“I love failure.” It is not something we usually expect to hear from a Nobel Laureate. Yet that is exactly how Sir Richard Roberts, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1993, describes it. For someone who has spent a lifetime making discoveries, failure is not simply something that happens along the way. It can be one of the most useful things that happens. We often learn to think about failure very differently. At school, getting something wrong can feel like

The Art of Observation There is a quiet skill behind many great discoveries and inventions that we don't talk about enough: the ability to observe. Not simply to see, but to really notice. To pause when something feels unusual, to look again when an answer doesn't quite make sense, and to remain curious about something others might dismiss as insignificant. When we look closely at the stories behind some of the world's great discoveries and ideas, we often find that they did

Some of the ideas that eventually change the world don't look extraordinary when they first appear. Sometimes they look strange, sometimes they fail, and sometimes people simply don't understand them. It can take years before others begin to see what the person who had the idea saw. One idea that particularly stayed with us came from Professor Arogyaswami Paulraj (Inventor of MIMO wireless technology), who recently spoke with our students. During the conversation, he shared a

We tend to remember Nobel Laureates for what they achieved: the discovery, the theory, the book, the medical breakthrough or the act of courage that earned them one of the world's most famous prizes. But the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm offers us a rather different way of looking at these extraordinary people. Nobel Laureates are invited to donate a personal object to the museum. It might be connected to their research, childhood, family or simply something that has meant

In our first article, The People Behind the Prize, we looked at some of the qualities that stood out as we explored the lives of extraordinary scientists and interacted with several of them through Open Ideas Lab. But while reading their biographies, we kept finding ourselves drawn further back beyond the laboratories, universities and eventual breakthroughs, to a much earlier part of their lives. What were they like before they became scientists? What occupied their attentio

When we launched Open Ideas Lab earlier this year, our goal was simple. We wanted young people to hear directly from some of the world's greatest scientists - not through textbooks or documentaries, but through real conversations. Since then, we have had the privilege of welcoming remarkable scientists to our platform, including Nobel Laureate Professor David Wineland, Abel Prize laureate Professor Michel Talagrand, astrophysicist Professor Avi Loeb, Former Chief Scientific A