, where his father had been a doctor during World War II. They returned to France in 1950. Le Clezio tells the story of his father in the 2004 "L'Africain."
He studied English at Bristol University in 1958-59 and completed his undergraduate degree at the Institut d'etudes Litteraires in Nice. He went on to earn a master's degree at the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1964 and wrote a doctoral thesis on Mexico's early history at the University of Perpignan in 1983.
Le Clezio has taught at universities in Bangkok; Mexico City; Boston; Austin, Texas and Albuquerque among other places, the academy said.
In Brussels, the European Commission said it was "delighted" that the award went to a European.
Besides the 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) check, Le Clezio will also receive a gold medal and be invited to lecture at the academy's headquarters in Stockholm's Old Town.
The Nobel Prize in literature is handed out in Stockholm on Dec. 10 — the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896 — along with the awards in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics. The Nobel Peace Prize is presented in Oslo, Norway.
———
Associated Press writers Malin Rising and Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm, Alfred de Montesquiou in Algiers, Angela Doland in Paris and Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
———
On the Net:
http://www.svenskaakademien.se
http://www.nobelprize.org
from The Associated Press
Le Clezio, 68, is the first French writer to win the prestigious award since Chinese-born Frenchman Gao Xingjian was honored in 2000 and the 14th since the Nobel Prizes began in 1901.
The decision was in line with the Swedish Academy's recent picks of European authors and followed days of vitriolic debate about whether the jury was anti-American.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed Le Clezio's win as a sign of France's worldwide cultural influence.
"A child in Mauritius and Nigeria, a teenager in Nice, a nomad of the American and African deserts, Jean-Marie Le Clezio is a citizen of the world, the son of all continents and cultures," Sarkozy said. "A great traveler, he embodies the influence of France, its culture and its values in a globalized world."
The academy called Le Clezio, who also holds Mauritian citizenship, an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
Le Clezio made his breakthrough as a novelist with "Desert," in 1980, a work the academy said "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants."
That novel, which also won Le Clezio a prize from the French Academy, is considered a masterpiece. It describes the ordeal of Lalla, a woman from the Tuareg nomadic tribe of the Sahara Desert, as she adapts to civilization imposed by colonial France.
The Swedish Academy said Le Clezio from early on "stood out as an ecologically engaged author, an orientation that is accentuated with the novels 'Terra Amata,' 'The Book of Flights,' 'War' and 'The Giants.'"
Speaking to reporters in Paris, Le Clezio said he was very honored and described feeling waves of emotion upon hearing the news.
"(I felt) some kind of incredulity, and then some kind of awe, and then some kind of joy and mirth," he said.
Asked if he deserved the prize, he replied "Why not?"
Le Clezio said he would attend the prize ceremony in December in Stockholm and was already planning to travel to Sweden later this month to receive another award — the Stig Dagerman prize, which honors efforts to promote the freedom of expression.
Since Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe won the award in 1994, the selections have had a distinctively European flavor. Since then 12 Europeans, including Le Clezio and last year's winner Doris Lessing of Britain, have won the prize.
The last U.S. writer to win the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993.
Last week, Academy Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl told The Associated Press that the United States is too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world. The comments ignited a fierce reaction across the Atlantic, where the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation offered to send Engdahl a reading list.
"I was very surprised that the reaction was so violent. I don't think that what I said was that derogatory or sensational," Engdahl told AP after Thursday's prize announcement.
He added his comments had been "perhaps a bit too generalizing."
Asked how he thought the choice of Le Clezio would be received in the United States, he said he had no idea.
"He's not a particularly French writer, if you look at him from a strictly cultural point of view. So I don't think this choice will give rise to any anti-French comments," he said. "I would be very sad if that was the case."
Richard Howard, an award-winning poet who has translated many works from French, including a couple of early short stories by Le Clezio, called him "a very gifted and remarkable writer."
"I loved the first books and I regard him with a great deal of respect and affection," Howard said.
Le Clezio has spent much time living in New Mexico in recent years. He has long shied away from public life and often traveled, especially to the world's deserts. The academy said he and his Moroccan wife, Jemia, split their time between Albuquerque, N. M., Mauritius and Nice.
He has published several dozen books, including novels, essays and children's books. His most famous works are tales of nomads, mediations on the desert and childhood memories. He has also explored the mythologies of native Americans.
The academy said Le Clezio's long stays in Mexico and Central America in the mid-70s had a decisive influence on his work.
