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Winners of the week

February 2, 2010

Three good stories pulled from a long discussion, with only minor edits from the deadline posts:

By Trevor Guyette

By 2013, NASA plans to look 13.5 billion years into the past, almost to the time of the Big Bang, according a Nobel Prize winner in physics who is senior project scientist on the space agency’s James Webb Telescope.

The infrared Webb space telescope will replace the Hubble telescope, which will only be operable for another five to ten years, said John Mather  in a Nobelist panel discussion during the Origins Symposium at Arizona State University.

The Webb telescope’s gaze will penetrate gas and dust clouds, which should offer NASA the earliest glimpse of the universe’s life ever available.

By Kirsten Traynor

We know how to identify life that is like ours, but if it doesn’t look like us, how would we recognize it? Alien life could course through our veins and we wouldn’t know it, a Nobel Prize winning chemist believes.

The oceans are teeming with bacterial life, according to Dr. Walter Gilbert, whose rapid DNA sequencing techniques earned him the coveted Nobel Prize in 1980. Bacteria are some of the most successful organisms alive today, but most refuse to grow in the laboratory, so we know little about them.

By Jake Harris

A Nobel prize winning physicist says the identification of the theorized Higgs particle would lead to a unified theory of particle physics, but it would also create more questions than it answers.

Frank Wilczek, who won the award in 2004 for a key elementary particle discovery, said that the Large Hadron Collider, slated to begin operating in less than a year, will allow scientists to see the particle for the first time, and that may reveal secrets about the ubiquitous dark matter that is a cause for debate among scientists.

Sinners (Next time)

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Science as authority

January 26, 2010

PBS is conducting a poll to determine if its viewers believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be vice-president of the United States. Check this one out. Do polls carry scientific authority? Does this one carry any special authority?

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Day 0

January 19, 2010

Our pursuit of the science news emerging from the 2009 Origins Symposium begins in earnest Monday and we’ll be moving very quickly each day we meet. Today we’ll take a walk in the garden, so to speak, but beware of what wonderful new technology hath wrought. Hidden among the blossoms be dragons.

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