Nobel Prize

On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given to two men, John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka, for their work describing how to coax adult cells back to an embryonic state, essentially "reprogramming" them. Gurdon showed that transferring the DNA-containing nucleus of a frog embryonic cell into an adult frog cell would revert the cell to its embryonic tadpole state, and Yamanaka showed that a set of genes could be used to turn adult skin cells back into pluripotent cells that could then turn into any type of tissue in the body.

The Nobel Prize. The Lasker Prize. The Fields Medal. The MacArthur Fellowships (a.k.a. “the genius grants”). The Kavli Prize. The Ig Nobels. Among the various awards given for scientific achievement, the Ig Nobels may not be the most coveted  - but they're certainly the most fun. The winners are selected by the Annals of Improbable Research to recognize breakthroughs that first make you laugh, then make you think. “The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology,” according to the organization's website . The 2012 Ig Nobels Prizes were handed out Thursday night at Harvard University, a place that knows a thing or two about academic achievement.

  Join book critic David L. Ulin and me for an online conversation about literary awards season Tuesday at 10 a.m. Among the more baffling suggestions in recent years has been that Bob Dylan might be awarded a Nobel Prize in literature. Currently, the musician is running second only to writer Haruki Murakami at the British betting house Ladbrokes . Dylan is certainly a sexier choice to American watchers than, say, Chinese writer Mo Yan, Dutch author Cees Noteboom or Albania's Ismail Kadare.

Nobody knows who will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Nobody. Not the Swedish Academy, which is still reading through the works of the very secret short list of finalists. Not the most erudite international reader or spot-on fortuneteller. And certainly not me. That said, I'm going to make some wild, barely founded guesses about some possible contenders. Like, say, Chinua Achebe. Born in Nigeria, Achebe (pictured) is the author of one of the most enduring works of 20th century African literature: "Things Fall Apart.

William S. Knowles, a retired Monsanto Co. organic chemist who shared a Nobel Prize in 2001 for helping to solve a vexing problem in the manufacture of medicines, died Wednesday of complications of ALS at his home in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield, Mo. He was 95. Knowles shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in chemistry with two other scientists, K. Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla and Ryoji Noyori of Nagoya University...

Elinor Ostrom, an Indiana University political economist who in 2009 became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics by demonstrating that local communities can manage imperiled natural resources as well as or better than the government or private business interests, died of pancreatic cancer Tuesday in Bloomington, Ind., according to the university. She was 78. Ostrom, a Los Angeles native who taught at Indiana University for nearly five decades, made her reputation by challenging a concept in the social sciences called the "tragedy of the commons.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Phillip Tobias, a renowned South African paleoanthropologist and expert on early man and hominids, died Thursday. He was 86. Tobias died in a Johannesburg hospital after a long illness, according to South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, where he chaired the anatomy department from 1959 to 1990. He "was one of the greats in human evolutionary studies," Nick Barton, director of Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology, told the Associated Press.

Sir Andrew Huxley, the British researcher who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of how nerve impulses are transmitted through cells, died May 30. He was 94. His death was announced by the University of Cambridge's Trinity College, where he served as master from 1984 to 1990, but no details were released. Working with fellow Nobel laureate Sir Alan Hodgkin, Huxley solved a puzzle that had perplexed biologists for decades: how nerves generate the electrical impulses that control muscle activities and even thoughts.

The world's largest natural products convention, a celebration of all things healthy and eco-friendly, was being held at the Anaheim Convention Center Saturday when F. Sherwood Rowland, 84, died at his home in Corona del Mar. It's not much of a stretch to say that Rowland, 84, helped spawn the industry that drew more than 60,000 people and 2,000 exhibitors. In 1973, the UC Irvine chemistry professor and a young researcher on his team, Mario Molina, discovered that manmade chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons destroyed the Earth's fragile and vital ozone layer.

F. Sherwood Rowland, the UC Irvine chemistry professor who warned the world that man-made chemicals could erode the ozone layer, has died. He was 84. Rowland, known as Sherry, died Saturday at his home in Corona del Mar of complications from Parkinson's disease, the university announced. In 1995, Rowland was one of three people awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work explaining how chlorofluorocarbons, ubiquitous substances once used in an array of products from spray deodorant to industrial solvents, could destroy the ozone layer, the protective atmospheric blanket that screens out many of the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.