EVENT OF THE MONTH: OCTOBER 2014

Malala: Nobel Peace Prize 2014

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three Japanese-born scientists, Isamu Akasaki from Meijo University, Hiroshi Amano from the Nagoya University, Japan and Shuji Nakamura from the University of California "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources". The Nobel laureates have been rewarded for having invented the blue light-emitting diode (LED). As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources. The LED lamp holds great promise the life of over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity. Aka-saki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Che-micals, a small company in Tokushima.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this year has been awarded to Eric Betzig from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Stefan W Hell from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Gottingen and William E Moerner from the University of Stanford. In 1873, the microscopist Ernst Abbe stipulated a physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: it could never become better than 0.2 micrometres. Helped by fluorescent molecules, the Nobel laureates ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Scientists achieved this through 'nanoscopy' by two methods. One is the Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) microscopy, developed by Stefan Hell, in 2000. The other method is known as ‘single molecule microscopy’, developed by Eric Betzig and William Moerner, working separately. These findings together could yields an image at the nanolevel.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to John O´Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.Their work, which collectively spans four decades, revealed the existence of nerve cells that build up a map of the space around us and then track our progress as we move around. John O’Keefe, a US-British citizen at University College London, received half of the award. The remaining half of the prize was shared by May-Britt Moser and her husband, Edvard who work at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. May-Britt Moser is only the 11th woman to have won the medicine prize since it was first awarded in 1901. But rarer still are Nobel laureate couples: the Mosers are only the fifth to have won the Nobel prize.
 
Link: http://www.nobelprize.org