It’s that time of the year again so naturally I’m here to once again provide a run-down of the winners of each of the categories because as usual news coverage of this event is almost non-existent.<\/p>\n
The physics prize goes to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for proving that neutrinos<\/strong> oscillate and therefore change identities while travelling from the Sun to Earth. This means that neutrinos must actually possess mass, even if that mass is extremely small, leading to a revision of the Standard Model of physics that originally required neutrinos to be massless.<\/p>\n The chemistry prize once again goes to a series of discoveries that could also qualify for the medicine prize. It goes to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for each discovering a different mechanism\u00a0for repairing damaged DNA<\/strong>. Tomas Lindal was also the first to note that without\u00a0some way to repair damage, DNA decays at a rate that should make life impossible on Earth.<\/p>\n The physiology prize itself goes to two separate efforts that ended up providing vital medicines against parasitic diseases<\/strong>. William C. Campbell and Satoshi\u00a0\u014cmura discovered Avermectin which is used to treat River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis. Youyou Tu found a promising plant from traditional Chinese herbal medicine and extracted the active component to create the medicine now known as Artemisin, used against malaria.<\/p>\n As usual, the economics prize is awarded for a lifetime of work which is more difficult to summarize in a single paragraph. It goes to Angus Deaton who helped answer such questions as how consumers distribute spending among different goods, how much of a society’s income is spent and how much is saved and how to best measure poverty and the effectiveness of welfare spending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s that time of the year again so naturally I’m here to once again provide a run-down of the winners of each of the categories because as usual news coverage of this event is almost non-existent. The physics prize goes to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for proving that neutrinos oscillate and therefore change … Continue reading Nobel Prizes 2015<\/span>