September 18, 2015

One winner of an Ig Nobel prize for 2015 allowed bees to sting him on different parts of his body to determine where bee stings are most painful for humans. Credit: © Shutterstock

A strange crowd was in attendance last night as the 25th annual Ig Nobel prizes were awarded in a star-studded gala ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Unlike the more well-known Nobel Prize, which in science is given for the most important discoveries or inventions in the fields of physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine, the Ig Nobel prizes honor scientific research projects that may make people laugh, but also makes them think. Ig Nobel is a play on words—the word ignoble means disgraceful or of a low class. Since 1991, the Ig Nobel ceremony has awarded 10 prizes each year to scientists whose unusual research helps spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology. Several of the awards last night were presented to winners by Nobel laureates. The award ceremony has many traditions. The audience, for example, throws paper airplanes at the stage during the ceremony.

The Ig Nobel prizes originated with the editors and publishers of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. Today, the award ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students and the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. Ig Nobel prizes are awarded for original research in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, economics, medicine, diagnostic medicine, physiology and entomology,  literature, and management.

The winners included:

 1. The chemistry prize was awarded to team from Australia who determined how to chemically (partially) unboil an egg.

2. The physics prize was awarded to a joint United States and Taiwan team who determined that nearly all mammals empty their bladder in about 21 seconds.

3. The literature prize was awarded for research that found the term “huh” exists in nearly all human languages.

4. The medicine prize went to a group that studied the health benefits of kissing.

5. In mathematics, a group was awarded the prize for using mathematical techniques to determine if it was possible, as claimed, for Moulay Ismael, the Emperor of Morocco from 1697 to 1727, to have fathered 888 children.

6. The physiology and entomology award went to a U.S. and Canadian team where one member allowed honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations of his body to determine which areas receive the most painful stings.

While many of the prize-winning topics sound funny, they actually demonstrate the imaginative use the scientific method to answer questions. Such research is not likely to be recognized by more prestigious scientific honors, but the research is still valuable or, sometimes just interesting.

October 14, 2014

French economist Jean Tirole yesterday was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of the best ways to regulate large, powerful industries. In making the award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences characterized Tirole as “one of the most influential economists of our time” who had provided regulators with “a whole new set of tools.”

After earning a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, Tirole studied the regulation of industries dominated by a small number of firms, such as investment banking and communications. His work is based on the idea that policy rules have different effects, both good and bad, on different industries. He developed a framework for constructing regulatory policies suited to industries–such as cable television companies–where competition does not fulfill the textbook pattern of driving down prices while driving up quality. Tore Ellingsen, chairman of the prize committee, noted that Tirole had broken new ground on “what sort of regulations do we want to put in place so large and mighty firms will act in society’s interest.”

October 13, 2014

Two Americans and a German have won the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their “ground-breaking” efforts in developing ways to peer more closely at the inner workings of living cells using optical (light-bending) microscopes than scientists had thought possible. The winners, all physical chemists, are William E. Moerner of Stanford University in Stanford, California, and Eric Betzig of the Janelia Research Campus at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia; and Stefan W. Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, both in Germany. The scientists were honored “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy,” which, the Nobel Committee said, is producing “new knowledge of greatest benefit to mankind … on a daily basis.” They will share the $1.1-million prize equally.

The scientists, working independently, turned the microscope into a nanoscope–a tool for seeing “the pathways of individual molecules inside living cells, according to the Nobel Committee. “They can see how molecules create synapses [bridges] between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate [clump]; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos.” Other types of microscopy kill living cells.

Fluorescence microscopy allows researchers to track the proteins involved in Alzheimer’s disease as they clump. In this photomicrograph, the round, yellow-brown spots, or plaques, are made up of abnormal amyloid protein. (© Jan Naslund, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden)

In fluorescence microscopy, cells or parts of cells are stained with green fluorescent protein (GFP), a naturally occurring molecule that glows green when exposed to blue or ultraviolet light. The light is typically captured by a digital camera or another detector connected to the microscope. By using GFP effectively and manipulating the captured images, scientists can identify tiny details within a cell. Since the 1870′s, scientists had believed that optical microscopes would never be able to visualize anything smaller than 0.2 micrometers, a limit based on the wavelength of light. Using fluorescence microscopy, researchers can visualize objects that are at least three times as small as that. Under certain circumstances, the resolution (ability to produce a clear image) may be even greater.