Engdahl called Le Clezio a writer of great diversity.
"He has gone through many different phases of his development as a writer and has come to include other civilizations, other modes of living than the Western, in his writing," Engdahl said.
Le Clezio was born in Nice in 1940 and at eight the family moved to Nigeria, where his father had been a doctor during World War II. They returned to France in 1950. Le Clezio tells the story of his father in the 2004 "L'Africain."
He studied English at Bristol University in 1958-59 and completed his undergraduate degree at the Institut d'etudes Litteraires in Nice. He went on to earn a master's degree at the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1964 and wrote a doctoral thesis on Mexico's early history at the University of Perpignan in 1983.
Le Clezio has taught at universities in Bangkok; Mexico City; Boston; Austin, Texas and Albuquerque among other places, the academy said.
In Brussels, the European Commission said it was "delighted" that the award went to a European.
Besides the 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) check, Le Clezio will also receive a gold medal and be invited to lecture at the academy's headquarters in Stockholm's Old Town.
The Nobel Prize in literature is handed out in Stockholm on Dec. 10 — the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896 — along with the awards in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics. The Nobel Peace Prize is presented in Oslo, Norway.
———
Associated Press writers Malin Rising and Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm, Alfred de Montesquiou in Algiers, Angela Doland in Paris and Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
———
On the Net:
http://www.svenskaakademien.se
http://www.nobelprize.org
from The Associated Press
Controversy Embroils Nobel Literature Prize
Even before the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature was announced Thursday morning, it was already drawing attention — for the wrong reasons. An official of the Swedish Academy — which awards the Nobel Prizes — caused a furor last week when he described American literature as isolated and insular, and therefore unqualified for literature's most prestigious award.
Playwright Edward Albee, whose credits include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Zoo Story, has gained a sort of cranky perspective when it comes to awards. "All prizes are peculiar," he says. "There's politics in everything, and some judges just don't know what they're doing."
Albee points to a long list of great 20th century writers who were passed over by the Nobel judges: Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and W.H. Auden.
Novelist Richard Russo says you could create a pretty good award out of just that list. Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls. He was baffled when the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, told the Associated Press last month that "Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States."
Russo called the statement "more curious than anything else. This idea of suggesting that literature is in a physical place — that doesn't make sense to me at all." Nor did it make sense to Russo when Engdahl charged that the United States does not participate in the "big dialogue" of literature.
"I think the book itself is the dialogue," says Russo. "If I or any other writer writes a great book, then that book is our contribution to the dialogue."
Some American Writers Were Furious
At least one writer responded to Engdahl's statement with language unprintable here. An essayist for the online magazine Slate proposed that the U.S. secede from what he called "the sham the Nobel Prize for literature has become."
That makes author Francine Prose chuckle. "Actually, I'd prefer to retain our ties with the international community, as attenuated as it might be," she says.
Prose is president of the Pen American Center, which champions writers' rights around the world. Because three of the past four Nobel literature winners have been outspoken critics of the U.S. and its foreign policy, some people have accused the Swedish Academy of favoring anti-American writers. Prose is not so sure.
"Any prize goes through phases," she says, "and it seems as if, for a certain number of years, they're rewarding certain kinds of books, but the range is — and always has been — really quite enormous."
Still, Prose says that Engdahl had a point when he criticized U.S. publishers for not promoting more literature in translation. Novelist Junot Diaz — who won this year's Pulitzer Prize in literature — says something good could actually come out of this controversy.
"If this encourages the average American to read one more book in translation — if only to spite the kind of sneering Eurocentric elitism of this one individual — that's not a bad thing," he says.
Nor would it be so bad, Diaz says, if it incited U.S. publishers to translate more work from other parts of the world. He has a tip for them: the young Mexican writer Martin Solares. His work, Diaz says, is brilliant, but mostly unavailable in English — or, in Swedish.
by Neda Ulaby
Playwright Edward Albee, whose credits include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Zoo Story, has gained a sort of cranky perspective when it comes to awards. "All prizes are peculiar," he says. "There's politics in everything, and some judges just don't know what they're doing."
Albee points to a long list of great 20th century writers who were passed over by the Nobel judges: Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and W.H. Auden.
Novelist Richard Russo says you could create a pretty good award out of just that list. Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls. He was baffled when the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, told the Associated Press last month that "Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States."
