An open letter signed by
31 Nobel laureates that
calls for the release of
jailed Iranian physics
Ph.D. student Omid
Kokabee was delivered
to the Iranian mission
to the United Nations
last week, along with earlier petitions signed by more than
14,000 people. Kokabee, 32, has been in
prison since January 2011 (http://scim.ag/
Kokabeetrial).
He was studying the interaction of lasers and plasma at the University of Texas, Austin, when he was arrested and was later condemned to 10 years for espionage. In April 2013, Kokabee claimed in an open letter that he was jailed for refusing to cooperate with a military research project. In early October, Iran’s supreme court accepted Kokabee’s lawyer’s appeal and ordered
a retrial. Kokabee was also awarded the AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility prize last week. (AAAS publishes Science.)
Italian physicist to lead CERN
Fabiola Gianotti will be the next director- general of CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, which is home to the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A staff member at CERN, Gianotti, 52, served from March 2009 to February 2013 as spokeswoman for the 3000 researchers working with ATLAS, one of four gargantuan particle detectors fed by the LHC. In that position, she partici- pated in the biggest event in particle physics in decades: On 4 July 2012, she and the representative for rival detector CMS reported that the two teams had indepen- dently discovered the long-sought Higgs boson. Gianotti will take over from Rolf-Dieter Heuer on 1 January 2016.
He was studying the interaction of lasers and plasma at the University of Texas, Austin, when he was arrested and was later condemned to 10 years for espionage. In April 2013, Kokabee claimed in an open letter that he was jailed for refusing to cooperate with a military research project. In early October, Iran’s supreme court accepted Kokabee’s lawyer’s appeal and ordered
a retrial. Kokabee was also awarded the AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility prize last week. (AAAS publishes Science.)
Italian physicist to lead CERN
Fabiola Gianotti will be the next director- general of CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, which is home to the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A staff member at CERN, Gianotti, 52, served from March 2009 to February 2013 as spokeswoman for the 3000 researchers working with ATLAS, one of four gargantuan particle detectors fed by the LHC. In that position, she partici- pated in the biggest event in particle physics in decades: On 4 July 2012, she and the representative for rival detector CMS reported that the two teams had indepen- dently discovered the long-sought Higgs boson. Gianotti will take over from Rolf-Dieter Heuer on 1 January 2016.
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