Additional World Book articles:

• Ernst Abbe
• Fluorescence
• Nobel Prizes in chemistry (table)
• Nobel Prizes (2008) (a Back in Time article)

October 9, 2014

French novelist Patrick Modiano has been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature. He is the 11th French writer to receive the world’s highest prize for literature. Modiano’s fiction centers on the themes of memory, identity, and guilt. Many of his stories are set in Nazi occupied Paris during World War II (1939-1945). His novels frequent have a strong autobiographical element and are written in a documentary style. The author sometimes draws on interviews and newspaper articles in assembling his stories. Modiano frequently carries incidents and characters over from one book to another.

Modiano won the Prix Goncourt, France’s leading literary award, for his novel Missing Person (1978), a story about a detective who has lost his memory and whose final case is trying to discover who he really is. Dora Bruder (1997, translated as The Search Warrant, 2000) is based on the true story of a 15-year old Jewish girl in Paris who becomes a victim of the Holocaust.

Modiano’s novels are often set in Paris during the Nazi occupation of World War II. In this photo, joyful Parisians welcome Allied troops after the liberation of the city in 1944. (© Corbis)

Modiano was born on July 30, 1945, in Boulogne-Billancourt, a Paris suburb. His father was of Jewish-Italian background. One of Modiano’s high-school teachers was the popular French author Raymond Queneau, who played a major role in Modiano’s early writing career. Modiano gained attention with his first novel, The Place de l’Etoile (1968). The novel, set in Paris during the German occupation, is considered a major work of Holocaust literature.

Modiano’s other novels in English translation include Night Rounds (1969), Ring Roads (1974), A Trace of Malice (1988), Honeymoon (1990), and Out of the Dark (1998). In addition to his novels, Modiano has written children’s books and was the co-author of the screenplay for the French World War II motion picture Lacombe, Lucien (1973). Modiano also wrote a highly praised memoir, A Pedigree (2004).

Additional World Book articles:

• French literature
• Nobel Prizes in Literature (table)

October 8, 2014

Two Japanese scientists and one American scientist have won the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics for their invention of the energy-efficient, environmentally friendly blue light-emitting diode (LED). Named were Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University and Nagoya University and Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University of Japan; and American Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara. In a press release annoucing the award, the Nobel Foundation said the blue LED has revolutionized lighting. “In the spirit of Alfred Nobel,” the foundation said, “the Prize rewards an invention of greatest benefit to mankind; using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way. With the advent of LED lamps we now have more long-lasting and more efficient alternatives to older light sources.” About 25 percent of the world’s electrical energy consumption goes toward making light.

Like traditional incandescent light bulbs, LED’s give off light in response to an electric current. But LED’s use electric power much more efficiently than traditional incandescents do. When electric current flows through an incandescent light bulb, most of it is transformed into heat. But in an LED, almost all of the electric current results in light. The devices can be used in a variety of applications, from small colored lights on automobile dashboards to bright street lamps. Some LED’s can last 100 times as long as incandescent bulbs and 10 times as long as fluorescent bulbs.

Light-emitting diodes (LED’s) serve as light sources in many traffic signals. Such signals rarely need replacement because LED’s last far longer than incandescent or fluorescent light bulbs. (© Richard Levine, Alamy Images)

Other researchers had created red and green in the 1950′s, but the blue LED stumped scientists for some 30 years. Blue LED’s enable light bulb manufacturers to efficiently create white-colored light. Beginning in the late 1980′s, Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura worked separately and alone to create the blue LED by using gallium nitride in the layers of semiconducting materials that make up a LED. A semiconductor is a material that conducts electric current better than an insulator like glass, but not as well as a conductor like copper. A computer chip is a piece of a semiconductor, usually silicon, that contains an electronic circuit. Semiconductors are also used to make solar cells and some lasers.

