The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- Jobs death prompts grief at Apple stores in U.S., elsewhere
- Ridiculed crystal work wins Nobel for Israeli
- U.S. Republican Palin decides not to run in 2012
| Jobs death prompts grief at Apple stores in U.S., elsewhere Posted: 05 Oct 2011 09:46 PM PDT CUPERTINO, Calif./NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple fans from New York to Australia gathered to mourn the death of Steve Jobs, leaving Apple products, bouquets and heartfelt messages in tribute to the man who transformed the computing, music and phone industries.
Flags outside Apple's headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California flew at half mast as a group of mourners flocked to a nearby lawn. Distraught Apple fans left flowers in tribute and a man played the bagpipes. "In my mind there is no difference between him and a Pasteur," said Chitra Abdolzadeh, a healthcare worker in Cupertino, in reference to the legendary French chemist Louis Pasteur. Ben Chess, a 29-year-old engineer at the Internet company Yelp and a former Apple intern, drove to the Apple HQ from San Francisco immediately after work. He laid a bunch of flowers. "It's the right thing to do," he said. At the downtown San Francisco Apple store, people held up pictures of Jobs on their iPads and taped greeting cards and post-it notes to the store window saying "thank you Steve" and "I hate cancer." There were also candles and red apples left outside. One Apple store employee in San Francisco, Cory Moll described Jobs as a personal inspiration. "We're lucky to have had him for as long as we did," said Moll, holding an iPad displaying a quote in memorial to Jobs. "What he's done for us as a culture, it resonates uniquely in every person," Moll said. "Even if they never use an Apple product, the impact they have had is so far-reaching." Across the country in New York City, a makeshift memorial made out of fliers featuring pictures of Jobs was established outside a 24-hour Apple store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, with mourners snapping photos of it on their iPhones. "We will miss you Steve, RIP. Thank you for your vision," read one flier. Business professor and influential business thinker Gary Hamel said he left for the store as soon as he found out about Jobs' death. "As soon as I heard the news, I came out to this Apple store to pay my respects," he said, clutching the power cord he just bought inside. "I saw tears in some people's eyes." Outside another Apple store in New York's SoHo neighborhood, two men laid candles, bouquets of flowers, an apple and, for a while, placed an iPod Touch on the ground. At the Apple Store on Boylston Street in Boston, Angelos Nicolaou, a student at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, said that Jobs "inspired us to be rebels and challenge the status quo. I hope there will be more leaders like him. It seems like the world is running out of them." In Sydney, Australia, lawyer George Raptis, who was five years old when he first used a Macintosh computer, said of Jobs: "He's changed the face of computing. There will only ever be one Steve Jobs." Some of the people who flocked to their local Apple stores when they heard of Jobs' passing were already thinking of Apple's future without its co-founder. The company named Tim Cook as its new CEO at the end of August when Jobs stepped down. "They had a lot of time to prepare for the transition ... Tim Cook will continue his legacy," said Guilherme Ferraz, 44, a Brazilian businessman who was standing in front of a Manhattan Apple Store. Keenen Thompson, a 21-year-old was in front of the Apple store in New York and said he would not leave until Apple's new iPhone 4S, unveiled earlier this week, comes out. The former Apple store employee said he wants to be the first one to get the new iPhone on October 14. "I wish the company well and I feel confident with Tim Cook," he said, glancing at the MacBook Air laptop he had set up next to him. (Reporting by Liana Baker, Andrew Longstreth, Nadia Damouni and Soyoung Kim in New York, Amy Pyett in Sydney, Jim Finkle in Boston, Sarah McBride, Noel Randewich, Jim Christie in Cupertino, California; Editing by Peter Lauria and Martin Howell) Copyright © 2011 Reuters | ||
| Ridiculed crystal work wins Nobel for Israeli Posted: 05 Oct 2011 09:15 PM PDT STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.
Three decades after Daniel Shechtman looked with an electron microscope at a metal alloy and saw a pattern familiar in Islamic art but then unknown at a molecular level, those non-stick, rust-free, heat-resistant quasicrystals are finding their way into tools from LEDs to engines and frying pans. Shechtman, 70, from Israel's Technion institute in Haifa, was working in the United States in 1982 when he observed atoms in a crystal he had made form a five-sided pattern that did not repeat itself, defying received wisdom that they must create repetitious patterns, like triangles, squares or hexagons. "People just laughed at me," Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening "crusade" against him, saying: "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists." After telling Shechtman to go back and read the textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for "bringing disgrace" on the team. "I felt rejected," Shechtman remembered. "His discovery was extremely controversial," said the Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which granted him the 10-million crown ($1.5-million) award. "Daniel Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science ... His battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter. "In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves." A PRIZE FOR THOUSANDS On Wednesday, Shechtman said he was "excited" but at pains to praise fellow scientists, many of whom once doubted him. Nancy Jackson, the president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), called it "a great work of discovery". Scientists had previously thought solid matter had only two states -- crystalline, like diamonds, where atoms are arranged in rigid rows, and amorphous, like metals, with no particular order. Quasicrystalline matter offers a third possibility and opens the door to new kinds of materials for use in industry. Sometimes referred to as Shechtmanite in the discoverer's honour, hundreds of quasicrystals have been synthesised in laboratories. Two years ago, scientists reported the first naturally occurring find of quasicrystals in eastern Russia. David Phillips, president of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry, called them "quite beautiful". Interlocking arrays of stars, circles and floral shapes are typical. "You can normally explain in simple terms where in a crystal each atom sits - they are very symmetrical," Phillips said. "With quasicrystals, that symmetry is broken: there are regular patterns in the structure, but never repeating." An intriguing feature of such patterns, also found in Arab mosaics, is that the mathematical constant known as the Greek letter tau, or the "golden ratio", occurs over and over again. Underlying it is a sequence worked out by Fibonacci in the 13th century, where each number is the sum of the preceding two. Living things, including flowers, fruit and shellfish, also