Russo called the statement "more curious than anything else. This idea of suggesting that literature is in a physical place — that doesn't make sense to me at all." Nor did it make sense to Russo when Engdahl charged that the United States does not participate in the "big dialogue" of literature.
"I think the book itself is the dialogue," says Russo. "If I or any other writer writes a great book, then that book is our contribution to the dialogue."
Some American Writers Were Furious
At least one writer responded to Engdahl's statement with language unprintable here. An essayist for the online magazine Slate proposed that the U.S. secede from what he called "the sham the Nobel Prize for literature has become."
That makes author Francine Prose chuckle. "Actually, I'd prefer to retain our ties with the international community, as attenuated as it might be," she says.
Prose is president of the Pen American Center, which champions writers' rights around the world. Because three of the past four Nobel literature winners have been outspoken critics of the U.S. and its foreign policy, some people have accused the Swedish Academy of favoring anti-American writers. Prose is not so sure.
"Any prize goes through phases," she says, "and it seems as if, for a certain number of years, they're rewarding certain kinds of books, but the range is — and always has been — really quite enormous."
Still, Prose says that Engdahl had a point when he criticized U.S. publishers for not promoting more literature in translation. Novelist Junot Diaz — who won this year's Pulitzer Prize in literature — says something good could actually come out of this controversy.
"If this encourages the average American to read one more book in translation — if only to spite the kind of sneering Eurocentric elitism of this one individual — that's not a bad thing," he says.
Nor would it be so bad, Diaz says, if it incited U.S. publishers to translate more work from other parts of the world. He has a tip for them: the young Mexican writer Martin Solares. His work, Diaz says, is brilliant, but mostly unavailable in English — or, in Swedish.
by Neda Ulaby
French Novelist Awarded Nobel Literature Prize
All Things Considered, October 9, 2008 · French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature. Antoine Compagnon, a professor of French Literature at Columbia University, says there are two periods in Le Clezio's work: it was more experimental in the 1960s and '70s, and later it featured traveling and exoticism.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
3 share Nobel prize for work on AIDS and cancer
Three European scientists shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for separate discoveries of viruses that cause AIDS and cervical cancer, breakthroughs that helped doctors fight the deadly diseases.
French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were cited for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in 1983.
They shared the award with Germany's Harald zur Hausen, who was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.
U.S. researcher Dr. Robert Gallo was locked in a dispute with Montagnier in the 1980s over the relative importance of their roles in groundbreaking research into HIV and its role in AIDS. Gallo told The Associated Press that he was disappointed at not being included in the prize.
Montagnier told the AP in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he is attending an international AIDS conference, that he was still optimistic about conquering the disease.
The prize, he said, "encourages us all to keep going until we reach the goal at the end of this effort."
Montagnier said he wished the prize had also gone to Gallo.
"It is certain that he deserved this as much as us two," he said.
Zur Hausen, a German medical doctor and scientist, received half of the 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million) prize, while the two French researchers shared the other half.
Zur Hausen discovered two high-risk types of the HPV virus and made them available to the scientific community, ultimately leading to the development of vaccines protecting against infection.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccine Gardasil in 2006 for the prevention of cervical cancer in girls and women ages 9 to 26.
The vaccine works by protecting against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV — including the two that zur Hausen discovered — that cause most cases of cervical cancers. The HPV virus, transmitted by sexual contact, causes genital warts that sometimes develop into cancer.
"I'm not prepared for this," zur Hausen, 72, of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, told the AP by telephone. "We're drinking a little glass of bubbly right now."
In its citation, the Nobel Assembly said Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier's discovery was one prerequisite for understanding the biology of AIDS and its treatment with antiviral drugs. The pair's work in the early 1980s made it possible to study the virus closely.
That in turn let scientists identify important details in how HIV replicates and how it interacts with the cells it infects, the citation said. It also led to ways to diagnose infected people and to screen blood for HIV, which has limited spread of the epidemic, and helped scientists develop anti-HIV drugs, the citation said.
"The combination of prevention and treatment has substantially decreased spread of the disease and dramatically increased life expectancy among treated patients," the citation said.
Barre-Sinoussi said that when she and Montagnier isolated the virus 25 years ago they naively hoped that they would be able to prevent the global AIDS epidemic that followed.
"We naively thought that the discovery of the virus would allow us to quickly learn more about it, to develop diagnostic tests — which has been done — and to develop treatments, which has also been done to a large extent and, most of all, develop a vaccine that would prevent the global epidemic," she told the AP by telephone from Cambodia.
