The day the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is announced is chemistry's day in the mainstream spotlight. For chemists there's genuine emotion and excitement behind the announcement. People stay up late (or get up early) to watch it.
Follow the reaction to the prize on the web with this Storify timeline.
You know Nobel Prize season's near when the predictions start emerging. "This is the Oscars for nerds," Paul Bracher, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
who maintains the chemistry-themed blog ChemBark, told the journal Science's blog ScienceInsider.2011 Predictions - Science - Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters picks its 2011 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates - researchers likely to be in contention for Nobel honors.
Chemistry Nobel Time. In the Pipeline:" Patent Trolling, Money and Fun | Main | XMRV: This Is Not Good " The first week in October is on us again, and this Wednesday is the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. So what can we say about who should get it (and about who actually will?)- The Twitterverse is, well, a-twitter with excitement.
- Who says scientists don't have a sense of humor? Not sure whether this is humor, ego, or some combination of the two.
Love my job. Just got an agenda with the disclaimer "if we win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, this meeting is cancelled" #UCBerkeleyQuite a few Nobel-watchers have been tee'd off in recent years that Chemistry laureates' research has slanted too far towards the biological. Of course, not everyone agrees with that. But it's still amusing to watch.
The anticipation is global.
So much for predictions. This year's winner wasn't on the major lists. And more than a few chemists, including Martyn Poliakoff of Periodic Table of Videos fame, admitted they weren't familiar with the work.
- Not everyone missed the quasicrystal boat. C&E News covered Shechtman's work back in 1999.
SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY
QUASICRYSTALS: A NEW KIND OF ORDER Endowed with unusually ordered structures, highly symmetric metallic compounds possess intriguing properties that attract investigators In 1982, Dan Shechtman peered through the window at the viewing stage of an electron microscope and saw something that broke the rules of crystallography.And researchers who'd worked in the quasicrystal area rejoiced at the announcement.
My PhD thesis topic, yay! RT @NatureNews 2011 Nobel in Chemistry to Daniel Shechtman "for discovery of quasicrystals". ow.ly/6NTNx
carmendrahl
Carmen Drahl
Science reporter and blogger at Chemical & Engineering News. PhD chemist. Follow me for the latest in chemistry, biotech, and pharma
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