Starship Asterisk*

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/10/2010-physis-nobel-prize-reaction-round-up/1 wrote:
Physics: Nobel Prize discovery was fished from the trash
By Dan Vergano

Slices of graphene from the 2004 paper that first reported the isolation & stability of the material, a single-atom thick.

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<<The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to graphene discoverers, Andre Geim, and Konstantin Novoselov, of the United Kingdom's University of Manchester. In a phone interview Novoselov described how he spotted the key to their findings, discovering that sticky tape would peel off single-atom thick layers of graphene for study.

"We had been trying several other methods in our lab. And there was a senior researcher who was preparing samples of graphite (bulk carbon samples) for the attempts. The way you clean graphite is just cover it with tape and pull the tape off, and then throw it away. So once, I just picked it up out of the trash and we analyzed it."

The rest is history. A search of Google Scholar on "graphene" yield 25,000 publications or patents since 2004. According to the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database, the number of original scientific publications on graphene has risen from 157 in 2004 to more than 2,500 this year, so far.

Emeritus Professor Marshall Stoneham, President of the Institute of Physics (IOP), said, "It's marvellous that carbon wins again. Diamonds may be a girl's best friend but graphene gives an unexpected and a wholly new way to put the electron in carbon country; bringing a whole new range of applications and showing again the strength of the British science base. It confirms at the highest level the excellence of UK physics."

A January report from Thomson Reuters pointed to a large-scale "brain drain" from Russia over the last decade, sending researchers like the year's physics prize winners abroad. "It is sure to come as a surprise to many analysts that Russia, often a byword for its focus on technology and science, now has a formal publication output that is on a scale with countries that have fewer resources as well as a shorter history of strong research investment," concluded the report.

However, Novoselov downplays this side of his story, in a phone interview today. "Science is international. There are 16 desks in our lab and you would be lucky to find any two people of the same nationality sitting at any of them."

On the lighter side, the award for Geim, 51, makes him the first science prize Nobelist to also win the coveted IgNobel Prize, granted by the Annals of Improbable Research. Geim was a co-winner in 2000, for research that used superconducting magnets to levitate frogs. The IgNobel award goes to the year's goofiest science.>>

"When I got the telephone call, I thought, 'oh shit!'" That call came from Sweden and it was intended to inform its recipient, Andre Geim, that he and his former grad student, Konstantin Novoselov, had won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. The pair were honored for helping develop a simple technique that allowed the isolation of graphene, a sheet of carbon a single atom thick. Graphene has some unusual properties: it's nearly transparent; by volume, it's stronger than steel; and it conducts heat and electricity better than copper. These properties have gotten the materials science community very excited, and set off a race to produce it in bulk.

Geim's unusually honest reaction should surprise no one. With this new honor, he becomes the first person to have taken home both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel Prize; he received the latter in 2000 for a paper on levitating frogs. Geim has also listed a hamster as the senior author of a paper on a similar approach to levitate a gyroscope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene wrote:
<<Graphene is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice. Graphene is most easily visualized as an atomic-scale chicken wire made of carbon atoms and their bonds>>

Konstantin Novoselov, the Russian-born physicist who shared this year's Nobel prize, struggled with physics as a student and was awarded a handful of B grades, his university said Wednesday.

The Moscow Physics and Technology University (MFTI) posted report cards on its website for Novoselov, who at 36 won the Nobel prize for physics with his research partner Andre Geim.

The reports reveal that he gained a handful of B grades in his term reports for theoretical and applied physics from 1991 to 1994.

He was also not strong on physical education -- a compulsory subject at Russian universities -- gaining B grades. And while he now lives in Britain, he once gained a C grade for English.

The university also revealed documents on Nobel prize winner Geim, who studied at the same university from 1976 to 1982. His brilliant academic career was only marred by a few B-grades for Marxist political economy and English.

Geim was turned down when he applied first to another Moscow university specialising in engineering and physics, and worked as a machinist at a factory making electrical instruments for eight months.

http://library.thinkquest.org/26588/biography_of__albert_einstein.htm wrote:
<<Albert [Einstein] never liked the School system as it was, he found it intimidating and boring, and showed little scholastic ability. In the age of 15, Albert left school in Germany because of bad grades in several subjects, such as history and languages, and moved to Milan following his family, which moved there recently because of his fathers Business. Having the wish to continue his education he applied at Zurich's Swiss Federal Polytechnic to become a teacher. Failing the entrance exams he had to attend a technical School.>>