Nobel Prize | featured news

On 11 October, when the Nobel Committee announced that they had decided to award this year's Nobel Prize for Literature to Mo Yan, the Chinese writer was in hiding in his hometown Gaomi, of Shandong province, some 600km (370 miles) from Beijing.

Two Americans were awarded the Nobel economics prize on Monday for studies on the match-making taking place when doctors are coupled up with hospitals, students with schools and human organs with transplant recipients. The work of Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley has sparked a "flourishing field of research" and helped improve the performance of many markets, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Novelist Mo Yan, this year's Nobel Prize winner for literature, is practiced in the art of challenging the status quo without offending those who uphold it. Mo, whose popular, sprawling, bawdy tales bring to life rural China, is the first Chinese winner of the literature prize who is not a critic of the authoritarian government. And Thursday's announcement by the Swedish Academy brought an explosion of pride across Chinese social media.

Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka of the United States have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry... Two Americans won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for studies of how the cells in our bodies pick up signals as diverse as hormones, smells, flavors and light — work that is key to developing better medicines.

Two physicists who developed techniques to study the interplay between light and matter on the smallest and most intimate imaginable scale won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday. They are Serge Haroche, of the Collège de France and the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris, and David Wineland, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado.

Africa's first democratically elected female president, a Liberian campaigner against rape and a woman who stood up to Yemen's autocratic regime won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of the importance of women's rights in the spread of global peace. The Norwegian Nobel Committee split the prize between Tawakkul Karman, a leader of anti-government protests in Yemen; Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman to win a free presidential election in Africa; and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, who campaigned against the use of rape as a weapon in her country's brutal civil war.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet whose surrealistic works about the mysteries of the human mind won him acclaim as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since World War II.

An Israeli scientist won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for changing the prevailing views about the atomic structure of matter with his discovery of quasicrystals. Dan Shechtman, 70, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, will get the 10 million-kronor ($1.4 million) award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at a press conference in Stockholm today.

Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their studies of exploding stars that revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating....

When Nobel Prizes are dished out each fall, the most accomplished professionals in computing, telecom and IT have usually been left out in the cold. That's because there is no Nobel Prize for these fields, and it's unlikely there will be one any time soon.