Lab Notes: 7th October 2010

You know what it's like; you wait for ages for a good science story to come along and then loads appear at once. That's why I give you.....Lab Notes: a round-up of some of the top science stories in the past week.

1. A Nobel Cause:
The Nobel Prizes are currently being distributed. Robert G. Edwards picked up the first of the prizes for Physiology or Medicine. He was central to the development of in vito fertilization, a process which has led to the birth of around 4 million people. The award was not without its controversy.

The award of Physics went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselev for their work on graphene. The pair wwere the first to isolate carbon layers from graphite.

Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki share the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing new, more efficient ways of linking carbon atoms together to build the complex molecules that are improving our everyday lives. It seems like carbon is the big winner this year!

2. Teagasc Recruitment Crisis:
Teagasc, the Irish agriculture and food development authority is turning away students because of a government moratorium on hiring staff. Gerry Boyle, director of Teagasc noted that the organisation had lost their plant pathologist and that the position could now not be replaced, leading to a serious gap in their expertise.

3. Super(nova) news:
An amateur astronomer based in Dublin has become the first Irish star-gazer to spot a supernova and he did it from a shed in his backgarden. The sighting has been described as "the biggest thing ever discovered in Irish astronomy".

4. Biology's Big Bang
Scientists at NUI Maynooth have said they have identified the moment when two single-celled organisms combined to become the first cell with a nucleus.Dr. James McInerney said that "these two primitive single-celled life forms came together in an event that essentially allowed nature to grow big".

5. New Species
200 new species have been identified in the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea. The finds include a long-snouted frog that's about the size of your thumbnail; a green cricket with bright pink eyes and a mouse with a white-tipped tail. “They tell us how little we still know about the world,” research team leader Stephen Richards said.

The above image is adapted from an original by BlueRidgeKitties and used under a Creative Commons  license.