October 4, 2023: Quantum dot discoverers win chemistry Nobel, a wildlife tracker powered by animal movement and bringing rocks back from Mars will break the bank. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Nobel Week, Day Three: Chemistry | The 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded today to three scientists for the discovery of quantum dots. The winners are Moungi Bawendi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Louis Brus of Columbia University and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology in New York State. Quantum dots are compressed balls containing electrons. "If you take an electron and put it into a small space, the electron's wave function gets compressed," said Heiner Linke, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, at the announcement. "You give electrons more energy." So, for example, the smallest dots will emit more blue light than red. Enlarging them slightly will change the color composition.
What they did: Brus and Ekimov created quantum dots independently of each other in the 1980s. And Bawendi developed the chemical solution required to fully develop them into useful materials to be used in manufacturing or medical diagnostics.
The impact: Today quantum dots are common materials in television screens, where they produce a rainbow of colors. The dots are also used in solar cells and to visualize blood vessels feeding tumors in biomedical imaging. They are also expected to revolutionize the encryption of quantum information.
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China is pulling ahead on quantum dot technology. | 8 min read | | | Scientists have developed a wildlife tracker that is powered by the kinetic energy generated by an animal's movements. Inside the device, a magnetic pendulum swings around a copper coil, generating electricity as the tagged animal moves. The new device was tested on domestic dogs, a wild pony and a European bison, and might theoretically survive for the entire lifetime of an active animal.
Why this matters: Typical GPS location wildlife trackers have limited battery life. The new device is also lighter and cheaper to make than its battery-powered counterparts. Solar-powered trackers break easily, making them a poor choice for devices strapped to larger mammals—and they don't work for nocturnal creatures.
What the experts say: "With a bit more development, this could be a game changer for wildlife animal research and monitoring," says ecologist Emily Studd of British Columbia's Thompson Rivers University. | | | • Atoms can scatter a variety of entangled light particles at the same time. This discovery could revolutionize quantum communication and computing. | 7 min read | | | • The emergence of dengue in Europe may finally spur the development of vaccines. But wealthy countries could divert medication away from poorer nations that may need it more. | 5 min read | | | • NASA's Perseverance rover has collected valuable samples on Mars, but a new report says that getting those rocks back to Earth could cost up to $11 billion. | 5 min read | For the Mars sample return mission, NASA plans to build a rocket to lift Martian rocks off of the Red Planet's surface. Here, a test motor for that rocket is fired at the Northrop Grumman facility in Elkton, Maryland. Credit: NASA | | | • The Mars sample return plans have been ruled unlikely to succeed due to budgetary and timing restrictions. Meanwhile, China is launching a more modest Mars sampling mission of its own at the end of the decade, which will almost certainly beat the U.S. initiative. Sharing any samples retrieved from the Red Planet (either by the U.S. or by China) between the two nations will not only benefit discovery, but could improve diplomatic relations, says Louis Freedman, an expert in aeronautics and astronautics and former co-leader of the Keck Institute for Space Studies Asteroid Retrieval Mission and Interstellar Medium Exploration Studies at the California Institute of Technology. | 5 min read | | | • A crime prediction software sold to a New Jersey police department was accurate less than half a percent of the time. FAIL. | The Markup | | | • Frontiers for Young Minds, is a journal launched in 2013 where top scientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, submit papers on complex topics to reviewers ages 8 through 15. | The Washington Post | | | • Extreme pro-Brexit lobbyists mounted a jawdropping campaign against the journal Nature and its senior editors during the start of the COVID pandemic. | Computer Weekly and Byline Times | | | Every year since 1936, Nobel Prize winners in the natural sciences are inducted into The Order of the Ever Jumping and Smiling Little Green Frog, an academic order associated with the Natural Sciences Faculty Club at Stockholm University. Some years, Laureates tote a giant papier mâché frog across the university campus in the dead of night; some years they are asked to leap like frogs on the table tops during the celebration; most are awarded a small metal frog statuette (precise details are fuzzy because press is not allowed). As 2005 Nobel winner in chemistry Robert Grubbs told me years later, the so-called Frog Ball was the celebration he'd been advised by previous Nobel winners not to miss. See? Scientists know how to party. | I hope you've been enjoying our Nobel coverage this week. Let me know what you think by emailing newsletters@sciam.com. Until tomorrow! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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