Funny anecdote that Dr. Brunkow thought she was being spammed when the Nobel Committee tried to inform her:
>Brunkow, meanwhile, got the news of her prize from an AP photographer who came to her Seattle home in the early hours of the morning. She said she had ignored the earlier call from the Nobel Committee. “My phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and thought: ‘That’s just, that’s spam of some sort.’”
Am I understanding correctly that this Nobel prize is for work that was completed over 20 years ago? I'm not a biologist but it sounds like they discovered regulatory T cells together, which sounds relatively major. Is it typical for a Nobel prize to lag that kind of discovery for decades? Or is it only now that we understand how major the discovery was? Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the discovery and the timeline.
At least in Physics, on average every year there is more than one discovery that is worth a Nobel prize. So there is an increasing backlog of people who should get a Nobel prize. You can look at the list and check that people in the 1920s got their prize about 15 years after their work [1]. But recently people have been getting it about 30-40 years after.
I can’t say I would react too differently. There are so many emails or phone calls claiming you’ve won a big award or sum of money that end up being scams.
The article does describe some of the subject's tormentors eventually apologizing to him, possibly more out of reflection and genuine remorse as opposed to being told to "Tell him you're sorry."
There should be consequences for bad behavior all around, but if one of the consequences is that a bully increases their level of compassion and self-regulation, it could allow the system to skip the punishment phase of creating consequences and still serve the goals of justice.
Also, while suspension for the subject sounds like a punitive and one-sided approach, he dreaded going to school and the suspension provided a mechanism to create an approach that would thoughtfully allow him and his tormentors to develop better behaviors.
Such a beautiful plane. While perhaps the structural issues could have been better anticipated and addressed, the fact that the engines were incorporated into the wings would likely have been the next issue for the aircraft, with fires, seized turbofans, and proximity to fuel tanks causing further incidents or accidents at rates exceeding those of planes with their engines mounted on pylons.
There were later versions of the Comet. Version 1 was underpowered, and had too much weight reduction for that reason. By version 4, the design had been debugged. With more powerful engines and structural fixes, the Comet 4 went into service and did OK. 46 Comet 4 aircraft were built. Last flight in 1997.
Interesting detail in TFA is that the pilot had converted to the plane's short take off and vertical landing mode, but instead carried out a missed approach procedure when his helmet-mounted display malfunctioned.
What do you mean by "instead"? Would you have expected the pilot to guess where the runway is without his instruments? He was flying in IMC. Meaning he couldn't see where he was going.
>Brunkow, meanwhile, got the news of her prize from an AP photographer who came to her Seattle home in the early hours of the morning. She said she had ignored the earlier call from the Nobel Committee. “My phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and thought: ‘That’s just, that’s spam of some sort.’”
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2025/10/sc...