Molecule building work wins Nobel

The method has allowed scientists to make drugs and improved electronics

Three scientists have shared this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing new ways of linking carbon atoms together.

The Nobel was awarded to Professors Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for innovative ways of developing complex molecules.

The chemical method developed by the researchers has allowed scientists to make medicines and better electronics.

The Nobels are valued at 10m Swedish kronor (£900,000; 1m euros; $1.5m).

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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said this year's chemistry award honours the researchers' development of "palladium-catalysed cross couplings in organic systems".

The academy said it was a "precise and efficient" tool that is used by researchers worldwide, "as well as in the commercial production of for example pharmaceuticals and molecules used in the electronics industry".

Such chemicals included one found in small quantities in a sea sponge, which scientists aim to use to fight cancer cells. Researchers can now artificially produce this substance, called discodermolide.

Heck, 79, is a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, US; Negishi, 75, is a chemistry professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and 80-year-old Suzuki is a professor at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.

Professor Negishi told reporters in Stockholm by telephone that he was asleep when the call from the Nobel committee came.

'Essential tools'

"I went to bed last night well past midnight so I was sleeping but I am extremely happy to receive the telephone call," he said.

Organic chemistry has built on nature, utilising carbon's ability to provide a stable skeleton for functional molecules. This has paved the way for new medicines and improved materials.

To do this, chemists need to be able to join carbon atoms together, but carbon atoms do not easily react with one another.

The first methods used by chemists to bind carbon atoms together were based on making carbon more reactive.

This worked well for synthesising simple molecules, but when chemists tried to scale this up to more complex ones, too many unwanted by-products were generated.

The method based around the metal palladium solved that problem: in it, carbon atoms meet on a palladium atom, and their proximity to one another kick-starts the chemical reaction.

PM's call

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said he spoke to Professor Suzuki on the phone and congratulated him.

"He told me that Japan's science and technology is at the world's top level and encouraged me to make good use of the resources," he said.

Professor David Phillips, President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said these metal-based "coupling" reactions had led to "countless breakthroughs".

He added: "The Heck, Negishi and Suzuki reactions make possible the vital fluorescent marking that underpins DNA sequencing, and are essential tools for synthetic chemists creating complex new drugs and polymers."

Russian-born Andre Geim, 51, and Konstantin Novoselov, 36, of the University of Manchester, UK, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for groundbreaking experiments with graphene, an ultra-thin and super-strong material.

Is Google Blocked In China

Several news outlets are reporting this morning that China has finally blocked Google's search engine completely. This follows Google's move earlier this month, wherein the search engine giant moved its search engine service in China to Hong Kong, in hopes of taking advantage of the "One Country, Two Systems" policy that separates mainland China from recently returned Hong Kong.
As the Chinese government does not comment on their practice of specific censorship, only user reports are available, and they appear to be spotty and varied.

According to the Shanghaiist, any search, political or inane, on both Google.cn and Google.com.hk were met with a "connection reset" and even a search for "shanghai" was met with "the white screen of death".

The local Shanghai blog also quoted some as saying that a possible reason for the block might be the inclusion of the letters "RFA" in the Google URL parameters. RFA can stand for "Radio Free Asia", a site that is also blocked in China.

Update: According to a statement from Google earlier today, the inclusion of those letters was indeed the case for the blockage.

"In the last 24 hours "gs_rfai" started appearing in the URLs of Google searches globally as part of a search parameter, a string of characters that sends information about the query to Google so we can return the best result. Because this parameter contained the letters rfa the great firewall was associating these searches with Radio Free Asia, a service that has been inaccessible in China for a long time - hence the blockage. We are currently looking at how to resolve this issue."

Update: [March 31] Google later reversed its statement, saying that the "rfa" part of the URL had been added a week earlier and could not be the cause of the problem. "Having looked into this issue in more detail, it's clear we actually added this parameter a week ago. So whatever happened today to block Google.com.hk must have been as a result of a change in the great firewall," the company said, according to PC World.

According to the AFP, their reporters in Shanghai were able to use Google's search engine without incident, even getting search results on sensitive terms like "Falungong" and "Dalai Lama". For those results, however, the resulting links were blocked, as has been the case. The Shanghaiist also reported two Twitterers, in Suzhou and Shanghai, who reported being able to access Google.

The page tracking Google's sites availability has yet to update to show any change.

It would also seem plausible that even the term "Google" itself is being filtered out by the Great Firewall of China and causing problems using the search engine. When I was in Beijing during the time around the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, simple things like advertisements in Yahoo! Mail and oft-seen widgets were showing up blocked and giving errors due to increased censorship.

At the same time, we have to ask - would it really be all that surprising if China had finally decided it had had enough and would put the brakes on the whole situation?