New image gives insight into colliding galaxies

A seemingly violent collision of two galaxies is in fact a fertile marriage that has birthed billions of new stars, and an image released on Tuesday gives astronomers their best view yet.

The new image of the Antennae galaxies allows astronomers working with the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope to distinguish between new stars and the star clusters that form them.

Most of these clusters, created in the collision of the two galaxies, will disperse within 10 million years but about 100 of the largest will grow into "globular clusters" -- large groups of stars found in many galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

The Antennae galaxies, 68 million light years from Earth, began to fuse 500 million years ago.

A light year is the distance light waves travel in one year -- about 6 trillion miles.

The image serves as a preview for the Milky Way's likely collision with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, about 6 billion years from now.

Reuters

Nobel Prize in Literature: Turkish author Orhan Pamuk wins

Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of "My Name is Red", "Snow" and half-a-dozen other novels, won the Nobel Literature Prize for a body of work that probes the crossroads of Muslim and Western cultures.


The Swedish Academy said Pamuk "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city (Istanbul) has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

Pamuk said he was honored to be awarded the prize.

"It's such a great honor, such a great pleasure," Pamuk told journalists at Columbia University in New York, where he studied as a visiting scholar in the 1980s. "I'm very happy about the prize."

The boyish Turkish author, who is now a fellow at Columbia, said the award was a cause for celebration not just for him, but his country and culture.

"I think that this is first of all an honour bestowed upon the Turkish language, Turkish culture, Turkey and also recognition of my labours ... my humble devotion to that great art of the novel," he said.

The 54-year-old writer is Turkey's best-known author at home and abroad, but also a political rebel whose pronouncements on his country's history have put its respect for freedom of expression under the international spotlight.

"In his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees himself principally a fiction writer with no political agenda," the Nobel jury noted.

Turkey's decades-old striving to become European -- characterized by clashes between Islam and secularism, tradition and modernity -- along with the painful impact of an aggressive Westernization after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, permeate Pamuk's writing.

Pamuk was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and he took a stand for his Turkish colleague Yasar Kemal when the latter was put on trial in 1995.

Pamuk himself faced prosecution after telling a Swiss newspaper last year that 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians had been killed during World War I under the Ottoman Turks.

The charges against him sparked widespread international protest, and were dropped earlier this year.

Just hours before the Swedish Academy made its announcement, the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a punishable offence to deny that the massacre of Armenians constituted genocide.

He declined to be drawn by reporters' questions on the issue on Thursday.

"This is a time for celebration, for enjoying this, rather than making political comments," he told journalists.

When pushed, he said: "This is a day for celebration, for being positive. I have lots of critical energy deep in me but I'm not going to express it today."

Joy at his achievement was particularly effusive in Turkey.

"It is great happiness for us all that a Turkish writer has won such a prestigious award," Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters.

And French President Jacques Chirac added his voice to the congratulations, saying he was "delighted" Pamuk had won the prize and that his "reflection on society is... intelligent, strong and liberal".

Pamuk is the first Turk to win the prestigious prize, and had been rumoured as one of the frontrunners this year.

A chain-smoker, he mostly shuns the public eye, writing for long hours in an Istanbul flat overlooking the bridge over the Bosphorus linking Europe and Asia.

Born in 1952 into a prosperous, secular family, Pamuk was intent on becoming a painter in his youth. He studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University but later turned to writing and studied journalism in Istanbul.

He published his prize-winning first novel, "Cevdet Bey and His Sons", in 1982, a family chronicle in which he describes the shift from a traditional Ottoman family environment to a more Western lifestyle.

His second novel, "The House of Silence", came out in 1983, but it was his third book, "The White Castle", published two years later, that gave him an international reputation.

Structured as a historical novel set in 17th century Istanbul, it is "on a symbolic level, the European novel captured then allied with an alien culture," the Swedish Academy said.

With the 2000 book "My Name is Red" -- a love story, murder mystery and discussion on the role of individuality in art -- Pamuk explores the relationship between East and West, describing an artist's different relationship to his work in each culture.

His latest novel is the critically-acclaimed "Snow", set in Turkey's border town of Kars, once a border city between the Ottoman and Russian empires.

"The novel becomes a tale of love and poetic creativity just as it knowledgeably describes the political and religious conflicts that characterise Turkish society of our day," the Academy commented.

