Things I Like - Sciences

This was a big week for science – the Nobel prizes were awarded. We had medicine on Monday, physics on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday.

• Elizabeth Blackburn, Jack Szostak and Carol Greider all share this year's Nobel Prize for medicine for their discovery into how chromosomes are copied and protected.
  
• Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and George Smith share the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics for breakthrough work in fiber optics and for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit.
  
• The Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath's for their (independent) work on the atom-by-atom mapping of the protein-making factories within cells.

I’m sure that these are important contributions, but I have a hard time getting excited about them. Not so the Ig Nobel awards that were made last week. From the Improbable Research site:

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.

2009 Awards:

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid —
specifically from tequila.


Public Health Prize winner Dr. Elena Bodnar demonstrates her invention — a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.

Now these are scientifc contributions that I can at least understand.