Celebrating The Nobel Prizes
More than 130 Nobelists have written more than 200 articles for Scientific American. Here's a sampling, along with a look at the prizes themselves
No Nobel for You: Top 10 Nobel Snubs
As the 2008 laureates are announced, SciAm looks back at some of Nobel history's also-rans
The Physical Science behind Climate Change
Why are climatologists so highly confident that human activities are dangerously warming Earth? Members of the IPCC, the 2007 peace winner, write on climate change
Of Survival and Science
From street waif in war-torn Italy to "knocking out" the genes of mice--Mario R. Capecchi shows how genius springs from the most unlikely beginnings.

Ranking Candidates Is More Accurate Than Voting
A ballot-counting system that allows voters to rank the candidates could provide more accurate results

Chemistry Nobel Glows Fluorescent Green
Laureates Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien used a colorful jellyfish protein to reveal the inner workings of cells

Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa Win Physics Nobel
Work on so-called symmetry breaking helped to shape the Standard Model and explain why matter won out over antimatter

Paul Krugman takes Nobel economics prize
Well-known New York Times columnist and Princeton professor of economics Paul Krugman has been awarded the 2008 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel...

No peace for science: International mediator takes Nobel Peace Prize
ScientificAmerican.com was up early again this morning checking the Nobel Prize Web site, waiting for the peace prize announcement. If you're wondering why, you'll recall that science and the environment have played a role in two of the last three Nobel Peace Prizes: Last year’s award to the U.N...

Chalfie, Shimomura and Tsien win Chemistry Nobel for lighting up cells
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Mass., and Boston University; Martin Chalfie, of Columbia University, New York; and Roger Tsien, of the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California...

Nobel Prize in Physics
Japan's Makato Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa share the Nobel Prize with American Yoichiro Nambu for work related to a fundamental description of nature at the subatomic particle level through what is known as broken symmetries...

Profile: Yoichiro Nambu in 1995
Strings and gluons--The seer, this year's physics Nobel laureate, saw them all

A History of Nobel Physicists from Wartime Japan
Nobel laureate Yoichiro Nambu co-authored this piece about the most trying years of Japan's history, as two brilliant schools of theoretical physics flourished

Montagnier, Barre-Sinoussi and zur Hausen Share Nobel
Physiology or medicine prize recognizes work on HIV and human papillomavirus (HPV) linked to cervical cancer--but leaves out Robert Gallo

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Germany's Harald Zur Hausen and France's Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi share this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The two French scientists discovered HIV, which quickly led to blood screening and treatments...

AIDS in 1988
In their first collaborative article 20 years ago, 2008 Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier, along with Robert Gallo, co-investigators who discovered HIV, introduced a Scientific American single-topic issue on AIDS...

Interview with Roderick MacKinnon

The Kindest Cut
Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first successful whole organ transplant

The $13-Billion Man
Why the head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute could be the most powerful individual in biomedicine.

Ask a Nobel Laureate
The Laureates provide answers to the best of your questions

The Watcher: Roald Hoffmann
A 1955 Westinghouse finalist wins a Nobel Prize in chemistry 26 years later, then turns his attention to poetry

Rulers of Light: Using Lasers to Measure Distance and Time
A revolutionary kind of laser light called an optical frequency comb makes possible a more precise type of atomic clock and many other applications

A Unified Physics by 2050?
Experiments at CERN and elsewhere should let us complete the Standard Model of particle physics, but a unified theory of all forces will probably require radically new ideas.

Detecting Mad Cow Disease
New tests can rapidly identify the presence of dangerous prions--the agents responsible for the malady--and several compounds offer hope for treatment