Pamuk will take home the prize sum of 10 million kronor (1.07 million euros, 1.37 million dollars).

He will receive the Nobel Prize, which also consists of a gold medal and a diploma, from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.


by Pia Ohlin

Nobel Peace Prize: Yunus, Grameen Bank win

Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the bank he founded won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for pioneering the use of microcredit, the extension of small loans to benefit poor entrepreneurs.

Grameen Bank has been instrumental in helping millions of poor Bangladeshis, many of them women, improve their standard of living by letting them borrow tiny sums to start businesses.

Loans go toward buying items such as cows to start a dairy, chickens for an egg business, or cell phones to start businesses where villagers who have no access to phones pay a small fee to make calls.

"Lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty," the Nobel Committee said.

Yunus said the award was "great news" for his homeland.

"I am so so happy," Yunus told The Associated Press when reached by telephone at his Dhaka home shortly after the prize was announced.

Yunus founded Grameen Bank in 1976, after lending $27 out of his pocket to help 42 women in Bangladesh buy weaving stools.

"They got the weaving stools quickly, they started to weave quickly and they repaid him quickly," said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the committee.

"Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development," the Nobel Committee said in its citation.

Today the bank claims to have 6.6 million borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women, and provides services in more than 70,000 villages in Bangladesh. Its model of micro-financing has inspired similar efforts around the world.

"At GB, credit is a cost effective weapon to fight poverty and it serves as a catalyst in the overall development of socio-economic conditions of the poor who have been kept outside the banking orbit on the ground that they are poor and hence not bankable," the committee said.

Yunus and the bank will share in the $1.4 million prize as well as a gold medal and diploma.

The peace prize was the sixth and last Nobel prize announced this year. The others, for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economics, were announced in Stockholm, Sweden.


By DOUG MELLGREN

Nobel Economie Prize: Jobs and Inflation

An American economist who developed theories about unemployment that better capture how workers and companies make decisions about jobs has been named winner of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Sign up for: Globe Headlines e-mail | Breaking News Alerts Edmund S. Phelps, a professor at Columbia University in New York, was cited yesterday for research into the relationship between inflation and unemployment, giving governments better tools to formulate economic policy.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced Phelps's selection in Stockholm, said in its citation that his work ``has fundamentally altered our views on how the macroeconomy operates."

Americans have swept all the Nobels disclosed so far this year, with Phelps being the sixth named for one of the prestigious awards. The economics prize carries an award of $1.4 million.

The winner of the Nobel for literature will be unveiled Thursday, followed by the peace prize on Friday.

Phelps said he had waited for the award for a long time, but wasn't expecting it this year. ``I thought for a time I would get it in my 60s, then I thought I would get it in my 70s, and, more recently, I've been thinking that I would get it in my 80s," he said.

The Swedish academy cited research by Phelps that challenged the view that there was a predictable tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. That view held that any government wanting to reduce joblessness by stimulating the economy would have to tolerate rising prices.

Phelps argued that this view didn't take workers' or companies' decision-making into account, and his research showed that their expectations about both unemployment and inflation affected their actions.

Edmund S. Phelps
Edmund S. Phelps became the first solo winner of the economics prize since 1999.
Age: 73
Education: Bachelor's degree from Amherst College, 1955; master's degree from Yale University, 1956; and PhD from Yale, 1959.
What he does now: Director of Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society, now part of the Earth Institute headed by former Harvard University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs.
His theory: Phelps looked at the relationship between inflation and unemployment and showed there is a "natural" rate of unemployment, below which inflation pressures are likely to intensify.
Why his work matters: His theories led to increased vigilance against inflation at the Federal Reserve and other major central banks.
By Associated Press

"Monster" fossil found in Jurassic graveyard

Scientists have found a fossil of a "Monster" fish-like reptile in a 150 million-year-old Jurassic graveyard on an Arctic island off Norway.

The Norwegian researchers discovered remains of a total of 28 plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs -- top marine predators when dinosaurs dominated on land -- at a site on the island of Spitsbergen, about 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole.

"One of them was this gigantic monster, with vertebrae the size of dinner plates and teeth the size of cucumbers," Joern Hurum, an assistant professor at the University of Oslo, told Reuters on Thursday.

"We believe the skeleton is intact and that it's about 10 meters (33 feet) long," he told Reuters of the pliosaur, a type of plesiosaur with a short neck and massive skull. The team dubbed the specimen "The Monster."

