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Nobel Prizes 2021
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lpetrich
Contributor
Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 - NobelPrize.org
“for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems”
with one half jointly to
Syukuro Manabe, Princeton University, USA
Klaus Hasselmann, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
“for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”
and the other half to
Giorgio Parisi, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
“for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 - Popular science background
“for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems”
with one half jointly to
Syukuro Manabe, Princeton University, USA
Klaus Hasselmann, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
“for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”
and the other half to
Giorgio Parisi, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
“for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 - Popular science background
lpetrich
Contributor
Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 - NobelPrize.org
Benjamin List, Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany
David W.C. MacMillan, Princeton University, USA
“for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis”
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 - Popular information - NobelPrize.org
Catalysts are an important part of industrial chemistry, and industrial catalysts are usually various metals.
Enzymes are biological catalysts, and they have been an important part of the workings of living things for just about all the history of our planet's biota.
Enzymes are proteins, composed of chains of amino acids, sometimes with some other stuff attached to them: biological molecules, metal ions, or both
Sometimes one wants to distinguish between mirror images of a molecule, and enzymes have been doing that for as long as they have been in use. Metal ions can't do that, and is there anything in between that could do that?
Benjamin List tried out proline, a protein-forming amino acid. It's bigger than a metal ion and smaller than an enzyme -- it's a building block of proteins, including enzymes. Biologically-sourced proline is also asymmetric. David MacMillan researched similar relatively small organic molecules as catalysts, and he coined the term "organocatalysis".
Benjamin List, Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany
David W.C. MacMillan, Princeton University, USA
“for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis”
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 - Popular information - NobelPrize.org
Catalysts are substances that speed up chemical reactions without being consumed by those reactions. They don't alter the thermodynamics of those reactions, however, and if (say) some reaction consumes heat energy, it will still do so.
Catalysts are an important part of industrial chemistry, and industrial catalysts are usually various metals.
Enzymes are biological catalysts, and they have been an important part of the workings of living things for just about all the history of our planet's biota.
Enzymes are proteins, composed of chains of amino acids, sometimes with some other stuff attached to them: biological molecules, metal ions, or both
Sometimes one wants to distinguish between mirror images of a molecule, and enzymes have been doing that for as long as they have been in use. Metal ions can't do that, and is there anything in between that could do that?
Benjamin List tried out proline, a protein-forming amino acid. It's bigger than a metal ion and smaller than an enzyme -- it's a building block of proteins, including enzymes. Biologically-sourced proline is also asymmetric. David MacMillan researched similar relatively small organic molecules as catalysts, and he coined the term "organocatalysis".
lpetrich
Contributor
Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 - NobelPrize.org
To
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian
for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch
As an introduction, how many senses do we have? Five is the traditional number: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. But we have more senses than that, and "touch" is not one sense but several: light touch, pressure, heat, cold, and pain. We also have less-obvious senses like proprioception, joint-orientation sensing, and senses of hunger and thirst.
Optical receptors are also well-understood. A photon excites a receptor molecule, producing a cascade of signaling.
Orientation is done in various ways. Vertebrates have fluid-filled semicircular canals in their heads, and moving one's head moves that fluid. Some invertebrates have "statocysts", hollow balls with a "statolith" in them.
Hearing I listed as mechanical because it works by sensing amount of vibration of ear parts, like the vertebrate inner ear.
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian first worked on finding the receptor that responds to capsaicin, what makes chili peppers feel burning hot. It was eventually named TRPV1. Menthol feels cool, and they discovered that it triggers a cold receptor, TRPM8. Others found additional receptor proteins for different temperatures.
Ardem Patapoutian then turned his attention to mechanical senses. They were understood in bacteria, but not in vertebrates. He and his collaborators found a cell line that would respond to being touched with a micropipette. The researchers then acted on the hypothesis that touch receptors act like other receptors, and he found 72 candidate genes for them. They silenced the genes, one by one, and looked for which silencing caused a lack of touch sensitivity. They found one, and named it Piezo1. They also found a second one, Piezo2. Their proteins were later shown to respond to pressure.
