Notice Board

The 2014 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics have been awarded, one for the invention of a new way of seeing microscopic processes in action, and the other for the ubiquitous LED light.

Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Japanese-born U.S. citizen Shuji Nakamura won the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the blue light-emitting diode (LED) -- the missing piece that now allows manufacturers to produce white-light lamps. The arrival of such lamps is changing the way homes and workplaces are lit, offering a longer-lasting and more efficient alternative to the incandescent bulbs pioneered by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison at the end of the 19th century.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Va.; Stefan W. Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (Germany), and William E. Moerner of Stanford University for their work in overcoming the limitations of the traditional light microscope. The three men honored by the  Nobel Prize contributed to super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, which allows us to see everything from DNA transference in action to the changes that neurons go through as we learn something new.

Sources: Nobel.org, Scientific American,  Reuters.