Detecting Single Action Potentials

A team of scientists have managed to optically detect single action potentials in the brains of living animals.

Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to:

1/2 Yoichiro Nambu “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics”

1/2 Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”

Congrats!

Now, I was planning on writing something about what these discoveries actually imply, but I just found it so hard to wrap my mind around that I could not do it justice in just a couple of paragraphs. I therefore choose to give some links to sites that explains this better than I would be able to do:

New Scientists short overview of quantum physics. 

Wikipedias entry on spontaneous symmetry breaking.

And for the really daring, here’s an article about the origins of families of quarks and leptons.

The original paper by Maskawa and Kobayashi is not free, as of yet, but can be bought here.

Edit: The major science websites have now had time to write their own articles about the science behind the award this year, and some examples can be found here and here.

Best Science Images 2008

The best science images for 2008 have been announced, and the winner is:

 

It was taken using an electron microscope, and shows diatoms, a form of eukaryotic algae, attaching themselves to some marine structure. Taken by Mario De Stefano.

More pictures inside…