After the announcement of the medicine prize and physics prize, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for the development of the CRISPR/Cas9 method of genetic editing. We discussed the origins, development, and applications of the CRISPR/Cas9 method earlier this year, but in light of this recent award, I thought we could delve a little deeper into the discovery and implications of this technology. Given how significant and ubiquitous the CRISPR/Cas9 technology has become, it was only a matter of time before it garnered a Nobel prize, but there was some disagreement…
Comments closedMonth: October 2020
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine, announced a day before the Physics prize we talked about last week, was awarded to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles M. Rice for their discovery of the blood-borne virus Hepatitis C. Hepatitis, a predominantly viral disease characterized by liver inflammation, can be caused by one of five different viruses (hepatitis A, B, C, D, or E). Hepatitis A (HAV) is commonly transmitted through contaminated food or water, and it usually resolves within six months without treatment. Similarly, Hepatitis E (HEV) is transmitted through unsanitary drinking water and usually clears up on its…
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Last Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez, and Reinhard Genzel. Penrose was awarded half of the prize for his foundational theoretical work proving the existence of black holes. The other half of the prize was shared between Ghez and Genzel for their experimental measurements that found the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is the first to be awarded for research involving black holes. As we’ve seen in the past few weeks, black holes have massive implications throughout theoretical physics.…
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Help me obi Juan whoever you are, you’re my only Ho Unless you’ve been living under a rock, your first introduction to the concept of holograms was probably Leia’s message to Obi-Wan in Star Wars IV: A New Hope (unless your first introduction to holograms was Tupac, in which case. . . I feel old). Although to be clear, Tupac’s Coachella performance in 2012 was not actually a hologram—it was a 2D video projected on a seemingly invisible screen. We don’t actually have the technological capability yet to create real holograms—that is a 3D image projected from a 2D light…
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The last couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing the potentially destructive implications of Hawking radiation, the mechanism by which black holes slowly decay. One of the most pressing implications is the information paradox. A core tenet of quantum physics, the conservation of quantum information, demands that quantum information is not ever destroyed or created. But Hawking radiation seems to defy this rule. Information that enters a black hole becomes irretrievable, but it’s not destroyed. But, when a black hole evaporates into random thermal radiation, what happens to that information? One of the most popular theories involves all the information inside…
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