PAUL KRUGMAN WINS THE NOBEL ECONOMICS PRIZEMonday October 13, 2008STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - American Paul Krugman won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for his analysis of trade patterns and locations of economic activity. Krugman, born in 1953, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and a columnist for The New York Times, formulated a new theory to answer questions about free trade, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. "What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions", the academy said in its citation. "He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography", it said. Krugman was the lone of winner of the 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million) award, the latest in a string of American researchers to be honored. The award, known as the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is the last of the six Nobel prizes announced this year and is not one of the original Nobels. It was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Nobel's memory.FORMER FINNISH PRESIDENT WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZEFriday October 10, 2008OSLO, Norway (AP) - Finland's ex-president Martti Ahtisaari received the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his efforts to build a lasting peace in places as diverse as East Timor and the Balkans in Europe. "The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2008 to Martti Ahtisaari for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts. These efforts have contributed to a more peaceful world and to 'fraternity between nations' in Alfred Nobel's spirit," the committee said in announcing the prize. Ahtisaari's efforts in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East drew much praise from the five-member committee. "For the past 20 years, he has figured prominently in endeavors to resolve several serious and long-lasting conflicts," the citation said, mentioning his work in conflicts from Namibia and Aceh to Kosovo and Iraq. "He has also made constructive contributions to the resolution of conflicts in Northern Ireland, in Central Asia, and on the Horn of Africa," the citation said. Speaking to NRK, Ahtisaari said he "was very pleased and grateful" at receiving the prize.FRANCE'S LE CLEZIO WINS 2008 NOBEL FOR LITERATUREThursday October 9, 2008STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for his poetic adventure and "sensual ecstasy". The Swedish Academy called Le Clezio, 68, an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization". Le Clezio made his breakthrough as a novelist with "Desert," in 1980, a work the academy said "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants". Le Clezio also won a prize from the French Academy for the work. The Swedish Academy said Le Clezio from early on "stood out as an ecologically engaged author, an orientation that is accentuated with the novels 'Terra Amata,' 'The Book of Flights,' 'War' and 'The Giants.'" The decision stood was in line with the Swedish Academy's recent picks of European authors for the prestigious award. Last year, it went to Briton Doris Lessing. Le Clezio was born in Nice in 1940 and at eight the family moved to Nigeria, where his father had been a doctor during World War II. His most recent works include 2007's "Ballaciner," a work the academy called a "deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film and the importance of film" in his life. His books have also included several tales for children, including 1980's "Lullaby" and "Balaabilou" in 1985.1 JAPANESE, 2 AMERICANS WIN NOBEL CHEMISTRY PRIZEWednesdauy October 8, 2008STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Two Americans and one Japanese won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for the discovery and development of a brightly glowing protein first seen in jellyfish, work that has helped scientists study how cancer cells spread. Japan's Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the prize for their research on green fluorescent protein, or GFP, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. The protein is a widely used laboratory tool to illuminate processes in living organisms, such as development of brain cells or the spread of cancer cells. Shimomura first isolated GFP from a jellyfish found off the west coast of North America in 1962 and discovered that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light. In the 1990s, Chalfie showed GFP's value "as a luminous genetic tag," while Tsien contributed "to our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces," the academy said in its citation. It said that their work has enabled "scientists to follow several different biological processes at the same time." That means that researchers have been able to use GFP to track nerve cell damage from Alzheimer's disease or see how insulin-producing beta-cells are created in the pancreas of a growing embryo. "In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells in the brain of a mouse with a kaleidoscope of colors," the citation said. Shimomura, born in 1928, works at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the Boston University Medical School. Chalfie, born in 1947, is a professor at Columbia University in New York, while Tsien, born in 1952, is a professor at the University of California, San Diego. The trio will split the 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million) award. Shimomura began his work in the mid 1950s while still in Japan. In 1962, he was able to isolate a protein from jellyfish that was slightly greenish in the sunlight. In the 1970s, he showed that the protein, GFP, contained a chemical group that absorbed and emitted light. In 1988, Chalfie heard about the protein and decided it would be an excellent tool for mapping the roundworm, acting as a glowing green signal for various activities in the roundworm's cells. He and others were able to prove that no other proteins were needed to control the chemical production to create the glowing green in GPF. Tsien's work helped extend GFP's usefulness by adding more colors to the palette that glowed longer with more intensity, the academy said. By exchanging various amino acids in different parts of GFP, he was able to get it to absorb and emit different colors, including blue, cyan and yellow. "That is how researchers today can mark different proteins in different colors to see their interactions," the academy said in its citation. The winners of the Nobel Prizes in medicine and physics were presented earlier this week. The prizes for literature, peace and economics are due to be announced Thursday, Friday and Monday. The awards include the money, a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896. Last