Americans Sargent, Sims win Nobel economics prize

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences member Per Krusell, left, permanent secretary Staffan Normark centre, and Acadeny member Torsten Persson leave the stage after announcing in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday Oct. 10, 2011, that Americans Thomas Sargent , top right, and Christopher Sims, top left, have won the 2011 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. (AP Photo / Fredrik Sandberg / SCANPIX) SWEDEN OUT

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Americans Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for research that sheds light on the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and policy instruments such as interest rates and government spending.

Sargent and Sims — both 68 — carried out their research independently in the 1970s and '80s, but it is highly relevant today as world governments and central banks seek ways to steer their economies away from another recession.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the winners have developed methods for answering questions such as how economic growth and inflation are affected by a temporary increase in the interest rate or a tax cut.
"Today, the methods developed by Sargent and Sims are essential tools in macroeconomic analysis," the academy said in its citation.
Sargent is a professor at New York University, and Sims is a professor at Princeton University.
The academy cited the two "for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy."
Sims told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone that he didn't expect to receive the prize.
"I couldn't be happier to be getting it with my colleague Tom Sargent," he said.
Asked how he would invest his half of the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award given the turbulence of today's financial markets, Sims said: "First thing I'm gonna do is keep it in cash for a while and think."
The academy said Sargent showed how "structural macroeconometrics" can be used to analyze permanent changes in economic policy — a method that can be applied to study how households and firms adjust their expectations concurrently with economic developments.
Sims developed a method based on so-called "vector autoregression" to analyze how the economy is affected by temporary changes in economic policy and other factors, like an increase in the interest rate, the academy said.
The economics prize capped this year's Nobel announcements. The awards will be handed out on Dec. 10 — the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death. The economics prize is not among the original awards established in Nobel's 1895 will, but was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in his memory.

Associated Press

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Nobel Peace Prize honors African, Arab women

OSLO  - Declaring women's rights vital for world peace, the Nobel Committee awarded its annual Peace Prize on Friday to three indomitable campaigners against war and oppression -- a Yemeni and two Liberians, including that country's president.
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first freely elected female head of state, shared the $1.5 million with compatriot Leymah Gbowee, who led a "sex strike" among her efforts against Liberia's civil war, and Arab activist Tawakul Karman, who hailed the award as a victory for democracy in Yemen.
"We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society," Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told reporters.
Johnson-Sirleaf, 72 and once dubbed the "Iron Lady" by opponents, is running for a second term in an election on Tuesday where she faces criticism for not having done enough to heal the divisions of years of civil war. Jagland dismissed suggestions the award might seem to be meddling in the vote.
But the former Norwegian prime minister said that honoring Yemen's protesters, who unlike those in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are still battling to get rid of their ruler, sent a signal from Oslo that President Ali Abdullah Saleh, long a U.S. ally, and other Arab autocrats should now step down.
It is a message that the era of Arab dictators was over, Karman told Reuters in Sanaa, declaring her prize a victory for Yemen and for all of the uprisings of the Arab Spring.
The trio of laureates follow only a dozen other women among 85 men, as well as a number of organizations, to have won the prize over its 110-year history.
The Committee said it hoped the three-way award "will help to bring an end to the suppression of women that still occurs in many countries, and to realize the great potential for democracy and peace that women can represent."
(Image: From Top to bottom-Leymah Gbowee, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf &Tawakul Karman) 
ARAB SPRING HONORED
Recognizing Karman, a 32-year-old journalist and mother who was detained for a time during the unrest, was seen as a gesture of the Norwegian Nobel Committee's wider approval for the Arab Spring protest movements, which had been heavily tipped to win the prize for their young street campaigners.
"In the most trying circumstances, both before and during the Arab Spring, Tawakul Karman has played a leading part in the struggle for women's rights and for democracy and peace in Yemen," the Nobel citation read.
Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz, who had been nominated, said: "Giving it to Yemen means giving it to the Arab Spring, and this is an honor to all of us and to all Arab states."
The committee said all three women were rewarded from the bequest left by Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel for "their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."
LIBERIAN CAMPAIGNS

