Powerful microscopy technique brings proteins into focus

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a technology has become more important because the field that it revolutionised – structural biology – has become more important. The international scientific community had this rise in fortunes, so to speak, acknowledged when the Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to three people in 2017 for perfecting its use to …

Before seeing, there are the ways of imaging

When May-Britt Moser, Edvard Moser and John O’Keefe were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”, there was a noticeable uptick in the number of articles on similar subjects in the popular as well as scientific literature in the following …

Are the papers behind this year’s Nobel Prizes in the public domain?

Note: One of my editors thought this post would work for The Wire as well, so it’s been republished there. “… for the greatest benefit of mankind” – these words are scrawled across a banner that adorns the Nobel Prize’s homepage. They are the words of Alfred Nobel, who instituted the prizes and bequeathed his …

Are the papers behind this year's Nobel Prizes in the public domain?

Note: One of my editors thought this post would work for The Wire as well, so it’s been republished there. “… for the greatest benefit of mankind” – these words are scrawled across a banner that adorns the Nobel Prize’s homepage. They are the words of Alfred Nobel, who instituted the prizes and bequeathed his …

Ways of seeing

A lot of the physics of 2015 was about how the ways in which we study the natural world had been improved or were improving.