The Nobel Foundation said, “The Laureates challenged established truths; they worked hard and took considerable risks. They built their equipment themselves, learnt the technology, and carried out thousands of experiments. Most of the time they failed, but they did not despair; this was laboratory artistry at the highest level.”

Additional World Book articles:

• Electric light
• Energy supply

October 6, 2014

Three scientists who discovered how virtually all creatures, including people, know where they are in their environment and how they find their way from place to place have won the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Half of the $1.1-million prize was awarded to British-American physiological psychologist John O’Keefe, director of the Sainsbury Welcome Centre in Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London. The other half of the prize was awarded to the Norwegian wife-and-husband team of psychologist May-Britt Moser, director of the Centre For Neural Computation, and neurophysiologist Edvard Moser, director of the Kavli Insitute for Systems Neuroscience, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. The Nobel Committee said the scientists had “discovered an ‘inner GPS‘ in the brain that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space,” demonstrating that brain cells are involved in our ability to know and perceive the world.

O’Keefe discovered the first component of that system–nerve cells that he named place cells–while using rats to study how the brain controls behavior. He found that these cells, located in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, fired (become activated) when a rat was at a specific place in a “room.” Other place cells fired when the rat was at other places. The cells, O’Keefe concluded, created a map of the room.

O’Keefe’s and the Mosers’ work on the role of the hippocampus in the brain’s navigation system has helped other scientists studying the causes and effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Patients with Alzheimer’s often lose their ability to find their way from place to place and recognize their surroundings. (© Phototake/Alamy Images)

The Mosers discovered the second component of the navigational system–another type of nerve cell called grid cells–in a nearby region of the brain called the entorhinal cortex. These cells fired when the rat passed certain locations in the room, forming a hexagonal grid that allowed for spatial navigation (purposeful movements within a certain space). More recent studies of the human brain using brain imaging techniques and in neurosurgery have revealed that both place cells and grid cells exist there as well.

The Nobel Committee said the scientists’ work in discovering the brain’s positioning system marks a major shift in the understand of how groups of brain cells work together to perform such major cognitive functions as making and recalling memories, thinking, and planning. The research has helped other scientists trying to gain a better understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions that affect cognitive functions. Patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease often lose their ability to find their way and fail to recognize even familiar environments.

Additional articles in World Book:

• Dementia
• Nervous system (How the nervous system works)

October 10, 2013

Canadian author Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature. Making the announcement today, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described Munro as a master of the short story: “She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection.”

Munro began writing fiction while studying at the University of Western Ontario. Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize. The stories explore life in a fictional small Ontario town similar to the one in which she was born and raised.

Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature. (AP Wide World)

Munro has since published more than a dozen short story collections, including Lives of Girls and Women (1971), The Progress of Love (1986), Open Secrets (1994), and The View from Castle Rock (2006). Many of Munro’s later stories depict the tangled relationships between men and women, the complications of marriage, and the difficulties individuals encounter recognizing their own motivations. Often compared with the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Munro’s most consistent theme has been how young women come to terms with the trials of rural life. Her stories are generally set in small towns in her native southwest Ontario, “because I live life here at a level of irritation which I would not achieve in a place that I knew less well.” “There are no such things as big and little subjects,” she stated in a recent interview. “The major things, the evils, that exist in the world have a direct relationship to the evil that exists around a dining room table when people are doing things to each other.”

Alice Laidlaw Munro was born on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario. In 1951, she married James Munro. She married her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, in 1976, and the couple settled in Clinton, Ontario, a small town near Lake Huron. Fremlin, died earlier this year, and Munro subsequently disclosed that her latest book, Dear Life, published in 2012, would be her last.

Munro will be presented with the Nobel Prize for literature at a formal ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who established the prize. In 2009, Munro was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work.

