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How To Win A Nobel: A three minute guide

  How To Win A Nobel: A three minute guide Read the article Nature looks at 646 past laureates to work out who is statistically most likely to take home a medal By  E mily Bates  &  Kerri Smith The Nobel prize has been awarded in three scientific fields —  chemistry ,  physics  and  physiology or medicine  — almost every year since 1901, barring some disruptions mostly due to wars. Nature  crunched the data on the 346 prizes and their 646 winners (Nobel prizes can be shared by up to three people) to work out which characteristics can be reliably linked to medals. Your best chance of winning comes when you’re 54, the age of 24 recipients. The average age of all laureates is 58. The youngest winner was Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he won the physics prize in 1915, together with his father, William Bragg, for their work analysing crystal structures using X-rays. The oldest was John B. Goodenough, who won the chemistry prize in 2019 at the age of 97. It was awarded to him and two ot

The discovery of microRNA wins the 2024 physiology Nobel Prize

  The discovery of microRNA wins the 2024 physiology Nobel Prize By  Tina Hesman Saey  and  Sophie Hartley An unexpected discovery about what made a tiny worm refuse to grow up has now led to the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.  Victor Ambros, now at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester, and Gary Ruvkun, of Harvard Medical School, found that small snippets of RNA called microRNAs can help control production of proteins throughout the body. These minuscule RNAs may play an outsize role in health and disease. “The seminal discovery of microRNA has introduced a new and unexpected mechanism of gene regulation,” Olle Kämpe, Vice Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said October 7  during the announcement  of the prize. MicroRNAs play important roles in  cancer ,  pain and itchiness ,  eye diseases  and in controlling the  mix of microbes  living in people’s colons ( SN: 4/7/19; SN: 8/13/18; S

Climate change fueled the fury of hurricanes Helene and Milton

  Climate change fueled the fury of hurricanes Helene and Milton Two new studies link abnormally hot water in the Gulf of Mexico to the storms’ intensity by Carolyn Gramling Meteorologists have watched in awe as Hurricane Milton, churning over the anomalously warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, swiftly transformed into one of the strongest Atlantic storms on record. Over just 20 hours on October 7, Hurricane Milton explosively intensified from a Category 1 to a catastrophic Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 290 kilometers per hour (180 miles per hour). The storm is expected to make landfall on the west coast of Florida either late on October 9 or early October 10 as a major Category 3 or 4 hurricane, bringing deadly storm surge and hurricane-force winds to  coastal regions still reeling from Hurricane Helene just two weeks earlier  ( SN: 10/1/24 ). The rapid intensifications of both storms were fueled by the Gulf’s extremely warm water. Developing tropical storms can suck up hea