demonstrate similar arrangements, which scientists associate with the efficient packing of materials into growing organisms. Quasicrystals are very hard and are poor conductors of heat and electricity, offering uses as thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity. They also have non-stick surfaces, handy for frying pans, and appear in energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and heat insulation in engines. Astrid Graslund, secretary for the Nobel Committee for chemistry, said: "The practical applications are as of now, not so many. But the material has unexpected properties. It is very strong, it has hardly any friction on the surface. It doesn't want to react with anything -- they cannot ... become rusty. "But it is more a conceptual insight - that these materials exist and we need to re-write all textbooks about crystals - it's a shift of the paradigm, which I think is most important." BATTLE OF BELIEF Since Galileo was mocked by established scientists and persecuted by the church in the 16th century for observing that the Earth moved round the Sun rather than the reverse, overturning accepted wisdom has never been easy, as several of this year's Nobel prizewinners in science have shown. Research that was largely ignored for years secured the medicine prize for the late Ralph Steinman and the astounding finding that the universe's expansion was speeding up not slowing down meant the physics prize for its joint discoverers. But in a year when science is in a froth over whether particles may have been fired from Geneva to Italy faster than the speed of light -- apparently defying Einstein -- few in the modern age have had to battle disbelief as hard as Shechtman. "He dealt with the scepticism in a very scientific and gentlemanly manner and answered his critics as every scientist should -- through science," Ron Lifshitz, a physics professor at Tel Aviv University, told Reuters. "There were also personal slurs but those did not warrant a response ... He believed in his own work and carried on with determination." Interviewed about his Nobel by television in Israel, where the award was big national news for a small country with a long roster of laureates, Shechtman spoke of a photograph in his office that showed a small cat sipping water, surrounded by angry dogs; a biblical inscription read: "Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil". "That's the way I felt for many years," Shechtman chuckled. "It accurately describes the situation, during that period." He "trusted in his science", however, and came to see the criticism by the late Pauling, which Shechtman has described as "almost theological", as a positive source of strength: "When you're a young scientist, and you're faced with perhaps the top international scientist, Professor Linus Pauling ... and he argues with you as an equal, and you know that he is wrong - that's not really such a bad feeling." (Additional reporting by Simon Johnson in Stockholm, Ben Hirschler in London, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Dan Williams, Ori Lewis and Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Writing by Alastair Macdonald) Copyright © 2011 Reuters | ||
| U.S. Republican Palin decides not to run in 2012 Posted: 05 Oct 2011 09:15 PM PDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sarah Palin said on Wednesday that she will not seek the Republican U.S. presidential nomination in 2012, ending months of speculation and leaving the Republican field largely settled.
Palin had left the door open to a run but gave little sign of joining the race to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama. She made it official in a letter to supporters and in an interview with conservative talk radio host Mark Levin. "After much prayer and serious consideration, I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for president of the United States," she said in the letter. Her decision leaves Republican voters to choose from a field that is led by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Texas Governor Rick Perry, and businessman Herman Cain, and includes a host of others. Her announcement came a day after New Jersey Governor Chris Christie opted against running. "Cinderella's not going to the ball, so Republican voters are going to have to settle for one of her ugly sisters," said Mark McKinnon, a former campaign adviser to Republicans George W. Bush and John McCain. While most Republicans opposed a presidential bid by Palin, she still has a passionate core following of conservatives and her endorsement would be beneficial. Perry, a top conservative candidate, quickly issued a statement that could be construed as a bid for her support. "Sarah Palin is a good friend, a great American and a true patriot. I respect her decision and know she will continue to be a strong voice for conservative values and needed change in Washington," Perry said. Experts did not believe Palin's supporters would necessarily gravitate toward any one candidate. "In most polls she was down to single digits. My experience is when you're down to single digits, you split off a percent to this one and 1 or 2 percent to that one. It just doesn't transform the race at all," said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political science professor. FAMILY CONSIDERATIONS In her letter, Palin cited family considerations as playing a major factor in her decision. She has felt the U.S. news media has gone too far in covering her family, such as the drama involving her daughter Bristol's tempestuous relationship with the father of her child, Levi Johnston. She made clear she would turn her attention toward recreating a role she carved out for herself in the 2010 congressional elections, helping elect Tea Party conservatives to Congress, state governorships and the White House. "I believe that I can be more effective and I can be more aggressive in this mission in a supportive role of getting the right people elected," she told Levin. Palin's star had faded since her opening days as McCain's vice presidential nominee in 2008 when she burst onto the scene as a relative unknown and quickly became a conservative star and promoted herself as a "mama grizzly." She has been polling far behind the main challengers for the Republican nomination and most Palin-watchers had long since concluded that she was not going to run based on a series of equivocating statements. The only woman in the 2012 race now is Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who is popular with the same social conservatives who find Palin an electrifying presence. There seemed to be no temptation by Palin to run for president as a third-party candidate. "I would assume that a third party would just guarantee Obama's re-election and that's the last thing our republic can afford. So the consideration is not there for a third party, no," she told Levin. Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Fordham University, said he expects Palin to be a factor in the 2012 elections. "She has a very dedicated following and a knack for staying relevant in politics, even when she herself is not a candidate," he said. (Additional reporting by William Schomberg, Lily Kuo and Jeff Mason; Editing by Vicki Allen) Copyright © 2011 Reuters |
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