Such pliosaurs are known from remains in countries including Britain and Argentina but no complete skeleton has been found, he said. The skull of the pliosaur -- perhaps a distant relative to Scotland's mythical Loch Ness monster -- was among the biggest on record.

Scientists would return next year to try to excavate the entire fossil, buried on a hillside.

Plesiosaurs, which swam with two sets of flippers, often preyed on smaller dolphin-like ichthyosaurs. All went extinct when the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.

The scientists rated the fossil graveyard "one of the most important new sites for marine reptiles to have been discovered in the last several decades."

"It is rare to find so many fossils in the same place -- carcasses are food for other animals and usually get torn apart," Hurum said.

Hurum reckoned the reptiles had not all died at the same time in some Jurassic-era cataclysm but had died over thousands of years in the same area, then become preserved in what was apparently a deep layer of black mud on the seabed.

At that time, the area of Spitsbergen under water several hundred km (miles) further south, around the latitude of Anchorage or Oslo.

Hurum said the presence of fossils was also an interesting pointer for geologists hunting for oil and gas deposits in the Barents Sea to the east. "A skull we found even smells of petrol," he said.



By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

Mexican archeologists make major Aztec find

Mexican archeologists have made the most significant Aztec find in decades, unearthing a 15th century altar and a huge stone slab at a ruined temple in the throbbing heart of Mexico City.

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The works were uncovered last weekend at the Aztec empire's main Templo Mayor temple, near the central Zocalo square, which was used for worship and human sacrifice.

It was the most meaningful find since electricity workers stumbled upon an eight-tonne carving of an Aztec goddess at the same site in 1978.

"It is a very important discovery, the biggest we have made in 28 years. It will allow us to find out a lot more," Mexico City's mayor, Alejandro Encinas, said on Wednesday.

The altar has a frieze of the rain god Tlaloc and an agricultural deity.

Archeologists are still unearthing the 11-foot (3.5-m) monolith, which they think might be part of an entrance to an underground chamber.

At the site, excavators with pick axes and shovels hacked at the earth above the monolith while groups of archeologists, government officials and reporters waited around the deep pit.

"The importance of the monolith is what we are going to discover...It's likely that it is part of a chamber, of some offering. We won't know until we get close. First we have to get the stone out," said Alberto Diaz, a member of the archeological team.

The Aztecs, a warlike and deeply religious people who built monumental works, ruled an empire stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean and encompassing much of modern-day central Mexico.

Their often bloody reign began in the 14th century and ended when they were subjugated in 1521 by the Spanish led by Hernan Cortes.

TALE OF THREE CITIES

The Aztecs began building the Templo Mayor pyramid-shaped temple in 1375. Its ruins are now only yards from downtown's choking traffic.

The temple was a center of human sacrifice. At one ceremony in 1487, historians say tens of thousands of victims were sacrificed, their hearts ripped out.

Spanish conquistadors destroyed the temple when they razed the city and used its stones to help build their own capital.

Now the site is surrounded by Spanish colonial buildings like Mexico City's cathedral and the historical National Palace as well as convenience stores and fast-food restaurants.

"Really, when we begin to excavate, we realize that we are in three different times, three different cities: You see the current city, the colonial city and the pre-Hispanic city," said Diaz.



By Gunther Hamm

Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Genetic code, DNA, is copied by an Enzyme

this year's winner of the 2006 Nobel Chemistry Prize, has been immersed in research since childhood and comes from a family that lives and breathes science.

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Kornberg is not a stranger to the Nobels either. In 1959, as a wide-eyed 12-year-old, he accompanied his father Arthur to Stockholm to see him receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

At the time of his father's award, Kornberg junior was already interested in science.

"Science was part of our conversations at the dinner table and part of our afternoon and weekend activities ... and the joy of science was completely natural for me and my brothers," Kornberg once told a science journal.

Arthur Kornberg, now in his 80s, was honoured for advancing understanding on how genetic information is transferred from a mother cell to its daughters.

The younger Kornberg's achievement was to portray how the genetic code, DNA, is copied by an enzyme and the copy is then stored in the outer part of the cell, in a process called transcription.

His mother Sylvy Ruth Levy was also a biochemist of note and contributed significantly to her husband's discovery of DNA polymerase, the enzyme that assembles the building blocks into DNA.

