NEWARK | Retired University of Delaware chemist Richard F. Heck and two Japanese scientists won the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for finding new ways to bond carbon atoms together, methods now widely used to make medicines and in agriculture and electronics.
Mr. Heck was honored along with Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for their development four decades ago of one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today, called palladium-catalyzed cross coupling. Their work lets chemists join carbon atoms together, a key step in the process of building complex molecules.
Mr. Heck, 79, who retired and moved to the Philippines with his Filipino wife, said from his home there that he was glad to have won.
“I published this work in the early days; it just took a while for it to get appreciated,” he said.
NEW YORK
Naked Cowboy says he’s running for president
NEW YORK | New York’s “Naked Cowboy” is looking for some new exposure as a presidential candidate.
Robert Burck is familiar to any Times Square tourist as the man standing in the heart of the “Crossroads of the World,” playing a guitar and wearing only tighty-whiteys, boots and a cowboy hat.
But he wore a suit and tie Wednesday as he announced his intention to run for president in 2012 as a member of the conservative “tea party” movement.
He proclaimed he was running “in defense of individual liberty” and criticized President Obama for the direction of the country.
“America is rapidly transforming into a government-run enterprise,” he said, adding that “American politicians are selling out America and its most cherished institution, that being capitalism.”
Mr. Burck said he was registered as a Republican in Ohio.
Among his policy goals, he listed closing borders, requiring drug tests for welfare recipients, abolishing unions for government workers and cutting capital-gains and income taxes. He also said he would work to reverse the recently passed health care law.
SOUTH CAROLINA
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