Philip Ball

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Articles

Redesigning the Nobels: what would change if scientists created the prizes now

Oct 11, 2024 | nature.com | Philip Ball

Nobel prize season is always a time of excitement and speculation about potential winners, but it also brings criticism about the constraints imposed by the rules for the world’s most prestigious scientific prizes. Is it, after all, realistic to expect the stipulations specified by Alfred Nobel 129 years ago to remain appropriate for science today?
The Building Blocks I Used to Become a Hard Science Fiction Writer

Oct 6, 2024 | writingcooperative.com | Felicity Harley |Philip Ball

To write my version of hard science fiction I had to venture deeply into theoretical quantum physics, evolutionary biology, genetics and chemistry. To write my version of hard science fiction I had to venture deeply into theoretical quantum physics, evolutionary biology, genetics and chemistry.
The history in our genes

Sep 5, 2024 | science.org | Eyal G. Frank |Sam Lee |Laksshman Sundaram |Philip Ball

Get full access to this articleView all available purchase options and get full access to this article. Books1The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie Richard Dawkins Yale University Press, 2024. 360 pp. Information & AuthorsInformationPublished In ScienceVolume 385 | Issue 67136 September 2024CopyrightCopyright © 2024 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
Evolving materials - Nature Materials

Aug 30, 2024 | nature.com | Philip Ball

Chemicals and materials have been produced industrially by the fermentation of genetically modified microorganisms ever since the pioneering work of Cohen and Boyer in the 1970s to clone and express human genes for insulin in Escherichia coli1, leading to the first licensed drug made by recombinant DNA technology. The production of biopharmaceuticals is now a vast industry, in which E. coli and yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) are the main host organisms.
Heisenberg gets 'let off the hook' in new historical drama based on the Farm Hall transcripts – Physics World

Aug 16, 2024 | physicsworld.com | Philip Ball

Philip Ball reviews Farm Hall by Katherine Moar at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, which runs until 31 August 2024 As the Second World War reached its endgame in Europe in 1945, Allied forces advancing towards Berlin raced to round up German scientists who’d worked on the Nazis’ “Uranium Project” to harness nuclear fission. Code-named the Alsos mission, it picked up the likes of Max von Laue, Otto Hahn (who’d led the experiments to discover fission in 1938), Carl von Weizsäcker, and the...
Buying the Final Frontier

Jun 21, 2024 | m2woman.com | Isaac Taylor |Philip Ball

Outer space was supposed to belong to all humankind. Should we surrender it to anyone who can pay up? SpaceX launched a Tesla roadster into space during a 2018 demonstration flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket. Crass? Inspiring? Both? [Credit: SpaceX]Hands up: Who thought it was cool that Captain James T.
A drop in the alien ocean - Nature Materials

Jun 4, 2024 | nature.com | Philip Ball

The science that describes the properties of droplets, bubbles and liquid films — namely capillarity, pioneered by Pierre-Simon Laplace at the start of the nineteenth century — therefore has relevance beyond our planet. Some of the implications for extraterrestrial environments are explored by Cordier and colleagues1. At the heart of capillarity is the notion of interfacial tension: in essence, the excess free energy of a liquid surface in contact with a vapour or a solid.
The shape of things - Nature Materials

May 3, 2024 | nature.com | Philip Ball

While the possibilities seem as broad as our imaginations, putting microscopic self-assembly to practical use demands a consideration of the timescales needed. To take one example, the rate of assembly will determine the speed of computation that is possible from algorithmic self-assembly of DNA ‘tiles’4. And the kinetics of self-assembly and disassembly of actin filaments are central to the speed of cell migration that depends on this mechanism5.
Éloge: Evelyn Fox Keller and the new biology

Apr 30, 2024 | journals.sagepub.com | Philip Ball

ObituaryGet full access to this articleView all access and purchase options for this article. ReferencesAmaral P., S. Carbonell-Sala, F. M. De La Vega, et al. 2023. “The Status of the Human Gene Catalogue.” Nature 622: 41–47. Ball P. 2013. “DNA: Celebrate the Unknowns.” Nature 496: 419–420. Ball P. 2023. How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bird A. 2013. “Genome Biology: Not Drowning but Waving.” Cell 154 (5): 951–952. Bird A. 2020.
Entangled entities: Bohr, Einstein and the battle over quantum fundamentals – Physics World

Apr 10, 2024 | physicsworld.com | Philip Ball

Next year sees the centenary of the summer in which German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg sought refuge from hay fever on the North Sea island of Helgoland. There, he figured out how to express the perplexing spectroscopic observations of atoms – whereby they absorbed and emitted light at well-defined, characteristic frequencies – in mathematical form.