Nobel Prizes 2015
1. Physics
“The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the
2015 Nobel Prize in Physics to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for the
discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.”
“These elementary particles are the second most abundant in the
universe, next to the photons, which are the particles of light. They are
created in nuclear reactions, for example, in the sun, in stars. They interact
very little with the environment, for example, they can go through Earth
without being stopped.”
Neutrinos are a group of
subatomic particles which have no electrical charge, there are three “flavours”
which are muon (Vµ), tau (VT) and electron (Ve). Professor Kajita noticed that
neutrinos switched between the flavours whilst in the Earth’s atmosphere,
Professor McDonald then further discovered that on a journey from the Sun to
the Earth, neutrinos changed their flavour from what data predicted.
The academy said, "The discovery has changed our understanding
of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the
universe.”
2. Chemistry
There were 3 joint winners of the Chemistry Noble Prize 2015 and
they were Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar “for mechanistic studies of DNA repair”. These
scientists started mapping out how cells repair damaged DNA via a few different
methods.
Tomas Lindahl showed that DNA, which had been thought to be a
stable molecule, would decay quickly without a way to monitor and fix it. He
discovered what’s called base excision repair, involving enzymes that get rid
of mistakes and prevent mutations.
Paul Modrich showed how cells correct errors that take place
during DNA replication, every time a cell divides. This mismatch repair fixes
some 99.9 percent of the errors that take place.
Aziz Sancar worked out what’s known as nucleotide excision repair.
If your DNA gets damaged by, for example, UV light, this process junks the
broken section of DNA, which allows a piece with the correct sequence to replace
it.
These discoveries will help the development of new cancer
treatments in the future.
3.
Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize for medicine was jointly awarded this year. The
first half was awarded to William C.
Campbell and Satoshi Omura for
their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by
roundworm parasites. The active ingredient in the drug is called Avermectin and
it has been found to eliminate river blindness and reduce down Filariasis (a
disease that disfigures the lymph system in the body). The second half was to Tu Youyou for her discoveries concerning
a novel therapy against malaria. Her work began in 1967 when she extracted
Artemisia annua (or sweet wormwood) from plants and started testing it on
malaria parasites. The component responsible is called Artemisinin and is
discovered to be very successful at killing the parasites responsible for
malaria.
4.
Literature
5. Peace
The Tunisian National Dialogue Quarter were the recipients of the
Peace prize for aiding the Tunisian government’s transition to
democracy. In 2010 the country was on the verge of a civil war but the Jasmine
Revolution in 2011 led to a democratization of Tunisia. Before the TNDQ became
involved there was a lot of corruption, however after the resignation of Pres.
Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali things soon became more democratic and has inspired
similar waves throughout North Africa.
6. Economics
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