Word: prize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nobel Prize carries with it a check for $341,000, which Arias intends to use to create a foundation for his country's poor. But its true value for Arias will be measured in the days before and after the Nov. 5 cease-fire. "The prize is a catalyst," he says. "It's a stimulus so that we don't lapse in our effort." No one, least of all Arias, believes eternal peace will reign three weeks from now; the Costa Rican President points out that the cease-fire "initiates a process, it doesn't end it." Yet most Central...
...Peace Prize winner, President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica, it was a week of stirred political passions and fresh opportunity. Meanwhile, the scientists named by the Nobel Committee to receive the 1987 prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine basked in the traditional praise of colleagues around the globe...
...Nobel Prizes were initially established to honor work done during the previous twelve months. That has rarely happened in the 86 years that the Nobel Committee has made the awards, which currently include a stipend of $340,000. Indeed, recognition of even the most significant scientific discoveries can take decades. But the research that earned this year's Physics Prize was such an obvious breakthrough that the academy acted with remarkable haste. Karl Alex Muller, 60, of Switzerland and Johannes Georg Bednorz, 37, a West German, became laureates less than two years after their discovery of high-temperature superconductivity...
...Since then, other researchers have used similar materials to achieve superconductivity at even higher temperatures. Indeed, Paul C.W. Chu of the University of Houston and colleagues reached 98 K, or -283 degrees F, an achievement some physicists think should have earned Chu a share of the prize. That level of cooling can be achieved with more readily available liquid nitrogen. Suddenly, a wide range of applications seems economically feasible: trains that ride on a cushion of magnetism; smaller, faster supercomputers; more powerful medical imaging machines; and 100%-efficient power lines. The superfast train, notes Bednorz, "is a real dream...
...seemed downright preposterous to Donald O. Cram of Altadena, Calif., when he got a phone call notifying him that he had just won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Reason: Cram is in the rug-shampooing business. The Swedish Academy of Sciences had rung up the wrong man. Quipped UCLA Chemist Donald J. Cram after hearing about the mix-up: "There is some chemistry involved in carpet cleaning." Cram, Pedersen and Lehn, working independently, shared the award for their work in "host-guest" chemistry. "The basis of our work," explains Lehn, "is the way molecules are able to recognize each other...