Gallo, director of the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland and a prominent early researcher in HIV, said it was "a disappointment" not to be honored along with Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi.
But he said all three of the award's recipients deserved the honor. No more than three people can share a Nobel Prize.
His dispute with Montagnier reached such a level in 1987 that then-President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France penned an agreement dividing millions of dollars in royalties from the AIDS blood test. The settlement led to an agreement that officially credited the Gallo and Montagnier labs with co-discovering the virus.
In the 1990s, however, the U.S. government acknowledged that the French deserved a greater share of the royalties. The admission solidified the French position that Montagnier had isolated the virus in 1983, a year before Gallo.
Maria Masucci, member of the Nobel Assembly, said there was no dispute in the scientific community that the French pair discovered and characterized the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, agreed there's no doubt the French scientists first identified the virus. He said they, and zur Hausen, deserved the Nobel.
Fauci said that if additional researchers could have been included, Gallo "would have been an obvious choice to be added to that list."
That's because of Gallo's roles in showing that HIV causes AIDS and in the technical advance that allowed the isolation of HIV, Fauci said.
The Nobel Assembly said zur Hausen "went against current dogma" when he found that some kinds of human papilloma virus, or HPV, caused cervical cancer. He realized that DNA of HPV could be detected in tumors, and uncovered a family of HPV types, only some of which cause cancer.
The discovery led to an understanding of how HPV causes cancer and the development of vaccines against HPV infection, the citation said.
Barre-Sinoussi, 61, is director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Union at the Institut Pasteur in France, while Montagnier, 76, is the director for the World Foundation for AIDS Research in Prevention, also in the French capital.
from The Associated Press.
French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were cited for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in 1983.
They shared the award with Germany's Harald zur Hausen, who was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.
U.S. researcher Dr. Robert Gallo was locked in a dispute with Montagnier in the 1980s over the relative importance of their roles in groundbreaking research into HIV and its role in AIDS. Gallo told The Associated Press that he was disappointed at not being included in the prize.
Montagnier told the AP in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he is attending an international AIDS conference, that he was still optimistic about conquering the disease.
The prize, he said, "encourages us all to keep going until we reach the goal at the end of this effort."
Montagnier said he wished the prize had also gone to Gallo.
"It is certain that he deserved this as much as us two," he said.
Zur Hausen, a German medical doctor and scientist, received half of the 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million) prize, while the two French researchers shared the other half.
Zur Hausen discovered two high-risk types of the HPV virus and made them available to the scientific community, ultimately leading to the development of vaccines protecting against infection.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccine Gardasil in 2006 for the prevention of cervical cancer in girls and women ages 9 to 26.
The vaccine works by protecting against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV — including the two that zur Hausen discovered — that cause most cases of cervical cancers. The HPV virus, transmitted by sexual contact, causes genital warts that sometimes develop into cancer.
"I'm not prepared for this," zur Hausen, 72, of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, told the AP by telephone. "We're drinking a little glass of bubbly right now."
In its citation, the Nobel Assembly said Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier's discovery was one prerequisite for understanding the biology of AIDS and its treatment with antiviral drugs. The pair's work in the early 1980s made it possible to study the virus closely.
That in turn let scientists identify important details in how HIV replicates and how it interacts with the cells it infects, the citation said. It also led to ways to diagnose infected people and to screen blood for HIV, which has limited spread of the epidemic, and helped scientists develop anti-HIV drugs, the citation said.
"The combination of prevention and treatment has substantially decreased spread of the disease and dramatically increased life expectancy among treated patients," the citation said.
Barre-Sinoussi said that when she and Montagnier isolated the virus 25 years ago they naively hoped that they would be able to prevent the global AIDS epidemic that followed.
"We naively thought that the discovery of the virus would allow us to quickly learn more about it, to develop diagnostic tests — which has been done — and to develop treatments, which has also been done to a large extent and, most of all, develop a vaccine that would prevent the global epidemic," she told the AP by telephone from Cambodia.
Gallo, director of the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland and a prominent early researcher in HIV, said it was "a disappointment" not to be honored along with Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi.
But he said all three of the award's recipients deserved the honor. No more than three people can share a Nobel Prize.
