Nobel Prize

Two Australian researchers who discovered that stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium, not by emotional stress or spicy foods, were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. Dr. J. Robin Warren, 68, and Dr. Barry J. Marshall, 54, overturned the belief held by physicians for decades by isolating a spiral-shaped bacterium called Helicobacter pylori from humans and ultimately demonstrating that it could produce serious lesions in the stomach.

His rise to the top of the scientific world is one of this century's great adventures of the mind. It was an odyssey of physical and intellectual daring that found him autopsying brains of reputed cannibals by lantern light in the wilds of New Guinea and accepting a Nobel Prize from the king of Sweden. His fall from grace seems no less dramatic. Dr.

In 2002, John Robert Schrieffer posed for ads in national newspapers and magazines touting scientific research in Florida. "When you have a 34-ton magnet, you attract some of the brightest research minds in the world," the ad read, extolling the Nobel Prize winner who had become chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee.

V.S. Naipaul, a master of prose and controversial interpreter of the developing world, won the centenary Nobel Prize for literature Thursday for "works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." A perennial outsider, Naipaul, 69, was born on the island of Trinidad to parents of Indian descent and moved to Britain more than 50 years ago. He writes in English about what he has called "half-made" societies in the Caribbean, India, Africa and Asia.

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, a reclusive widow whose seductively simple verse has captured the wit and wisdom of everyday life for the past half century, has been awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday in Stockholm. Unassuming, shy and obsessively protective of her privacy, Szymborska had been considered a longshot for the prestigious prize, which was presented to another poet, Irishman Seamus Heaney, last year.

Herbert A. Simon, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering work on the nature of decision making, has died. Simon, a longtime faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, died Friday at Presbyterian University Hospital in Pittsburgh of complications from surgery last month. He was 84.

A society of Indian holy men meets regularly in a Guatemala City apartment to study the Mayan calendar, a 2,500-year-old timekeeping system that is at the center of their religion. In recent years, their reading of the calendar has told them that an ancient prophecy is about to come true: "The time of darkness" is coming to an end. The Mayan people, exploited for five centuries, second-class citizens in their own land, will soon enter an age of "clarity and brightness."

The University of Chicago lays claim to an astonishing 78 Nobel laureates -- the most of any institution in the United States and second in the world only to England's University of Cambridge. Renowned physicists Hans Bethe and Werner Heisenberg and economics guru Paul A. Samuelson are all counted among Chicago's Nobel brethren. Wait a minute. Didn't Bethe spend virtually his entire career at Cornell University? Isn't Samuelson considered the heart and soul of MIT economics?

Severo Ochoa, a biochemist who won the 1959 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for discoveries that furthered research on heredity, has died at age 88. He died Monday night of pneumonia, hospital officials said. He had been hospitalized in Madrid after suffering a stroke six months ago. Ochoa, a naturalized American citizen, was on the faculty of New York University for more than four decades before retiring in 1986.

A UCLA chemist and Stanford University physicist were roused from sleep Wednesday morning with news that all scientists dream of: They had won Nobel prizes. UCLA's Paul D. Boyer won a share of the chemistry prize for discovering the molecular machinery of the "three-cylinder engine" that turns sunlight into energy powering virtually all living things.

Ginzburg obituary: In Tuesday's Section A, the headline on the obituary of Vitaly Ginzburg said he was born in 1922. The Russian physicist, who played a key role in the Soviet Union's development of the hydrogen bomb and later won a Nobel Prize for his work on the theoretical underpinnings of superconductivity, was born Oct. 4, 1916.

Two Americans on Monday won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their seminal work on how people and organizations make decisions and cooperate outside traditional markets -- a growing area of research that scholars said was relevant to such pressing issues as climate change and the behavior of financial institutions. Elinor Ostrom, a Los Angeles native who teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., became the first woman to win the prize for economics since it was first awarded 40 years ago. She will share the $1.4-million award with Oliver E. Williamson, a professor at UC Berkeley.

Nobel Prize: An article in Wednesday's Section A about the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics included a photo of winner George Smith holding a camera that the caption said used a CCD sensor, for which he won the prize. The camera is a newer-generation model that uses a CMOS sensor.

Israeli writer Amos Oz is the favorite to be selected for the 2009 Nobel literature prize Thursday, but with the judging notoriously hard to predict, he is far from a safe bet. Oz, who deals with life in modern Israel in his novels and reflects decades of commitment to the Israeli peace movement in his political writing, is quoted at 4-1 odds by British bookmaker Ladbrokes, meaning he has one chance in five of winning. But Oz was also widely touted last year, when Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the award.

Robert F. Furchgott, one of three American scientists awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discovery that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body, died May 19 in Seattle. He was 92. Furchgott, formerly of the State University of New York in Brooklyn, shared the $995,500 prize with Louis J. Ignarro of UCLA and Dr. Ferid Murad of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.

Retirement savings: An article in Sunday's Section A about calls for change in the 401(k) system misspelled the Nobel Prize as the Noble Prize.

Paul Krugman occupies two spheres in the American intelligentsia. In one, he is a New York Times op-ed columnist known for his barbed opinions about President Bush's policies. In the other, he is a Princeton University economist famous for his research on international trade and finance. On Monday, it was Krugman the academic who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his study of international trade and the effects of globalization.

Question: What prize was recently characterized by one of its winners as "mundane"? a) Radio-Active Car Audio's "Loudest Car Stereo" contest. b) The International Federation of Competitive Eating's World Tamale Eating Championship. c) The Nobel Prize. Talk about a no-brainer. The answer is "c" -- the Nobel Prize!

If the selection of French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio as the 2008 Nobel literature laureate has anything to tell us, it's that Horace Engdahl means what he says. Last week, Engdahl, the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, called American literary culture "too isolated, too insular.

A Japanese American theorist whose work helped explain how the cosmos came into being and two Japanese theorists who predicted the existence of a family of exotic particles called quarks will share the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Swedish Nobel Foundation announced Tuesday. All three studied a curious but essential phenomenon known as broken symmetry, which helps to explain the behavior of matter on the smallest scale, where the everyday laws of physics seemingly break down or are ignored.