Leon N. Cooper, a Nobel-winning physicist who helped unlock the secret of how some materials can convey electricity without resistance, a phenomenon called superconductivity, and who did pioneering work in understanding how memory and the brain work, died on Wednesday at his home in Providence, R.I. He was 94. His …
Read More »82 American Nobel Prize Winners Endorse Kamala Harris
More than 80 American Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics have signed an open letter endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president. “This is the most consequential presidential election in a long time, perhaps ever, for the future of science and the United States,” reads the letter, …
Read More »These Tiny Worms Account for at Least 4 Nobel Prizes
When scientists win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, they typically thank family and colleagues, maybe their universities or whoever funded their research. This year, as the molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun accepted the most prestigious award of his career, he spent a few minutes lauding his experimental subject: a …
Read More »Three Receive Nobel in Economics for Research on Global Inequality
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded on Monday to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and to James Robinson of the University of Chicago. They received the prize for their research into how institutions shape which countries become wealthy and prosperous …
Read More »A Shift in the World of Science
By Alan Burdick and Katrina Miller We are journalists on The Times’s Science desk. Technology observers have grown increasingly vocal in recent years about the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the human variety. A.I. models can write and talk like us, draw and paint like us, crush us at …
Read More »For Atomic Bomb Survivors, a Nobel Prize and a Reckoning, 80 Years Later
Cities blasted to rubble. Burned bodies and flayed flesh. Invisible waves of radiation coursing through the air. And the indelible image of a mushroom cloud. The atomic bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the world what an apocalypse looks like. Tens …
Read More »Nobel Prize in Chemistry Goes to 3 Scientists for Predicting and Creating Proteins
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to three scientists for discoveries that show the potential of advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, to predict the shape of proteins, life’s chemical tools, and to invent new ones. The laureates are: Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who …
Read More »Google Triumphs on the Nobel Stage as Tough Antitrust Fight Looms
Google, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars it makes every year from its online search business, has long pursued giant research projects that could one day change the world. On Wednesday, the Nobel Prize committee conferred considerable prestige to Google’s pursuit of big ideas. Demis Hassabis, the chief …
Read More »Nobel Physics Prize Awarded for Pioneering A.I. Research by 2 Scientists
John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for discoveries that helped computers learn more in the way the human brain does, providing the building blocks for developments in artificial intelligence. The award is an acknowledgment of A.I.’s growing significance in the way …
Read More »How Does It Feel to Win a Nobel Prize? Ask the ‘Godfather of A.I.’
On Tuesday, the scientists John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries that helped drive the development of artificial neural networks — a technology that is now essential to the operation of search engines like Google and online chatbots like ChatGPT from OpenAI. …
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