To
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian
for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch
As an introduction, how many senses do we have? Five is the traditional number: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. But we have more senses than that, and "touch" is not one sense but several: light touch, pressure, heat, cold, and pain. We also have less-obvious senses like proprioception, joint-orientation sensing, and senses of hunger and thirst.
- How many senses do humans have?
- Humans have a lot more than five senses — here are 18 | Considerable
- How many senses do we have? | JHU Press
- Chemical - smell, taste, hunger, thirst, various internal
- Optical - sight
- Temperature - heat, cold
- Mechanical - light touch, pressure, proprioception, orientation, hearing
- (other species) Magnetic
- (other species) Electrical
Optical receptors are also well-understood. A photon excites a receptor molecule, producing a cascade of signaling.
Orientation is done in various ways. Vertebrates have fluid-filled semicircular canals in their heads, and moving one's head moves that fluid. Some invertebrates have "statocysts", hollow balls with a "statolith" in them.
Hearing I listed as mechanical because it works by sensing amount of vibration of ear parts, like the vertebrate inner ear.
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian first worked on finding the receptor that responds to capsaicin, what makes chili peppers feel burning hot. It was eventually named TRPV1. Menthol feels cool, and they discovered that it triggers a cold receptor, TRPM8. Others found additional receptor proteins for different temperatures.
Ardem Patapoutian then turned his attention to mechanical senses. They were understood in bacteria, but not in vertebrates. He and his collaborators found a cell line that would respond to being touched with a micropipette. The researchers then acted on the hypothesis that touch receptors act like other receptors, and he found 72 candidate genes for them. They silenced the genes, one by one, and looked for which silencing caused a lack of touch sensitivity. They found one, and named it Piezo1. They also found a second one, Piezo2. Their proteins were later shown to respond to pressure.
lpetrich
Contributor
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 - Scientific background noting Scientific Background for the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 - sciback_fy_en_21.pdf
Fluid turbulence is very difficult to model with numerical simulation, because of the large amounts of number crunching needed. In 1963, Edward Lorenz developed a very simplified model with only three variables -
Lorenz system - and he did computer runs on it. What he discovered was very startling. While its overall behavior is well-defined, and while one can predict its behavior for short times, for long times, small errors would expand exponentially, and make the system difficult to predict in detail. That was an example of dynamical chaos. For a two-variable system without explicit dependence on its parameter, one finds well-defined behavior -- going off to infinity, going to a point, or going to a limit cycle -- but one more causes chaos.
Then the article gets into climate research, with research into the greenhouse effect. There was a lot of stuff on testing climate models, stuff that I could not quite follow. It was apparently averaging over a lot of variation, and I think that the chaos-theory discussion is to show that it is legitimate to do that.
Then it got into the structure of "spin glasses", like magnetic systems in a phase where the atoms are randomly oriented relative to each other instead of all aligned. They are not completely random, since they interact with each other, and working out the behavior of this partial randomness is a challenge. But much of that discussion was rather difficult for me to follow.
Fluid turbulence is very difficult to model with numerical simulation, because of the large amounts of number crunching needed. In 1963, Edward Lorenz developed a very simplified model with only three variables -
Lorenz system - and he did computer runs on it. What he discovered was very startling. While its overall behavior is well-defined, and while one can predict its behavior for short times, for long times, small errors would expand exponentially, and make the system difficult to predict in detail. That was an example of dynamical chaos. For a two-variable system without explicit dependence on its parameter, one finds well-defined behavior -- going off to infinity, going to a point, or going to a limit cycle -- but one more causes chaos.Then the article gets into climate research, with research into the greenhouse effect. There was a lot of stuff on testing climate models, stuff that I could not quite follow. It was apparently averaging over a lot of variation, and I think that the chaos-theory discussion is to show that it is legitimate to do that.
Then it got into the structure of "spin glasses", like magnetic systems in a phase where the atoms are randomly oriented relative to each other instead of all aligned. They are not completely random, since they interact with each other, and working out the behavior of this partial randomness is a challenge. But much of that discussion was rather difficult for me to follow.