Rocky Mountain National ParkFLICKR, ANDREW E. RUSSELLThree teams of researchers will receive this year’s Golden Goose Awards tomorrow (September 17) at a ceremony held in Washington, DC.
Joel Cohen, a mathematical population biologist, and Christopher Small, a geophysicist, are being honored for their studies on the distribution of human populations at different altitudes. “Turns out, altitude determines more about our lives than we thought,” Golden Goose Award creator Representative Jim Cooper (D-TN) said in a press release. The research has impacted disaster preparedness as well as changes in potato-chip packaging and personal computer cooling systems.
Torsten Weisel and the late David Hubel won a Golden Goose Award for their early research on visual perception, spurred by an accidental motion while monitoring cats’ responses to a black dot projected on a screen. Their work helped explain the brain’s ability to rewire itself, and pushed doctors to conduct cataract surgery on children as early ...