It noted that Johnson-Sirleaf had led the way for women to lead African states and that Gbowee, 39, had mobilized women across ethnic and religious lines to bring an end to the war in Liberia and ensure their participation in elections.
Her brother, Alphonso Diamond Gbowee, told Reuters: "I am so excited that her relentlessness to ensure the development of women and children in our region has been recognized.
"She's very hard-working, helping with women and children all over the place, especially in Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone ... This will be a challenge for her to do more. I have no doubt she'll continue to impact those vulnerable lives."
Speaking by telephone from Monrovia, Johnson-Sirleaf's son James told Reuters: "I am over-excited. This is very big news and we have to celebrate."
Johnson-Sirleaf was Liberia's finance minister, then suffered jail and fled the country as it descended into one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars, serving as a World Bank economist before going home and winning the presidency in 2005.
Gbowee's Women For Peace movement is credited by some for bringing an end to the civil war in 2003. The movement started humbly in 2002 when Gbowee organized a group of women to sing and pray for an end to fighting in a fish market.
She is the subject of an award-winning documentary film "Pray the Devil Back to Hell."
"Whatever they achieved today has been done along with all Liberian women," Liberia's minister for gender and development Vabah Gayflor told Reuters.
"It is something that all Liberian women will be proud of ... Women all over Africa and the world will be proud."

The prize will be presented in Oslo on December 10.
(Reuters)
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Swedish poet Transtromer wins Nobel in literature

STOCKHOLM (AP) — The 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded on Thursday to Tomas Transtromer of Sweden, whose surrealistic works about the mysteries of the human mind won him wide recognition as the most influential Scandinavian poet of recent decades.
Characterized by powerful imagery, Transtromer's poems are often built around his own experiences and infused with his love of music and nature. His later poems are darker, probing existential questions of life, death and disease.
"Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams. Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler sinks toward the green zone of morning," the prelude reads. "Things flare up. From the viewpoint of the quivering lark he is aware of the huge root systems of the trees, their swaying underground lamps. But aboveground there's greenery — a tropical flood of it — with lifted arms, listening to the beat of an invisible pump."
A psychologist and avid amateur pianist, Transtromer (TRAWN-stroh-mur), 80, suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him half-paralyzed and unable to speak, but he continued to write and published a collection of poems — "The Great Enigma" — in 2004. He has since retired from writing
Transtromer has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel and in recent years Swedish journalists have waited outside Transtromer's apartment in Stockholm on the day the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award is announced.
"He's writing about big questions. He's writing about death, he's writing about history and memory, and nature," said Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize.
Transtromer is the first Swede to receive the literature prize since Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson shared it in 1974. Englund has said that the academy is especially cautious about awarding Swedish writers out of fear of being seen as biased.
"I think we've been quite thoughtful and haven't been rash," Englund said after the award was announced.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said the award made him "happy and proud," and he hoped it would draw global attention to Swedish literature.
The Swedish Academy has also been criticized for being too Euro-centric, ignoring writers from other parts of the world. Seven of the last 10 winners have been Europeans.
Born in Stockholm in 1931, Transtromer was raised by his mother, a teacher, after she divorced his father — a journalist. He started writing poetry while studying at the Sodra Latin school in Stockholm.
His work was published in several journals before he published his first book of poetry, "17 poems," in 1954, winning much acclaim in Sweden.
He studied literature, history, poetics, the history of religion and psychology at Stockholm University, and later divided his time between poetry and his work as a psychologist. Between 1960 and 1966 he worked as psychologist at Roxtuna, an institution for juvenile offenders.
Transtromer's most famous works include the 1966 "Windows and Stones," in which he depicts themes from his many travels, and "Baltics" from 1974.
Since the 1950's, Transtromer has had a close friendship with American poet Robert Bly, who translated many of his works into English. In 2001, Transtromer's Swedish publishing house Bonniers published the correspondence between the two writers in the book "Air Mail."
Earlier this year, Bonniers released a collection of his works between 1954 and 2004 to celebrate the poet's 80th birthday.
"We have waited and waited, we had nearly stopped hoping (for a Nobel) but still not given up the last strand of hope," said Anna Tillgren, spokeswoman for the publisher. "We are overwhelmed. This is the happiest day ever for many of us working at the publishing house."
British bookmaker Ladbrokes said a surge of late bets on Thursday had made Transtromer the 4/6 favorite for the prize.
"He was second favorite to begin with and stayed quite prominent throughout," said spokesman Alex Donohue.
"This morning he became the favorite after a surge of late bets, several of which were from Sweden," he said, adding the betting pattern wasn't suspicious.
"The nearer you get to the event, there are always going to be people who have an idea of what is going on ... we're certainly not suggesting anything untoward was going on."
The Nobel Prize, considered one of the highest accolades in literature, is given only to living writers. The academy's choices sometimes spark heated debate among literature experts.
Some of its previous picks were obscure even to literature experts, while others were widely celebrated authors decorated with numerous other awards.
Acclaimed writers who never won the Nobel include Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Graham Greene.

