Tag: Nobel

  • 2 U.S. Academics Among Winners of Nobel Prize in Economics

    2 U.S. Academics Among Winners of Nobel Prize in Economics

    Two American academics were among the three winners of this year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. They were given the prestigious award “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday morning.

    Joel Mokyr, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, will receive half the roughly $1.6 million prize “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress,” according to the announcement.

    Peter Howitt, a professor emeritus of economics at Brown University, will split the other half of the award money with Philippe Aghion of Collège de France and INSEAD and the London School of Economics and Political Science, “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.”

    “The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted,” said John Hassler, chair of the committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences. “We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation.”

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  • UC Berkeley Scientist Wins Nobel Prize for Chemistry

    UC Berkeley Scientist Wins Nobel Prize for Chemistry

    A chemist from the University of California, Berkeley, was among the trio of scientists awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday.

    Omar Yaghi, the Berkeley professor; Susumu Kitagawa from Kyoto University in Japan; and Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne in Australia were recognized for their work since the 1990s to develop a new form of molecular architecture that combines metal ions and carbon-based molecules, according to a release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which administers the Nobel Prize.

    The metal-organic frameworks can harvest water or store toxic gases. The release noted that the frameworks “may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges.”

    The release says the frameworks are essentially “rooms” because of the large spaces that form in the structure. A Nobel committee member compared it to Hermione Granger’s magical bag in the seventh Harry Potter book, the Associated Press reported. Her small bag eventually contained a tent, books and other provisions. Likewise, the frameworks look small but can hold a lot.

    Since the trio’s discoveries, more than 100,000 metal-organic frameworks have been created, according to a news release from Berkeley.

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  • 3 Academics Share Nobel Prize in Physics

    3 Academics Share Nobel Prize in Physics

    Three academics affiliated with U.S. universities have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday morning.

    British physicist John Clarke, a professor of experimental physics at the University of California, Berkeley; French physicist Michel Devoret, professor emeritus of applied physics at Yale and a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and John Martinis, also a physics professor at UCSB, will share the nearly $1.2 million prize.

    They won for performing a series of experiments using an electronic circuit made of superconductors, which can conduct a current with no electrical resistance, demonstrating “that quantum mechanical properties can be made concrete on a macroscopic scale,” according to the announcement.

    “It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology,” said Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

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