The first Chinese citizen to receive a Nobel Prize, Liu Xiaobo is a poet and literary critic who has come to prominence over the last two decades as one of the most visible leaders of China’s pro-democracy movement. Currently serving an 11 year prison term, he is the third Nobel Peace Laureate to be under…

Incumbent Presidents have quite frequently been recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. US Presidents and were Laureates while in office, as for instance, were Presidents of the USSR and of South Korea. There have also been current Prime Ministers ( of Israel) and Chancellors ( of the Federal Republic of Germany), but never before has…

Martti Ahtisaari, former diplomat and politician, is an international trouble-shooter. Over the past two decades he has worked under a variety of mandates to attempt to bring a peaceful end to conflicts in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Few people have gained such a broad understanding of the intricacies of managing conflict resolution.…

For the third successive year, but for only the sixth time since it was initiated in 1901, the Nobel Peace Prize has been divided equally between an institution and an individual. In awarding the Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global body responsible for scientific assessment of climate change, and Albert…

For the nervous system to receive information from the body and send out instructions, it must rely on finding a way of passing its electrical impulses from one nerve cell to another. By revealing the mode through which impulses communicate their signal across the miniscule gaps, or synapses, that separate nerve cells from each other…

At any given time, our nervous system faces an enormous signal control task. Acting as the command centre for the entire body, it is charged with generating and processing the host of different messages sent through nerve cells that allow us to move, think and respond to any given stimulus. Managing this constant and complex…

When engaging an enemy in battle, it’s always an advantage to enlist some help, and in the case of the immune system this is no exception. To aid their vital task of specifically binding to and destroying invading bacteria and viruses, antibodies recruit a special type of protein to deliver a lethal blow. The identity…

Our immune system does a remarkable job of protecting us against the harmful effects of infectious agents that cause disease. However, every so often this defence mechanism can be made to turn on itself, triggering a violent, often fatal reaction against its host. Understanding how the immune system can be prompted to behave in such…

The 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal for revealing the inner beauty of the nervous system. By developing methods that could colour and highlight its key components, Golgi and Cajal allowed the anatomy of the nervous system to be observed and documented in precise…

The first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine acknowledged both the development of a scientific concept that concerned the way in which the immune system can fight certain infectious agents, and its successful translation into a method of keeping the illnesses they cause at bay. At the forefront of these achievements was Emil von Behring.…