Beware the diabolical in the sublime
Scientists must take responsibility for the consequences of their discoveries, argues Joseph Rotblat, and the mantle should sit most heavily on the shoulders of the Nobel laureates. In his elegant...
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The greatest prize of all
What gets a Nobel laureate excited? Guest editor Harry Kroto says the buzz in his field comes from nanoscience but warns that mankind is in danger if we lose our most precious possession, the freedom...
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Emission to kill
The hole in the ozone over Antarctica surprised a world that thought it was polluting only its cities. Paul Crutzen asks what other shocks lie in store. From an evolutionary point of view, Homo...
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How to win a Nobel prize
You know what you have to do to join the ranks of the great science laureates, but just as important is what you don't do. Leo Esaki has a list of golden rules to help you on your way to stardom in...
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Champions of conscience
Truth and human rights are thrust ahead of personal ambition in a community that hails heretics as heroes, argues John Polanyi. Science denotes knowledge from observation of the outside world....
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Repulse the march of the morons
Freedom, democracy and open-mindedness must be education's battle cry post-September 11 and our war should be one on ignorance and the anti-thinking that pervades our bandwidths, says Leon Lederman....
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Vacuum gleaning
It may be empty space but it's full of promise for the future of fundamental physics and cosmology - if only we can crack how much energy it contains, says Steven Weinberg. The energy of empty space...
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All our worldly good..
Is globalisation, the ideal before us for a just society, the new face of racism, asks Nadine Gordimer. Many communities in the world, and many individuals outside but humanly concerned about such...
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A purpose in the past
The child of a mixed marriage, Günter Grass argues that his Polish-Slav and German roots may have had an impact on his development as a writer. My mother was of Kaschubian origin, my father a German...
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Hungry for solid solutions
The greatest prize for humanity would be an end to poverty but there is no easy answer, writes James Mirrlees. Fifty years ago, health, peace and poverty reduction were the world's priorities, but...
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Truth, unlike a meal, can be hard to swallow
More animals are eaten at the average conference dinner than were used in experiments that resulted in drugs that saved millions of people's lives. John Vane urges us to put vivisection into...
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Blueprint for a new age
The decoding of the human genome has helped to deliver the molecular motors that will drive the technologies of the future, writes John Walker. The decoding of the human genome is an enormous...
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Cosmology and a matter outstanding
Over the past half century, the origins of the universe have begun to unfold. But Antony Hewish argues that there are still many questions left unanswered. Amazing progress has been made during the...
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Only 2% of Nobel science prizes have been awarded to women
In the past, female researchers were often dismissed as the 'brawn behind the brains' in teams of scientists, leaving men to take the credit, yet a few women managed to beat the odds to make their...
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Wonders of the Nobel world
Herb Kroemer and Sherwood Rowland select seven of their Nobel and near-Nobel favourites. Max Planck, physics, 1918, and Albert Einstein, physics, 1921 Being a physicist, I naturally think first about...