Nobel Prize Goes To 9
Two Americans and a German won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry yesterday for laying the foundations of an ultra-powerful microscope that allows the study of tissue at the molecular level.
The tool has revolutionised research into diseases and drug design, the Nobel jury said, as it lauded Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and Germany's Stefan Hell.
"Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nano-dimension," it said.
"Today, nanoscopy is used worldwide and new knowledge of the greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis."
Working separately, the trio overcame a presumed limit set in 1873 by microscopist Ernst Abbe, who said the resolution of an image would never be better than around 200 nanometres (200 billionths of a metre), which is half the wavelength of light.
Because of this so-called diffraction limit, it was thought that the inner workings of a cell would never be clearly observed, inhibiting for instance our understanding of how cells function, reproduce or become infected.
The basis of the laureates' work, dating back to pioneering research by Hell in the
1990s, adds fluorescent molecules to a sample to be studied.
Medicine and biology have been the big winners from nanoscopy.
NOBEL IN PHYSICS
Three scientists from Japan won the Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for pioneering energy-efficient LED lighting, a weapon against global warming and poverty.
The trio are Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, who has since become a US national.
"This year's Nobel Laureates are rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source -- the blue light-emitting diode (LED)," the jury said.
"Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century. The 21st century will be lit by LED lamps."
Red, green and blue need to be mixed to recreate the white light of the Sun.
Red and green diodes had been around for a long time, but devising a blue LED was the Holy Grail -- and achieving it took three long decades.
The breakthrough came in the 1990s when the three researchers, after dogged work, coaxed bright blue beams from semiconductors.
LEDs are also commonplace in computers, TV, watches and mobile phone screens.
NOBEL IN MEDICINE
British-American researcher John O'Keefe on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize with a Norwegian couple, May-Britt and Edvard Moser, for discovering an "inner GPS" that helps the brain navigate.
They earned the coveted prize for identifying brain cells enabling people to orient themselves in space, with implications for diseases such as Alzheimer's, the jury said.
"The discoveries of John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries," it said.
"How does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?"
O'Keefe, 74, told AFP that his research explained how London taxi drivers were able to navigate 25,000 streets and know how to get from one to the other.
"In the same way that GPS allows you to locate yourself in an area or even on the surface of the Earth and then find your way to a desired location, it does exactly the same thing for the brain," O'Keefe said.
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