Nobel Prize

François Englert and Peter Higgs (Photo courtesy CERN. All rights reserved)

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When last year two experiments at CERN, CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) and ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), announced the preliminary results of their research confirming the existence of the Higgs boson, everybody started expecting Peter Higgs to receive the Nobel Prize for physics. Today came the official announcement of the award to him and François Englert, the other physicist who in the ’60s published an independent work that led to very similar conclusions.

Christian de Duve in 2012 (Photo Julien Doornaert)

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Last Saturday the biochemist Christian de Duve died in his home in Nethen, Belgium. His health had deteriorated and a few weeks ago he decided to request euthanasia, which is legal in Belgium. In 1974, Christian de Duve received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine together with Albert Claude and George E. Palade for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell.

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Yesterday the British biologist Robert Edwards, a pioneer of artificial fertilization, died following a long illness. Born on September 27, 1925, Edwards received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of in vitro fertilization in 2010.

Rita Levi Montalcini in 2009 (Photo Presidency of Italian Republic)

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Rita Levi-Montalcini, neurologist and since 2001 senator for life in the Italian Parliament, passed away today. Born on April 22, 1909, in Turin, Italy, for her discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor (NGF), in 1986 she received the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Official portrait of Albert Einstein after receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921

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The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has announced it has started a project that will put online more than eighty thousand documents relating to Albert Einstein on the already existing website Einstein Archives Online dedicated to the famous scientist.