*Chemistry Nobel for mapping how cells repair damaged DNA :
Tomas Lindahl, Paul L. Modrich and Aziz Sancar have jointly won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for having mapped and explained how the cell repairs its DNA and safeguards its genetic information.
Lindahl, of the Francis Crick Institute in London, was honoured for his discoveries on base excision repair — the cellular mechanism that repairs damaged DNA during the cell cycle.
• Modrich, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine, was recognised for showing how cells correct errors that occur when DNA is replicated during cell division.
• Sancar, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was cited for mapping the mechanism cells use to repair ultraviolet damage to DNA.
* Kajita, McDonald win physics Nobel for neutrino work :
Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada have won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the "chameleon-like" nature of neutrinos, work that yielded the crucial insight that the tiny particles have mass.
Kajita showed in 1998 that neutrinos captured at the detector underwent a metamorphosis in the atmosphere. Three years later McDonald found that neutrinos coming from the sun also switched identities.
*What are neutrinos?
Neutrinos are miniscule particles created in nuclear reactions, such as in the sun and the stars, or in nuclear power plants. There are three kinds of neutrinos.
• Neutrinos interact with matter via the weak force. The weakness of this force gives neutrinos the property that matter is almost transparent to them.
• Since they rarely interact, these neutrinos pass through the Sun, and even the Earth, unhindered. There are many other natural sources of neutrinos including exploding stars (supernovae), relic neutrinos, natural radioactivity, and cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere of the Earth.
• The neutrino was proposed by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930; but it took another 26 years for it to be actually detected. In 1956 Reines and Cowan found evidence of neutrino interactions by monitoring a volume of cadmium chloride with scintillating liquid near to a nuclear reactor. Reines was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 in part for this revolutionary work.
** 3 win Nobel Prize in Medicine for parasite-fighting therapies :
Three scientists from the US, Japan and China have won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering drugs to fight malaria and other tropical diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people every year.
The three scientists are:
1. Santoshi omura from Japan
2. Youyou tu from China
3. William campbell from Ireland
• Campbell and Omura were cited for discovering avermectin, derivatives of which have helped lower the incidence of river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, two diseases caused by parasitic worms that affect millions of people in Africa and Asia.
• Tu discovered artemisinin, a drug that has helped significantly reduce the mortality rates of malaria patients. Tu Youyou is the first-ever Chinese medicine laureate.
River blindness is an eye and skin disease that ultimately leads to blindness. About 90% of the disease occurs in Africa, according to the World Health Organization.
Lymphatic filariasis can lead to swelling of the limbs and genitals, called elephantiasis, and it’s primarily a threat in Africa and Asia. The WHO says 120 million people are infected with the disease, without about 40 million disfigured and incapacitated.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that still kills around 500,000 people a year, mostly in Africa, despite efforts to control it.
