Aussie biologist wins Nobel prize
Pioneering work in ageing and disease
Win is a first for an Australian woman
MOLECULAR biologist Elizabeth Blackburn has become the first Australian woman to win a Nobel prize.
Professor Blackburn, whose pioneering work on telomeres - protective caps on the ends of chromosomes - has opened up new lines of inquiry into growth, ageing and disease, is the 2009 Nobel laureate for physiology or medicine, The Australian reports.
Professor Blackburn's work with psychologists on telomeres, stress-related disease and meditation has given tantalising evidence of the connection between mind and body.
Learn more about Professor Blackburn's breakthrough and how it affects your life.
She will share the 10 million Swedish kroner ($1.6 million) Nobel award with Carol Greider and Jack W. Szostak, the Nobel assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced last night.
She is only the ninth woman to be awarded the physiology or medicine prize since its inception in 1909, and only the 36th female Nobel laureate in any category since 1901, when the first prizes were awarded in chemistry, physics, medicine and peace.
The first was Marie Curie, who won the prize in 1903 and whom Professor Blackburn said inspired her to become a scientist.
But Nobel committee secretary Goeran Hansson said gender played no part in the decision.
"They're not being honoured because they are women. They are being honoured because they've made a fundamentally important discovery," he told Swedish news agency TT.
That discovery was made 25 years ago, but even at that moment Professor Blackburn knew she was onto something big. "I felt very excited ... and I thought this is very interesting, this is a very important result, and you don't often feel that," she said.
Professor Greider, 48, who was doing some laundry when the Nobel people called, said she was "just thrilled" when she was told she had won the award. "I just think that the recognition for curiosity-driven basic science is very, very nice," she said.
Professor Blackburn, 60, grew up in Tasmania and took science degrees at the University of Melbourne, but is now based in the US.
Speaking about her work to The New York Times recently, she said: "As the ends of the chromosomes wear down, the telomerase comes in and builds them back up.
"In humans, the thing is that as we mature, our telomeres slowly wear down. So the question has always been: did that matter? Well, more and more, it seems like it matters.
"In my lab, we're finding that psychological stress actually ages cells, which can be seen when you measure the wearing down of the tips of the chromosomes, those telomeres."
Read more on this story at The Australian.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
ESL Assistant Finds Errors in Your English
Finds Errors in your English Writing with the ESL Assistant
While the majority of international communication happens in English, a lot of these people, who communicate in English on a daily basis, aren’t very comfortable as English is not their native language.
They therefore have to sometimes struggle to express themselves correctly in English, only to be dismayed that native English speakers can immediately notice the flaws in their writing.
When English is a Foreign Language for you
Microsoft Research has created a useful online proofing tool to help people who use English as a foreign language.
This tool, called ESL Assistant, is a web service that analyzes text for the common mistakes that non-native English speakers, especially those from Southeast Asia, often make in their writing such as the choice of determiners and prepositions.
Type some English sentences into the text box and the tool will look for possible problems in your writing and indicate them with wavy green underlines.
Once it identifies possible mistakes in your writing, the tool will generate suggestions for correcting the problems. What’s even more interesting is that the tool will find you real-world examples of both the incorrect and correct usage from other web pages on the Internet using Bing.
You can just hover your mouse over the suggested phrase and the search results in the two Bing windows will change automatically.
Check Errors in your Outlook Emails with ESL
Anyone can use the ESL (English as Second Language) Tool to check their emails and other writings for errors online though the site requires the Silverlight plugin.
The other option is that you download the ESL addon for Microsoft Outlook and integrate the web service into your email program.
There’s a bit of privacy issue here because when you click the ESL Assistant button in Outlook to check your message for errors, the program will send the entire text of your email to the ESL website where you can review it for problems. If you correct errors online, you will have to copy the text back into Outlook manually.
Although ESL Assistant will not catch or correct all errors, it often finds problems that are overlooked by normal spelling and grammar checking tools. This makes it a great tool to expand your options and make sure that your English sounds as correct as possible.
http://www.eslassistant.com/
While the majority of international communication happens in English, a lot of these people, who communicate in English on a daily basis, aren’t very comfortable as English is not their native language.
They therefore have to sometimes struggle to express themselves correctly in English, only to be dismayed that native English speakers can immediately notice the flaws in their writing.
When English is a Foreign Language for you
Microsoft Research has created a useful online proofing tool to help people who use English as a foreign language.
This tool, called ESL Assistant, is a web service that analyzes text for the common mistakes that non-native English speakers, especially those from Southeast Asia, often make in their writing such as the choice of determiners and prepositions.
Type some English sentences into the text box and the tool will look for possible problems in your writing and indicate them with wavy green underlines.
Once it identifies possible mistakes in your writing, the tool will generate suggestions for correcting the problems. What’s even more interesting is that the tool will find you real-world examples of both the incorrect and correct usage from other web pages on the Internet using Bing.
You can just hover your mouse over the suggested phrase and the search results in the two Bing windows will change automatically.
Check Errors in your Outlook Emails with ESL
Anyone can use the ESL (English as Second Language) Tool to check their emails and other writings for errors online though the site requires the Silverlight plugin.
The other option is that you download the ESL addon for Microsoft Outlook and integrate the web service into your email program.
There’s a bit of privacy issue here because when you click the ESL Assistant button in Outlook to check your message for errors, the program will send the entire text of your email to the ESL website where you can review it for problems. If you correct errors online, you will have to copy the text back into Outlook manually.
Although ESL Assistant will not catch or correct all errors, it often finds problems that are overlooked by normal spelling and grammar checking tools. This makes it a great tool to expand your options and make sure that your English sounds as correct as possible.
http://www.eslassistant.com/
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