This year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry recognizes the invention of cryo-electron microscopy, a method for chilling down biomolecules to produce less jittery, more precise pictures of them.
Tag: Nobel Prize
This year’s Nobel Prize for physics is going, unsurprisingly, to three people who represent the hundreds of researchers behind the first direct detection of gravitational waves at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO.
Some of those researchers work at the LIGO detector in Hanford, Wash.
Like the Nobel-winning discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, LIGO’s discovery was the result of decades of work, undertaken with the expectation of finding evidence for an exotic phenomenon that was long predicted.
But because of the rules for the scientific Nobel Prizes, no more than three physicists could be given a share of the $1.1 million award.
The Nobel laurels are going to MIT’s Rainer Weiss and Caltech’s Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, who are recognized as ringleaders for the $500 million LIGO project.
The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine was awarded today for research into biological clocks that was conducted by three American researchers — including Jeffrey Hall, who received his Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Washington back in 1971.
Hall will share the $1.1 million prize with Michael Rosbash, a collaborator of his at Brandeis University; and Rockefeller University’s Michael Young.
The three biologists studied fruit flies to trace the genetic “inner workings” of circadian rhythm, the mechanism that regulates sleep, metabolism and other bodily functions in the course of a day, the Swedish-based Nobel committee said.
“Their discoveries explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth’s revolutions,” the committee said.
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UW’s first Nobel laureate dies at 94
The University of Washington says the first Nobel laureate in its history, Hans Georg Dehmelt, has passed away in Seattle at the age of 94 after a long illness.
Dehmelt won a share of the Nobel physics prize in 1989 for his work with ion traps, a type of apparatus that uses an array of electromagnetic fields to isolate electrically charged atoms and subatomic particles, and hold them in place for highly accurate measurements.
David Thouless, a British-born professor emeritus at the University of Washington, has been awarded half of this year’s Nobel physics prize for untangling the topological mysteries of superconductors, superfluids and other weird materials.
“Over the last decade, this area has boosted front-line research in condensed matter physics, not least because of the hope that topological materials could be used in new generations of electronics and superconductors, or in future quantum computers,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in today’s announcement of the award.
The other physicists named as Nobel laureates are Princeton’s Duncan Haldane and Brown University’s Michael Kosterlitz. The Nobel Prize committee allocated half of the $930,000 (8 million Swedish kronor) award to Thouless, with the other half to be shared by Haldane and Kosterlitz.