His dispute with Montagnier reached such a level in 1987 that then-President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France penned an agreement dividing millions of dollars in royalties from the AIDS blood test. The settlement led to an agreement that officially credited the Gallo and Montagnier labs with co-discovering the virus.
In the 1990s, however, the U.S. government acknowledged that the French deserved a greater share of the royalties. The admission solidified the French position that Montagnier had isolated the virus in 1983, a year before Gallo.
Maria Masucci, member of the Nobel Assembly, said there was no dispute in the scientific community that the French pair discovered and characterized the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, agreed there's no doubt the French scientists first identified the virus. He said they, and zur Hausen, deserved the Nobel.
Fauci said that if additional researchers could have been included, Gallo "would have been an obvious choice to be added to that list."
That's because of Gallo's roles in showing that HIV causes AIDS and in the technical advance that allowed the isolation of HIV, Fauci said.
The Nobel Assembly said zur Hausen "went against current dogma" when he found that some kinds of human papilloma virus, or HPV, caused cervical cancer. He realized that DNA of HPV could be detected in tumors, and uncovered a family of HPV types, only some of which cause cancer.
The discovery led to an understanding of how HPV causes cancer and the development of vaccines against HPV infection, the citation said.
Barre-Sinoussi, 61, is director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Union at the Institut Pasteur in France, while Montagnier, 76, is the director for the World Foundation for AIDS Research in Prevention, also in the French capital.
from The Associated Press.
Nobel Prize In Medicine For Major Virus Discoveries
Morning Edition, October 6, 2008 · The 2008 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine goes to two French scientists for discovering the virus that causes AIDS. A German researcher shares the prize for discovering the viruses that cause cervical cancer.
Half the $1.4 million prize goes to Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi for their discovery of the AIDS virus. The other half goes to Harald zur Hausen, who established that most cervical cancer is caused by two types of human papilloma viruses.
In the case of HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, the Nobel committee clearly waited until the dust settled over a bitter controversy over who really discovered the virus in the early 1980s — Americans or the French. The committee apparently accepts the results of an investigation done 15 years ago, which concluded that the American virus was actually a contaminant from the French lab.
Zur Hausen's work with HPV led to highly effective new vaccines — among the first to protect against cancer.
by Richard Knox and Steve Inskeep
Half the $1.4 million prize goes to Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi for their discovery of the AIDS virus. The other half goes to Harald zur Hausen, who established that most cervical cancer is caused by two types of human papilloma viruses.
In the case of HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, the Nobel committee clearly waited until the dust settled over a bitter controversy over who really discovered the virus in the early 1980s — Americans or the French. The committee apparently accepts the results of an investigation done 15 years ago, which concluded that the American virus was actually a contaminant from the French lab.
Zur Hausen's work with HPV led to highly effective new vaccines — among the first to protect against cancer.
by Richard Knox and Steve Inskeep
Nobel Honors Glimpse Into Universe's Design
All Things Considered, October 7, 2008 · An American physicist and two Japanese physicists won the Nobel Prize on Tuesday for their work on understanding the breakdown of symmetries in the laws of nature.
Most people intuitively know what symmetry is; they see it in people's faces and in snowflakes. But theoretical physicists think about symmetry as it relates to the fundamental workings of the universe.
Yoichiro Nambu, 87, was woken up early this morning by a phone call — a call he'd pretty much given up on. It was Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences, telling him he had won the Nobel Prize for a paper he wrote on something called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. Nambu's paper helped explain some of the fundamental forces of nature, and why different particles have different masses.
"My paper came out 1960, I believe. It was a long, long time ago," says Nambu. He added that he's honored and happy to get the prize, but that he didn't expect it after so many years had passed.
He shares the prize, and $1.4 million, with two researchers in Japan. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa explored another kind of symmetry breaking. Their work in the 1970s led to the prediction that physicists should eventually find new types of the subatomic particles known as quarks. And experiments have proved them right.
"These three gentlemen provided theories that explain one of the most fundamental aspects of existence. How symmetric is the universe?" says Philip Schewe, a spokesperson for the American Institute of Physics.
"We sort of instinctively want the universe to be symmetric, we want it to be regular, and the fact that it's not is kind of interesting."
Experts say that understanding asymmetries is important because they are at the heart of what makes life possible.
For example, when the Big Bang created the cosmos some 14 billion years ago, it didn't create equal amounts of matter and antimatter. That's a good thing, because they would have cancelled each other out. Scientists are still trying to understand why there was just a tiny bit of extra matter created, a little asymmetry that was the seed of our whole universe. The person who figures that one out might someday win a Nobel of their own.