Additional World Book articles:

• Canada
• Canadian literature

October 9, 2013

Three foreign-born United States citizens have won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in designing powerful computer models that are widely used to study an amazing variety of complex chemical interactions. The winner are Austrian-born Martin Karplus of Harvard University and the University of Strasbourg; South African-born Michael Levitt of Stanford University School of Medicine; and Israeli-born Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Developing new drugs is only one application of this pioneering work. “Today the computer is just as important a tool for chemists as the test tube. Simulations are so realistic that they predict the outcome of traditional experiments,” the Nobel Committee said. “The work of Karplus, Levitt and Warshel is ground-breaking in that they managed to make Newton’s classical physics work side-by-side with the fundamentally different quantum physics. Previously, chemists had to choose to use either or.” Quantum physics is the study of the smallest known units of matter and their activity. Using programs based on Karplus, Levitt, and Warshel’s models, researchers can study the behavior of large molecules as well as the atoms and electrons in them.

“Chemical reactions occur at lightning speed,” the Nobel Committee explained. “In a fraction of a millisecond, electrons jump from one atomic nucleus to the other. Classical chemistry has a hard time keeping up; it is virtually impossible to experimentally map every little step in a chemical process. Aided by the methods now awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, scientists let computers unveil chemical processes, such as a catalyst’s purification of exhaust fumes or the photosynthesis in green leaves.”

October 8, 2013

Two physicists who developed a theory explaining what gives particles mass have won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics. Mass is a property related to weight. Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Francois Englert of the University Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium were recognized for setting off a 40-year search for a particle, later known as the Higgs boson, which gives mass to the subatomic particles that have that property. The discovery of the Higgs boson—a landmark in scientific research—was announced in 2012 by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, at the CERN research center in Switzerland. The Higgs is so fundamental to the nature of matter that it has been called the “god particle.”

A giant detector records the particles produced during the collisions between two circulating beams of high-energy particles that takes place in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Using this process, physicists were able to discover the existence of the Higgs boson (© CERN).

Physicists had greeted the discovery of the Higgs boson with excitement because it allowed them to complete the Standard Model, the theory that describes the particles that make up matter and how they interact through forces. The Standard Model has had enormous success in accounting for the interactions between and behavior of elementary particles. However, physicists still could not explain how particles attained mass.

Higgs and Englert were among several physicists who proposed that a missing particle was the source of the mass found in subatomic particles. However, many physicists argued that things could not be so simple, and they proposed models with many additional particles. But the simplest model—proposed by Higgs and his colleagues—became the favorite among physicists.

One property of the Higgs is that it undergoes extremely rapid decay—breaking down into photons and other subatomic particles soon after it appears. A particle accelerator with very high energy is needed to pick out the elusive Higgs among the debris of particle collisions. In the LHC, scientists finally had a particle accelerator powerful enough to reveal the Higgs.

Additional World Book articles:

• Boson
• Nobel, Alfred
• Supersymmetry
• Physics 2012 (a Back in Time article)
• Found—The Top Quark (a special report)

October 7, 2013

American scientists James E. Rothman of Yale University and Randy W. Schekman of the University of California at Berkeley shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with German-born biologist Thomas Sudhof of Stanford University for  discoveries showing how insulin and other vital materials are transported and delivered to targets within and between cells of the body. This extremely precise transport system is essential for health.

Cells differ greatly in size and shape and in the jobs they do. But all cells have certain features, and each cell can be thought of as a tiny chemical factory. It has a control center that tells it what to do and when. It has power plants for generating the energy it needs to function, and it has machinery for making needed products or performing essential services. Within each cell, a transportation control system ensures that necessary substances are delivered to the right place at the right time and so prevents the cellular factory from breaking down.

Working separately, the three scientists investigated the networks of tiny cavities, called vesicles, that transport materials within and sometimes between individual cells of the body. Rothman studied the various proteins that enable vesicles to deliver such necessary substances as hormones or enzymes to the appropriate target within the cell. Schekman identified the genes that control the cellular transport system. Similar genes are found in all animals, from simple yeast to human beings. Sudhof studied how chemical signals from nerve cells instruct vesicles to release the substances they contain. Such signaling is necessary so that the thousands of complex reactions that take place in the body occur in a precise manner.

The three scientists’ research offers many practical medical applications. Disturbances in the cell’s internal transport system are thought to play a role in diabetes and various neurological and immune system disorders.

Additional World Book article:

• Nobel, Alfred Bernhard