It takes ever longer for physicists to win a Nobel prize

ONE of Alfred Nobel's original rewards, the Nobel prize in physics has been awarded 104 times to 188 scientists between 1901 and 2010. As time has passed, so the laureates have generally had to wait ever longer for recognition from Sweden's Royal Academy of Science. In 1924, 1957 and 1987, the prizes rewarded research from the previous year, whereas Ernst Ruska shared the 1986 award for work he had done on the design of the first electron microscope 54 years earlier. This year, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov have managed to buck the waiting trend. Their award was for "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene" that they carried out as recently as 2004. (See Babbage for more.)