Nambu came to the United States from Japan in 1952 and is now a citizen. He's worked at the University of Chicago for decades. Some of his colleagues in Chicago say the honor is long overdue.
"We'd been talking about it for years that he deserved it. He's such a shy and humble man; those kinds of people don't always win the prize," says Joe Lykken, a particle physicist at Fermilab in Illinois.
"But the Nobel committee has finally wised up and done the right thing for him," Lykken says of the man he calls one of his personal heroes.
Kobayashi and Maskawa's research, Lykken says, was built on the work of an Italian physicist named Nicola Cabibbo.
"These three people — Cabibbo, Kobayashi, and Maskawa — are mentioned so often together that we usually just say C-K-M rather than saying all three of their multisyllabic names," says Lykken.
Some scientists might wonder why Cabibbo wasn't honored by the committee. But the rules state that the Nobel can go to only three scientists.
by Nell Greenfieldboyce
Most people intuitively know what symmetry is; they see it in people's faces and in snowflakes. But theoretical physicists think about symmetry as it relates to the fundamental workings of the universe.
Yoichiro Nambu, 87, was woken up early this morning by a phone call — a call he'd pretty much given up on. It was Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences, telling him he had won the Nobel Prize for a paper he wrote on something called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. Nambu's paper helped explain some of the fundamental forces of nature, and why different particles have different masses.
"My paper came out 1960, I believe. It was a long, long time ago," says Nambu. He added that he's honored and happy to get the prize, but that he didn't expect it after so many years had passed.
He shares the prize, and $1.4 million, with two researchers in Japan. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa explored another kind of symmetry breaking. Their work in the 1970s led to the prediction that physicists should eventually find new types of the subatomic particles known as quarks. And experiments have proved them right.
"These three gentlemen provided theories that explain one of the most fundamental aspects of existence. How symmetric is the universe?" says Philip Schewe, a spokesperson for the American Institute of Physics.
"We sort of instinctively want the universe to be symmetric, we want it to be regular, and the fact that it's not is kind of interesting."
Experts say that understanding asymmetries is important because they are at the heart of what makes life possible.
For example, when the Big Bang created the cosmos some 14 billion years ago, it didn't create equal amounts of matter and antimatter. That's a good thing, because they would have cancelled each other out. Scientists are still trying to understand why there was just a tiny bit of extra matter created, a little asymmetry that was the seed of our whole universe. The person who figures that one out might someday win a Nobel of their own.
Nambu came to the United States from Japan in 1952 and is now a citizen. He's worked at the University of Chicago for decades. Some of his colleagues in Chicago say the honor is long overdue.
"We'd been talking about it for years that he deserved it. He's such a shy and humble man; those kinds of people don't always win the prize," says Joe Lykken, a particle physicist at Fermilab in Illinois.
"But the Nobel committee has finally wised up and done the right thing for him," Lykken says of the man he calls one of his personal heroes.
Kobayashi and Maskawa's research, Lykken says, was built on the work of an Italian physicist named Nicola Cabibbo.
"These three people — Cabibbo, Kobayashi, and Maskawa — are mentioned so often together that we usually just say C-K-M rather than saying all three of their multisyllabic names," says Lykken.
Some scientists might wonder why Cabibbo wasn't honored by the committee. But the rules state that the Nobel can go to only three scientists.
by Nell Greenfieldboyce
Friday, October 03, 2008
Trouble on Hubble delays last shuttle service mission: NASA
WASHINGTON (AFP) - NASA has delayed the final service mission of the Atlantis space shuttle to the Hubble space telescope, probably until early 2009, after a "significant anomaly" occurred on the orbiting telescope.
"It's obvious that October 14 is off the table" for launching Atlantis, John Burch, the shuttle program manager at NASA's space center in Houston, Texas, told a telephone news conference.
The most likely new launch date for the mission to Hubble would be in February next year, the officials said.
On Saturday, Science Data Formatter side A, the unit on Hubble that took data from five instruments, formatted it and sent it back to the ground, providing NASA with spectacular images of space, "totally failed," Preston Burch, Hubble manager at Goddard space flight center near Washington said.
NASA was working to get Hubble back up and "doing science" in a matter of days by reconfiguring a unit on Hubble that has laid dormant during the 18 years that the telescope has been in orbit, to do the work of the failed unit.
