The Nobel Prizes, established by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel in 1895, have recognized achievements in a suite of sciences and the people behind those scientific pinnacles. Here's a list of the 2016 Nobel Prize winners, which will be updated each day as new awards are announced. Live Science also explains, in plain English, how the Nobel Laureates contributed to science and humankind.
Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology
Fukuoka, Japan-born scientist, Yoshinori Ohsumi illuminated a cellular process called autophagy, or 'self-eating', in which cells take unneeded or damaged material, including entire organelles, and transport them to a recycling compartment of sorts — in yeast cells, this compartment is called the lisosome, while vacuoles serve a similar purpose in human cells.
Nobel Prize in Physics
David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz were jointly awarded this year's Nobel Prize in physics for 'theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter'. (Topology refers to "a branch of mathematics that describes properties that change step-wise," according to the Nobel Foundation.)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 'for the design and synthesis of molecular machines'. In other words, this trio developed the world's smallest machines by linking together molecules into a unit that, when energy is added, could do some kind of work. These machines, a thousand times thinner than a strand of hair, included a tiny lift, mini motors and artificial muscles.
Link: https://www.nobelprize.org
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