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)
