The Japanese Did It Again!

October 8th marked a day of merriment and celebration for the Japanese because they have made four Nobel laureates! All THANKS to the glowing jellyfish and teeny-weeny atoms!

Dr. Osamu Shimomura, who is based in Massachusetts shares a third of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with two other American scientists for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein GFP. Shimomura-san's breakthrough came when he first isolated GFP from the crystal jellyfish, and discovered that the protein glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.

GFP plays a very significant role in DNA technology particularly on the "research of nerve cell damage during Alzheimer's disease or insulin-producing beta cells created in the pancreas of a growing embryo", the foundation said.

That's great news isn't it? With this discovery, I am hopeful that humanity will soon find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, cancer and other fatal diseases.

Now, on to Physics.

Three physicists have greatly contributed to the knowledge of subatomic particles.

Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago, who "discovered the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics", will get half of the prize.

The other half will be shared equally by Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Toshihide Maskawa of Kyoto University. These two men "discovered the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."

These are indeed very remarkable discoveries in the history of Physics. They have explored the smallest particle there is!

Hmmm.. looks like these discoveries will lead to how the earth came to be. But I would prefer if they wouldn't. The mystery of life makes it really wonderful, don't you think?

And did you know how much the Nobel prize is worth? A staggering, mind-blowing, humongous, whopping Swedish Kronor (SEK) 10M. That's around USD1.4M. Great isn't it?

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