But that would require some complex manoeuvers and would only be a stop-gap measure, the scientists said.
"If we just switch over to Side B of the Science Data Formatter, we would be left with a system that has several single-point failures, and that would be a risk to the mission for the long duration," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington.
"Barring some unforeseen circumstance, our plan right now is to take the delay and put up the new hardware so that we can keep Hubble going as long as possible," he said.
"If we're going to spend the money and take all the risk involved in a shuttle mission we want to make sure that we leave Hubble as healthy as we possibly can and potentially locked in for the next five to 10 years," Weiler said.
Hubble is due to be replaced in 2013 by a new space telescope with an eagle-eyed camera that scientists hope will lift the veil from the origins and mysteries of the universe.
Every month that the service mission to Hubble is delayed represents a cost to NASA of around 10 million dollars, the officials said.
But the extra cost was unlikely to prompt the US space agency to "throw up its hands and abandon Hubble," Weiler said.
"I don't see anyone throwing in the towel because we have to spend a few more tens of millions to get this done," he said.
"Think about the other option -- if this failure had occurred two weeks after this last service mission," he said.
Launched 18 years ago, Hubble revolutionized astronomy by peering deep into the universe, beaming back dazzling images free of the distortions from Earth's atmosphere.
Orbiting 575 kilometers (360 miles) above Earth, Hubble has enabled scientists to better measure the age and origins of the universe, observe distant supernovas, and identify and study bodies in and outside the solar system.
All that, in spite of the Hubble program being declared dead in 1990.
"Not only did it survive, but we became the great American comeback story," Weiler said.
"Hubble has a habit of coming back from adversity... we'll find a way to get this fixed," he said.
"Luckily we have a spare. We have to test it out and do due diligence to make sure it's working right, but we do have a spare on the ground. We anticipated this kind of problem 20 years ago," he said.
"It's obvious that October 14 is off the table" for launching Atlantis, John Burch, the shuttle program manager at NASA's space center in Houston, Texas, told a telephone news conference.
The most likely new launch date for the mission to Hubble would be in February next year, the officials said.
On Saturday, Science Data Formatter side A, the unit on Hubble that took data from five instruments, formatted it and sent it back to the ground, providing NASA with spectacular images of space, "totally failed," Preston Burch, Hubble manager at Goddard space flight center near Washington said.
NASA was working to get Hubble back up and "doing science" in a matter of days by reconfiguring a unit on Hubble that has laid dormant during the 18 years that the telescope has been in orbit, to do the work of the failed unit.
But that would require some complex manoeuvers and would only be a stop-gap measure, the scientists said.
"If we just switch over to Side B of the Science Data Formatter, we would be left with a system that has several single-point failures, and that would be a risk to the mission for the long duration," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington.
"Barring some unforeseen circumstance, our plan right now is to take the delay and put up the new hardware so that we can keep Hubble going as long as possible," he said.
"If we're going to spend the money and take all the risk involved in a shuttle mission we want to make sure that we leave Hubble as healthy as we possibly can and potentially locked in for the next five to 10 years," Weiler said.
Hubble is due to be replaced in 2013 by a new space telescope with an eagle-eyed camera that scientists hope will lift the veil from the origins and mysteries of the universe.
Every month that the service mission to Hubble is delayed represents a cost to NASA of around 10 million dollars, the officials said.
But the extra cost was unlikely to prompt the US space agency to "throw up its hands and abandon Hubble," Weiler said.
"I don't see anyone throwing in the towel because we have to spend a few more tens of millions to get this done," he said.
"Think about the other option -- if this failure had occurred two weeks after this last service mission," he said.
Launched 18 years ago, Hubble revolutionized astronomy by peering deep into the universe, beaming back dazzling images free of the distortions from Earth's atmosphere.
Orbiting 575 kilometers (360 miles) above Earth, Hubble has enabled scientists to better measure the age and origins of the universe, observe distant supernovas, and identify and study bodies in and outside the solar system.
All that, in spite of the Hubble program being declared dead in 1990.
"Not only did it survive, but we became the great American comeback story," Weiler said.
"Hubble has a habit of coming back from adversity... we'll find a way to get this fixed," he said.
"Luckily we have a spare. We have to test it out and do due diligence to make sure it's working right, but we do have a spare on the ground. We anticipated this kind of problem 20 years ago," he said.
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