This year’s Nobel laureates will have to forego the lavish Nobel banquet that is held in December. The Nobel Foundation, which manages the Nobel prizes that are announced in early October, said this week that the banquet is cancelled due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Each year the prize winners are invited to Stockholm for talks, the Nobel ceremony as well as the banquet, which is housed in Stockholm’s City Hall. The winners, together with the Swedish royal family and some 1300 guests, are treated to a multi-course dinner and entertainment, but not this year. “It is unreasonable to hold these events in 2020,” the foundation notes.
This is the first time the banquet has been cancelled since 1956. The foundation has said that the award ceremonies will still be held this year, but in “new forms”.
The Greek philosopher Plato believed that the universe was made of five types of matter: earth, air, fire, water, and the cosmos. Each was described with a particular geometry and for earth that shape was the cube. But new research shows that maybe he was onto something.
A team from the US and Hungary measured and analysed fragmentation patterns of rocks that they collected as well as from previously assembled datasets, finding that the resulting shape of the fragments is indeed a cube. “It turns out that Plato’s conception about the element earth being made up of cubes is, literally, the statistical average model for real Earth,” says geophysicist Douglas Jerolmack from University of Pennsylvania. “And that is just mind-blowing”.
And finally, what do premature babies hear when lying in an incubator? According to the World Health Organisation, around 15 million babies are born prematurely each year and given babies’ inability to regulate their temperature they often need to be placed in an incubator. Around 2-10% of babies born prematurely suffer hearing loss — compared to infants born at full term. A reason for this could be the high levels of noise that they are subjected to in an incubator, compared to the filtering and absorption of background noise that happens naturally in the womb.
An interdisciplinary team from the Medical University of Vienna have measured the sounds inside an incubator, finding that while high and medium frequencies were largely supressed, low frequencies were instead amplified. They also discovered that when access doors to the incubator were left open, noise levels shot up, particularly those from devices such as respirators. “At a high flow-rate with the associated roaring sound, the increase is such that it equates to the noise of a vacuum cleaner at a distance of one meter (75 dB),” the authors write, adding that the results show the need to invest in new, quieter technologies.