year's chemistry award went to Gerhard Ertl of Germany for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding such questions as why the ozone layer is thinning.TWO JAPANESE, AMERICAN WIN 2008 PHYSICS NOBELTuesday October 7, 2008STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) - Two Japanese scientists and a Tokyo-born American shared the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics for helping to explain the behavior of subatomic particles, work that has helped shape modern physics theory, the prize committee said on Tuesday. The Nobel committee lauded Yoichiro Nambu, now of the University of Chicago, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan for work that helped show why the universe is made up mostly of matter and not anti-matter via changes known as broken symmetries. Nambu's analogy likens the changes to when one dinner guest uses the wrong bread plate, forcing all the other guests at a round table to change as well. "The work he has done has had implications from the study of the early universe all the way to the behavior of magnetic materials," University of Chicago Provost Thomas Rosenbaum told a news conference. The three men's work, done in the 1950s through the 1970s, predicted the behavior of the tiny particles known as quarks and underlies the Standard Model, which unites three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force. Nambu also influenced the development of quantum chromodynamics, which describes some interactions between protons and neutrons, which make up atoms, and the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons. He shared half of the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.4 million) prize with Kobayashi of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Maskawa of Kyoto University. Kobayashi and Maskawa predicted there were three families of quarks, instead of the two then known. Their calculations played out as predicted in high-energy particle physics experiments and there are now six known types of quarks -- up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. Kobayashi said the news of his Nobel prize came as a shock. "It is my great honor and I can't believe this," he said. Maskawa said he was not surprised. "There is a pattern to how the Nobel prize is awarded," he was quoted as saying by Kyodo. "I am very happy that Professor Yoichiro Nambu was awarded. I myself am not that happy". While his work helps explain how particles shift from one state to the next, Nambu described the initial reaction from his peers as "very poor". "There was no eureka moment," University of Chicago's James Cronin, the 1980 Nobel laureate in physics, told the news conference. But, he added, "It has been clear for so many years that of all of the people who have won the Nobel, there has been one missing, and that is Yoichiro Nambu". Physicists are now searching for the broken symmetry, the Higgs mechanism, which threw the universe into imbalance at the time of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Switzerland will be looking for the Higgs particle when they restart the collider in spring 2009. The prizes, awarded by the Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, are given annually for achievements in science, peace, literature and economics. They were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the 1895 will of Swedish dynamite millionaire Alfred Nobel.AIDS PIONEERS AND CANCER SCIENTIST WIN NOBEL PRIZEMonday October 6, 2008STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) - Two French scientists who discovered the AIDS virus and a German who bucked conventional wisdom to find a virus that causes cervical cancer were awarded the 2008 Nobel prize for medicine on Monday. Luc Montagnier, director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Institut Pasteur won half the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) for discovering the virus that has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the 1980s. Dr. Harald zur Hausen of the University of Duesseldorf and a former director of the German Cancer Research Center shared the other half of the prize for work that went against the established opinion about the cause of cervical cancer. "The three laureates have discovered two new viruses of great importance and the result of that has led to an improved global health," said Jan Andersson, a member of the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute. The discoveries made it possible to diagnose both infections, and led to the development of two vaccines that prevent cervical cancer, and more than 20 drugs that can keep HIV patients healthy. But Montagnier said those who most need the diagnosis and treatments for AIDS are not getting either. "It's Africa which is carrying the weight of the epidemic at this moment. Out of millions of people infected, a large number are not being treated, either because they don't have access to treatment or because they don't know they are infected," Montagnier told Reuters in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he was giving a lecture. The award is a decisive vote for Montagnier in a long-running dispute over who discovered and identified the virus, Montagnier or Dr. Robert Gallo, then of the U.S. National Cancer Institute. "There was no doubt as to who made the fundamental discoveries", Nobel Assembly member Maria Masucci told Reuters. Zur Hausen was recognized for finding that the human papilloma virus, or HPV, caused cervical cancer. "More than 5 percent of all cancers worldwide are caused by persistent infection with this virus," the Nobel committee said. The virus, which infects at least half of all sexually active adults, can also cause genital warts, cancer of the penis and other genitalia. The German scientist, who began his research in the 1970s, searched for different HPV types, detecting them in 70 percent of cervical tumor samples from around the world. An estimated 500,000 women are diagnosed with the disease each year and about 300,000 die from it, mostly in the developing world. Zur Hausen said he thought more cancers would be linked to viruses. "I suspect there will be more in the future", he said in a telephone interview. GlaxoSmithKline and Merck and Co. have developed vaccines against HPV -- which are controversial because to be effective the series of costly shots must be given to girls before they begin sexual activity. Medicine is traditionally the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. The prizes for achievement in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel. The Nobel laureate for physics will be announced on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in Oslo.
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