Chemistry gets the focus today. From the Academy:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2007 to Gerhard Ertl (Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany), for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces.
Apparently, it’s also his birthday!! That’s a remarkable present to get!
There’s a description of the work (which has important applications all over science and technology – the solid things around us are not infinite, so surfaces abound) here on the Nobel site, but you may find the nice NPR piece I heard this morning quite illuminating.
-cvj
