All of the Nobel Prizes this year, so far, in the sciences have gone to Americans (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,71905-0.html?tw=rss.index)

Yeah, heard that on NPR this morning. *beam* Good job!

Yea, the Americans are cleaning up on the Nobel prizes.

...and all from the San Francisco Bay Area. <img src=http://lag9.com/biggrin.gif>

Physics:

John C. Mather
1/2 of the prize
USA
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD, USA

George F. Smoot
1/2 of the prize
USA
University of California
Berkeley, CA, USA

edicine:
Andrew Z. Fire
1/2 of the prize
USA
Stanford University School of Medicine
Stanford, CA, USA

Craig C. Mello
1/2 of the prize
USA
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Worcester, MA, USA

Seems not ALL are from San Francisco Bay. :biggrin:

Lets not forget the prestigious Ig Noble prize!
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10207-ig-nobel-prizes-hail-digital-rectal-massage.html

Heart stopper

Runaway electrical impulses in the vagus nerve cause intractable hiccups, so Fesmire attempted to block them by stimulating the nerve. Gagging, tongue pulling, sinus massage and pressing the eyeball to stimulate the vagus all failed to stop the hiccups. Then he remembered reading about a case in which digital rectal massage – inserting a finger into a patient’s anus – had slowed a racing heartbeat, an effect similar to runaway hiccups.

"It worked, and the rest is history," he says. He has not needed to go that far again for other patients, but Majed Odeh of Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, did a few years later and wrote a paper with the same title that earned him a share of the Ig Nobel.

However, Fesmire will not be trying it again. In researching his Ig Nobel acceptance speech, he told New Scientist that he found a treatment sure to be more popular with hiccup patients. "An orgasm results in incredible stimulation of the vagus nerve. From now on, I will be recommending sex – culminating with orgasm – as the cure-all for intractable hiccups."
Eye-popping bird brain

Not any bird brain can scoop an Ig Nobel prize, but studying bird brains earned the ornithology prize for the late Philip May at the University of California at Los Angeles and Ivan Schwab of the University of California at Davis, both in the US. May wondered why the pileated woodpecker did not get concussed while pounding its beak into trees up to 12,000 times a day.

He found the bird had evolved a thick skull of spongy bone which held its contents tightly in place, like foam packing material. The birds also evolved their own versions of seat belts. A millisecond before the bird's beak hits the wood, the nictitating membrane over its eyes tightens to keep them from popping out on impact.

Schwab suggests woodpeckers may have evolved small brains to make them more impact resistant, but admits that birds with little brainpower may have been the ones most likely to try head-butting trees in the first place.
Screeeeeeeeeech

The acoustics prize honoured research into another of those timeless questions, why do fingernails screeching on a blackboard send chills down the spine of virtually everyone who hears the sound?

Volunteers rated the sound of a three-pronged garden rake on slate top of the annoyance scale, followed by metal on metal and Styrofoam rubbing against itself, says Randolph Blake, now at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, US.

His experiments showed the frequencies in the middle of the audio range were the ones that drove people up the wall. Blake says chimpanzee warning cries "are remarkably similar to fingernails on a chalkboard". It is possible our reactions are instinctive, hearkening back to warning signals screeched by our pre-human ancestors when they spotted a sabre-tooth on the prowl, he suggests.

Blake shares the prize with former colleagues Lynn Halpern and James Hillenbrand.

we just took the Economics prize (yea i know its technically not a nobel prize but whatever!)

Lit i have no idea since they take it for having a career not a single book so it could be a lot of people!

Peace prize?

maybe kissinger again! (haha)

Peace prize?
Lets see... George Bush! Yeah, that's the ticket.

Gratz USA!
dont forget that to win the nobel prize are researches done quite a few years ago though ...

Gratz USA!
dont forget that to win the nobel prize are researches done quite a few years ago though ...

Aye, but these people are still researching, and one of the major reason's why they got the Nobel in their field was because their work provided a foundation for other scientists to build on.