prizes

This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio of France, has a dream.

In a lecture Sunday to the Swedish Academy that awards this stunningly relevant prize, Le Clezio suggested that the Web, had it been around in those days, might have prevented World War II.

"Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded--ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day," he said.

It is hard to find good fiction these days. And it seems even harder … Read more

The Pulitzer Prize Board is finally recognizing the obvious: if newsprint's highest journalism award wants to stay relevant it had better welcome the Web.

The Pulitzer board announced Monday that it will consider entries from online-only publications in addition to print outlets for the 14 journalism categories that once were prestigious but now few care about.

Any organization interested in submitting stories for Pulitzer consideration must publish at least once a week, be U.S.-based, and feature original reporting. Online or print magazines need not apply. The Pulitzers are for daily or weekly news organizations.

Why the change … Read more

Reporter Ina Fried gives us the skinny on what Microsoft is cooking up for its next version of Windows and tells us how a Web-accessible version of Office will work.

Also in this podcast: the man behind the video game Doom wins the first level of the X Prize Foundation's lunar-lander contest; Google reaches a settlement with authors and publishers over its searchable online library of books; and MTV opens its vast archive of music videos--old and new--to people on the Web.

Today's stories:

Next version of Office heads to the browser… Read more

Armadillo Aerospace, a team led by Doom video game creator John Carmack, has won $350,000 in prize money in a contest to improve lunar flight.

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is a $2 million contest that challenges teams to build a lunar vehicle and then simulate a 90- to 180-second moon flight and landing. The event is hosted by the X Prize Foundation and sponsored by NASA. And the end goal is to open the door for developing a fleet of lunar ferries that could carry people and payloads between lunar orbit and the moon's surface.

The … Read more

Aren't you momentarily stunned when your cab driver or your shuttle driver at Hertz or your local car dealership says something that really makes you think? Don't you wonder how someone so smart ended up driving you around?

Please, therefore, consider what it must be like to be Douglas Prasher.

Prasher, or as he should be known, Dr. Prasher, makes around $8 an hour as a courtesy shuttle driver for an Alabama car dealer. And he's been stunned to hear that the fruits of his work have led to a Nobel Prize for chemistry--which just happened … Read more

YouTube might be best known for videos of cute animals and teens dancing with light sabers. But one nonprofit wants to use it as an idea factory.

The X Prize Foundation, the same organization behind the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize to send private vehicles to the moon, said Tuesday that it has put together an eco challenge for YouTubers called "What's your crazy green idea?" Dream up a world-changing idea to stop global warming, post a two-minute YouTube video about it, and it could be worth $25,000.

That's a paltry sum compared to … Read more

Within the next 10 years, the U.S., China, Israel, and a host of private companies plan to set up camp on the moon. So if and when they plant a flag, does that give them property rights?

A NASA working group hosted a discussion this week to ask: who owns the moon? The answer, of course, is no one. The Outer Space Treaty, the international law signed by more than 100 countries, states that the moon and other celestial bodies are the province of all mankind. No doubt that would irk all of the people throughout the ages, like … Read more

Ten teams are signed up once again to compete in the NASA-sponsored Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a $2 million contest to simulate a moon flight in the New Mexico desert.

The X Prize Foundation, the event's host, announced the team lineup Tuesday, saying it is confident that this year, after two years of unsuccessful attempts, NASA will award the prize money. However, in a potentially cautionary move, the 2008 event in late October at New Mexico's Holloman Air Force Base will be closed to the public for the first time. People can watch it live via the … Read more

Ten teams are signed up once again to compete in the NASA-sponsored Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a $2 million contest to simulate a moon flight in the New Mexico desert.

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