Watch the video below-

2010 Nobel Prize in Literature Announcement

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Crystal work wins Nobel for Israeli Shechtman

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - An Israeli scientist whose work was once ridiculed for being out of line with received thinking won the 2011 Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for discovering different ways in which atoms could be packed together in solid materials.
The work of Daniel Shechtman, the winner of the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.5 million), has opened the door for experiments in the use of the quasicrystals, which he discovered, in everything from diesel engines to frying pans.
Shechtman found in 1982 that atoms in crystals could be packed in a pattern which did not repeat itself -- recalling the intricate mosaics of Arab art and flying in the face of the accepted view that patterns had to be repetitious.
"His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group," said the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which made the award.
"However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter," it added in a statement. "Scientists are currently experimenting with using quasicrystals in different products such as frying pans and diesel engines."
Shachtman, 70, reached by Israel Radio, said he was "excited" to be honored but declined to go into more detail about his work, promising a statement later in the day.
David Phillips, president of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry, said: "Quasicrystals ... break all the rules of being a crystal at all. You can normally explain in simple terms where in a crystal each atom sits -- they are very symmetrical.
"With quasicrystals, that symmetry is broken: there are regular patterns in the structure, but never repeating.
"They're quite beautiful, and have potential applications in protective alloys and coatings. The award of the Nobel Prize to Danny Shechtman is a celebration of fundamental research."
Noting the mathematically regular but infinitely varied patterns found in Arab and Persian art, the Nobel panel said:
"Aperiodic mosaics, such as those found in the medieval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra palace in Spain and the Darb-i Imam shrine in Iran, have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level.
"In those mosaics, as in quasicrystals, the patterns are regular -- they follow mathematical rules -- but they never repeat themselves."
Tel Aviv-born Shechtman is based at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in the northern city of Haifa, but was working in the United States at the time of his major discovery.
Shechtman's research was initially dismissed by many scientists, since it conflicted with all the textbooks.
One of his fiercest critics was the famously argumentative Linus Pauling, himself double a Nobel laureate. But in 1992, the International Union of Crystallography altered its definition of what constitutes a crystal in the light of his work.
Over the last three decades, hundreds of quasicrystals have been synthesized in laboratories and, two years ago, scientists reported the first naturally occurring quasicrystals in a mineral sample from Russia containing aluminum, copper and iron.
USEFUL PROPERTIES
Astrid Graslund, professor of biophysics at Stockholm University and secretary for the Nobel Committee for chemistry, said: "The practical applications are as of now, not so many. But the material has unexpected properties. It is very strong, it has hardly any friction on the surface, it doesn't want to react with anything, they cannot oxidize and become rusty.
"But ... it is more a conceptual insight that these materials exist and we need to re-write all textbooks about crystals -- it's a shift of the paradigm, which I think is most important."
Scientists had thought solid matter had only two states -- crystalline, like diamonds and quartz, where atoms are arranged in rigid rows, and amorphous, like metals, with no particular order. Quasicrystalline matter offers a third possibility and opens the door to new kinds of materials for use in industry.
Quasicrystals have already been found in some types of durable steel, used in products such as razor blades and ultrathin needles for eye surgery.
Quasicrystals are very hard and are also bad conductors of heat and electricity, making them useful as so-called thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity. They also have non-stick surfaces. Potential uses include surface coatings for frying pans, components for energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LED) and heat insulation in engines.
(Additional reporting by Simon Johnson in Stockholm, Ben Hirschler in London and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Andrew Heavens)

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Nobel comes days too late for Canadian scientist

The ultimate lifetime achievement award came days too late for Canadian Steinman, who was honored for his groundbreaking work on the immune system. (AFP Photo/Mario Tama)

The ultimate lifetime achievement award came days too late for Canadian Ralph Steinman, who was honored with the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his groundbreaking work on the immune system.

