Archive by date | November 2013

Frederick Sanger, father of DNA sequencing, dead at 95

Fred Sanger

Frederick Sanger, who won two Nobel Prizes for his work on DNA and protein sequencing, died yesterday, according to a spokesperson at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He was 95.  Read more

Balzan prizes honour research on ‘spooky action at a distance’ and infectious bacteria

Balzan prizes honour research on 'spooky action at a distance' and infectious bacteria

A physicist and a bacteriologist, both French, have claimed two of this year’s Balzan prizes, each worth 750,000 Swiss francs (US$ 800,000), the Italo-Swiss International Balzan Prize Foundation announced today.  Read more

Updated: White House announces Energy Department nominees

President Barack Obama today nominated Franklin “Lynn” Orr, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, as under secretary for science at the Department of Energy. Orr’s nomination was accompanied by that of Marc Kastner, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, to head the department’s office of science.  Read more

Ocean acidification could trigger economic devastation

Modelled global sea-surface pH.

Coral reefs, shellfish, and even top predators such as tuna could be devastated as human carbon-dioxide emissions continue to acidify the world’s oceans. These and other impacts of anthropogenic ocean acidification are laid out in a new expert assessment, released today.  Read more

WMO: 2013 among the ten warmest years on record

The year 2013 is on course to becoming the seventh-warmest year since climate records began in 1850. The average surface temperature during January to September has been 0.48 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 average, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s provisional State of the Climate report, released today.  Read more

Swedish scientists decry government links to anti-GMO ‘vandals’

A group of Swedish scientists challenged their government in an open letter on 22 October in which they alleged that Swedish foreign aid has supported vandalism in the Philippines against research plots of genetically modified crops.  Read more