There’s never such thing as a shoo-in at the Nobel Prizes. The scientists who developed the various Covid-19 vaccines saving lives around the world may have been thought to be the frontrunners for this year’s Nobel in physiology and medicine.
Instead, the prize went to a pair of scientists who discovered something even more fundamental: why we feel the light prick of the vaccine needle and other kinds of touch, and why we feel painful heat and cold.
The Nobel Committee today (Oct. 4) named the US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian as the joint winners of this years prize. In 1997, Julius, a physiologist at the University of California San Francisco, tweaked cells to be responsive to capsaicin, the active chemical in chili peppers. By watching how these cells reacted to capsaicin, Julius found a sensor in nerves that signaled sensations of “pain” and “heat” when the skin encounters high temperatures.
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025...
NASA's James Webb Telescope recently got a front-row seat to some incredible stellar fireworks on the...
The Nobel physics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and includes a...
The Trump administration can go ahead and purge more than 1,600 research grants issued by National...