The 68-year-old cell biologist's own discoveries helped extend his life but he died Friday after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer, his daughter told AFP.
"We said to him, 'Hang on until Monday,'" said Alexis Steinman, 34. "We joked, we said, 'You know you got to keep going until the Nobel.''
She said the family was only alerted to Steinman's win when her mother discovered an email on his cell phone, which had been "turned to silent."
His hopes were raised a few years ago when he heard he was on the short list for the Nobel Prize. He did not win that year, she recalled, but the family has considered the possibility every year since.
Steinman shared the award with Bruce Beutler of the United States and Luxembourg-born Jules Hoffmann, a naturalized French citizen, for their work on the body's complex defense system in which signaling molecules unleash antibodies and killer cells to respond to invading microbes.
"The news is bittersweet, as we also learned this morning from Ralph’s family that he passed a few days ago after a long battle with cancer. Our thoughts are with Ralph's wife, children and family," said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of the New York-based Rockefeller University where he worked.
The university said in a statement it was also "delighted" to learn of the Nobel honor, and added Steinman's "life was extended using a dendritic cell-based immunotherapy of his own design."
The Nobel committee in Stockholm, Sweden said it would stand by the award, even though it is typically not given out posthumously.
"We just got the information. What we can do now is only to regret that he could not experience the joy," Goeran Hansson, the head of the Nobel assembly at Karolinska Institutet, was quoted as saying by the Swedish news agency TT.
According to the committee's rules, "work produced by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award. If, however, a prizewinner dies before he has received the prize, then the prize may be presented."
Steinman was born in Montreal, Canada on January 14, 1943, and earned his medical degree from Harvard University in 1968.
He and his collaborator Zanvil Cohn discovered in 1973 a new cell type called the dendritic cell.
Steinman "speculated that it could be important in the immune system and went on to test whether dendritic cells could activate T cells, a cell type that has a key role in adaptive immunity," said the Nobel committee.
"These findings were initially met with skepticism but subsequent work by Steinman demonstrated that dendritic cells have a unique capacity to activate T cells."
Tessier-Lavigne said his research "laid the foundation for numerous discoveries in the critically important field of immunology, and it has led to innovative new approaches in how we treat cancer, infectious diseases and disorders of the immune system."
Steinman began work at Rockefeller University in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow and was named director of the Christopher Browne Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases in 1998.
He received a host of honors during his life, including the 2007 Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the 2009 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, which he shared with Beutler.
"I think it is a great tragedy that he didn't live quite long enough to know that he had won the Nobel Prize," Beutler told AFP.
"He had received many other prestigious awards," he added. "He knew he was in line for it (a Nobel), that's for sure."
Steinman's daughter, Alexis, said the family was moved by the news of the prestigious prize.
"He was always hopeful... but he was a very humble man. He said, 'There are all these great scientists out there, they will pick some one else," she told AFP.
"He was sick and he thought that his time had passed."

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Studies of universe's expansion win physics Nobel

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for overturning a fundamental assumption in their field by showing that the expansion of the universe is constantly accelerating.

(Image- From Top to Bottom: Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess & Saul Perlmutter)

The Associated Press/Their discovery created a new portrait of the eventual fate of the universe: a place of super-low temperatures and black skies unbroken by the light of galaxies moving away from each other at incredible speed.
Physicists had assumed for decades that the expansion of the universe was getting ever-slower, meaning that in billions of years it would resemble today's universe in many important ways.
Then, working in separate research teams during the 1990s, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess found that the light from more than 50 distant exploding stars was far weaker than they expected, meaning that galaxies had to be racing away from each other at increasing speed.
The acceleration is driven by what scientists call dark energy, a cosmic force that is one of the great mysteries of the universe.
The Nobel-winning discovery implies instead that the universe will get increasingly colder as matter spreads across ever-vaster distances in space, said Lars Bergstrom, secretary of the Nobel physics committee.
He said galaxies that are 3 million light years away from Earth move at a speed of around 44 miles per second (70 kilometers per second). Galaxies that are 6 million light years away move twice as fast.
The research implies that billions of years from now, the universe will become "a very, very large, but very cold and lonely place," said Charles Blue, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics.
In contrast to the big bang, that fate has been called the "big rip" to indicate how galaxies would be torn apart, he said.
Galaxies will be flying away so quickly that their light could not travel across the universe to distant observers as it does today, making the sky appear black, he said.
"For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago," the citation said. "However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the universe will end in ice."
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Perlmutter would receive half of the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award, with Riess and Schmidt, a U.S.-born Australian, splitting the other half.
Perlmutter, 52, heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley.
Schmidt, 44, is the head of the High-z Supernova Search Team at the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia.
Riess, 41, is an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
Schmidt said he was just sitting down to have dinner with his family in Canberra, Australia, when the phone call came from the academy.
"I was somewhat suspicious when the Swedish voice came on," Schmidt told The Associated Press. "My knees sort of went weak and I had to walk around and sort my senses out."
Riess said his "jaw dropped" when he received an early-morning call at his home in Baltimore from a bunch of Swedish men and realized "it wasn't Ikea," the Swedish furniture retailer. "I'm dazed," he told AP.
The discovery was "the biggest shakeup in physics, in my opinion, in the last 30 years," said Phillip Schewe, a physicist and spokesman at the Joint Quantum Institute, which is operated by the University of Maryland and the federal government.
"I remember everyone thinking at the time (that) there was some mistake," Schewe said. But there was no mistake, and in fact the basic finding was confirmed later by other measurements. For example, other scientists found evidence for it when they analyzed the microwave radiation left over from the big bang that still bathes the universe, he said.
Perlmutter told AP his team made the discovery in steps, analyzing the data and assuming it was wrong.
"And after months, you finally believe it," he said. "It's not quite a surprise anymore. I tell people it's the longest "aha!" experience that you've ever had."
Fred Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, said the prize confirmed an idea from Albert Einstein, called the cosmological constant, that Einstein inserted in his general theory of relativity, a cornerstone of modern physics.
Einstein later repudiated that idea as his "biggest blunder," but it did lead to a lot of theoretical and experimental studies, Dylla said.
The physics prize was the second Nobel to be announced this year. On Monday the medicine prize went to American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann who shared it with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman for their discoveries about the immune system. Steinman died three days before the announcement but since his death was not known to the committee, they decided he should keep the Nobel. Since 1974, Nobels have been awarded only to living scientists.
The Nobel Prizes were established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, and have been handed out since 1901.
Last year's physics award went to Russian-born scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for groundbreaking experiments with graphene, the strongest and thinnest material known to mankind.
The prizes are handed out every year on Dec. 10, on the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896

