International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

Governments and research consortia can reap great benefits for the community and industry through large, shared research facilities and infrastructure. What happens when experiments are too big and too expensive for a single university to run? Some research efforts need to be conducted at a huge scale, drawing on multiple partner institutions; it’s not always feasible or advisable for one institution to be the sole focus of that work. Instead, large scientific instruments and experimental infrastructure are built and maintained at central facilities. These advanced research tools range from underground labs at the bottom of mines, to free-electron lasers and particle accelerators – such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN , Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest particle accelerator. It’s a prime example of a facility that fosters international scientific collaboration. Photograph: Dominguez, Daniel; Brice, Maximilien. Credit: CERN. Due to thei...

“Cosmic Cliffs” in the Carina Nebula, approximately 7,600 light-years away from Earth. Image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. As children we look up to the beauty of the night sky and are inspired to dream. I recall as a small child being fascinated by my father’s books on astronomy and the beautiful pictures of now-familiar starscapes such as the Horsehead Nebula. That led me to join the astronomy club at school and spending nights in the cold, sleeping on the floor of the cricket pavilion, and waking up at the right time with other similarly nerdy teens, to peer up through a telescope lens to see if we could locate the moons of Jupiter. How many of today’s scientists (not just astronomers) are doing what they do in part due to some similar formative experience? A wonder about the universe and a desire to understand its mysteries. A whole new generation of scientists may now have been inspired to dream and perhaps, one d...