The day after her husband was awarded the Nobel prize, she was quoted in a newspaper as saying "I was robbed".

Born in Saint-Louis in 1947, Roger D. Kornberg is the eldest of three brothers.

Thomas is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California in San Francisco.

Even Kenneth, the youngest of the trio, has not entirely escaped the science bug. Although an architect, he specialises in laboratory design.

Roger Kornberg gained a degree in chemistry at Havard and earned his PhD, also in chemistry, from Stanford University.

Following postdoctoral work at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, England, in 1978, he joined the staff there.

He later became part of the faculty in the Department of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School in the United States. He returned to Stanford in 1984, where he worked as professor of structural biology until 2002.

The following year he took up his current post as professor of medicine at Stanford University Medical School in California.

Kornberg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Nobel Prize in Physics : The Origin of the Universe and How it grew into Galaxies

Two American astronomers who uncovered evidence about the origin of the universe and how it grew into galaxies were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics today.

The researchers, John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, will split the prize of 10 million Swedish kroners, about $1.37 million.

Dr. Mather and Dr. Smoot led a team of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and technicians that built and launched the Cosmic Background Explorer, or Cobe, satellite in 1989 to study a haze of microwave radiation that is believed to be a remnant of the explosion that, according to the Big Bang theory, started the universe.

Cobe’s measurements of the temperature and distribution of the microwaves, including the detection of tantalizingly faint irregularities from which things like galaxies could have grown, were a resounding confirmation of the theory of a universe that was born in a terrific explosion of space and time 14 billion years ago and in which the ordinary matter that makes up stars and people is overwhelmed by some mysterious “dark matter.”

“What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe and its evolution,” Dr. Smoot said in a press conference about the results in 1992. About a map showing the splotchy seeds of galaxy formation, he famously said, “If you are religious, it is like looking at God.”

Today’s announcement delighted astronomers who had long anticipated a Nobel for the Cobe work. In the wake of that research wake came a wave of Big Bang theorizing and a series of balloon and satellite experiments to provide increasingly detailed data on the cosmic microwaves, including NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Project, or WMAP, which is still orbiting and beaming down data contributing to the emerging picture of a preposterous universe, full of dark energy pushing it apart, as well as dark matter.

James Peebles, a Princeton cosmologist, said, “Cobe was deeply important: those two measurements set cosmology on the track to our present well-based theory of the expanding universe.”

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said the Cobe measurements had ushered in an era of “precision cosmology” that continues to this day. “This is likely to the first of a number of prizes in cosmology in this golden age we find ourselves in.”


By DENNIS OVERBYE

Nobel Prize in physiology or Medicine: Turn off the Effect of Specific Genes

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Americans Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine Monday for discovering a way to turn off the effect of specific genes.

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"RNA interference" is already being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes and it is being studied as a treatment for virus infections, heart diseases, cancer and several other conditions.

Fire, of Stanford University, and Mello, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, published their seminal work in 1998.

RNA interference occurs naturally in plants, animals, and humans. The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which awarded the prize, said it is important for regulating the activity of genes and helps defend against viral infection.

"This year's Nobel laureates have discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information," the institute said.

Genes produce their effect by sending molecules called messenger RNA to the protein-making machinery of a cell. In RNA interference, certain molecules trigger the destruction of RNA from a particular gene, so that no protein is produced. Thus the gene is effectively silenced.

Fire, who conducted the research while at the Carnegie Institution, said he was honored that the work "has received such positive attention."

"Science is a group effort. Please recognize that the recent progress in the field of RNA-based gene silencing has involved original scientific inquiry from research groups around the world," he said in a statement released by the Carnegie Institution.

The announcement opened this year's series of prize announcements. It will be followed by Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

Last year's medicine prize went to Australians Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren for discovering that bacteria, not stress, causes ulcers.

The Nobel committees do not reveal who has been nominated for the awards, but that does not stop experts and Nobel-watchers from speculating on potential winners.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in his will in the categories of literature, peace, medicine, physics and chemistry. The economics prize is technically not a Nobel but a 1968 creation of Sweden's central bank.

Winners receive a check of $1.4 million, handshakes with Scandinavian royalty, and a banquet on Dec. 10 — the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896. All prizes are handed out in Stockholm except for the peace prize, which is presented in Oslo.

By MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER, Associated Press Writers