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Immune system discoveries earn Nobel in medicine

(From L to R:  Ralph Steinman, Bruce Beutler& Jules Hoffmann)

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries about the immune system that opened new avenues for the treatment and prevention of infectious illnesses and cancer.

American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann shared the 10 million-kronor ($1.5 million) award with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman, the Nobel committee at Stockholm's Karolinska institute said.

Beutler and Hoffmann were cited for their discoveries in the 1990s of receptor proteins that can recognize bacteria and other microorganisms as they enter the body, and activate the first line of defense in the immune system, known as innate immunity.

Steinman was honored for the discovery two decades earlier of dendritic cells, which help regulate adaptive immunity, the next stage of the immune system's response, when the invading microorganisms are purged from the body.

"Their work has opened up new avenues for the development of prevention and therapy against infections, cancer and inflammatory disease," the citation said.

Prize committee member Hans-Gustav Ljunggren told The Associated Press that drug companies are using the discoveries to develop better vaccines, though none are on the market yet.

"Some vaccines against hepatitis are coming out, large clinical trials are being done today," Ljunggren said.

In the long-term it will be possible to use the discoveries to improve the treatment of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and chronic inflammatory diseases, committee secretary Goran Hansson said.

Hansson said he had not been able to reach any of the winners before the announcement.

"Hoffmann for example is traveling in China and is difficult to reach," he said.

Beutler, born in 1957, is professor of genetics and immunology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Hoffmann, 70, headed a research laboratory in Strasbourg, France, between 1974 and 2009 and served as president of the French National Academy of Sciences between 2007-2008.

Steinman, 68, has been affiliated with Rockefeller University in New York since 1970, and heads its Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases.

Hoffmann's discovery came in 1996 during research on how fruit flies fight infections. Two years later, Beutler's research on mice showed that fruit flies and mammals activate innate immunity in similar ways when attacked by germs.

Steinman's discovery dates back to 1973, when he found a new cell type, the dendritic cell, which has a unique capacity to activate so-called T-cells. Those cells have a key role in adaptive immunity, when antibodies and killer cells fight infections. They also develop a memory that helps the immune system mobilize its defenses next time it comes under a similar attack.

The trio's discoveries have enabled the development of new methods for treating and preventing diseases, including improved vaccines and in attempts to help the immune system to attack tumors, the committee said.

The medicine award kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements, and will be followed by the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The winners of the economics award will be announced on Oct. 10.

The coveted prizes were established by wealthy Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel — the inventor of dynamite — except for the economics award, which was created by Sweden's central bank in 1968 in Nobel's memory. The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, on the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

Last year's medicine award went to British professor Robert Edwards for fertility research that led to the first test tube baby.

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