Celebrating The Nobel Prizes

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

A revolutionary kind of laser light called an optical frequency comb makes possible a more precise type of atomic clock and many other applications

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

Strings and gluons--The seer, this year's physics Nobel laureate, saw them all

Work on so-called symmetry breaking helped to shape the Standard Model and explain why matter won out over antimatter

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. Steve Mirsky reports

A ballot-counting system that allows voters to rank the candidates could provide more accurate results

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.

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

As the 2008 laureates are announced, SciAm looks back at some of Nobel history's also-rans

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. They recounted the breakthrough and offered prospects for vaccine, for therapy and for the epidemic

Physiology or medicine prize recognizes work on HIV and human papillomavirus (HPV) linked to cervical cancer--but leaves out Robert Gallo

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. The German showed that cervical cancer was caused by the human papilloma virus, paving the way to a vaccine. Steve Mirsky reports

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

The Laureates provide answers to the best of your questions

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first successful whole organ transplant

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

Why the head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute could be the most powerful individual in biomedicine.

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.