Nobel Prize

Polls show that frustration with Washington has never been higher — and who could argue? Most Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. Most lawmakers openly concede that nothing will get done before the November elections. The leaders of both parties are already trading threats over the possibility of a national debt default next year. Barack Obama got elected by promising to change the tone in Washington, but clearly he's failed, as George W. Bush did before him. That should be a clue that the partisan animosity consuming the political system doesn't originate in the White House.

Although American physicist Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in 1965, it was his books of anecdotes ("Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?") and his appointment to the presidential Challenger disaster investigation commission in 1986 that raised him to icon status. Feynman was an independent thinker, extremely intolerant of stupidity. Learn why Feynman fans are so devoted at today's website picks. Basic Feynman www.basicfeynman.com Created by publisher Basic Books, Basic Feynman goes beyond book promotion...

OSLO -- The first African woman and the first Kenyan to win the Nobel Peace Prize, environmental activist Wangari Maathai, received her award yesterday to the beat of drums and dancers that broke with the usual stodgy ceremony. Maathai, 64, received the traditional gold medal and diploma that accompanies the $1.5 million prize at a ceremony in Norway. "We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process . . .embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder," Maathai said.

LOS ANGELES - F. Sherwood Rowland, a chemist and Nobel laureate who sounded the alarm on the thinning of the Earth's ozone layer and crusaded against the use of man-made chemicals that were harming Earth's atmospheric blanket, has died. He was 84. Dr. Rowland died Saturday at his home in Corona del Mar of complications from Parkinson's disease, the dean of the University of California Irvine's physical sciences department said Sunday. "We have lost our finest friend and mentor," Kenneth C. Janda said in a statement.

1. Dudley Herschbach, a professor at Harvard who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986. 2. Richard Roberts, the chief scientific officer for New England BioLabs in Ipswich. Roberts won the Nobel Prize in 1993 in the Physiology or Medicine category. 3. Jerome Friedman, a professor emeritus at MIT who won the 1990 Nobel Prize for Physics. 4. Sheldon Glashow, a professor at Boston University who won the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics. 5. David Hubel, a professor emeritus at Harvard who won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Norman Ramsey, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in physics for his research into molecules and atoms that led to the creation of the atomic clock, has died. His wife says the emeritus professor of physics at Harvard University died in his sleep at a Wayland nursing home on Friday. He was 96. Ramsey wrote in his autobiography for the Nobel Prize he shared with Hans Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul that he was inspired by failure in molecular beam magnetic resonance experiments to invent the separated oscillatory field method in the 1960s.

PALO ALTO, Calif. - Dr. Arthur Kornberg, whose test-tube synthesis of DNA earned him the Nobel Prize in 1959, died of respiratory failure Friday at Stanford Hospital, the hospital said. He was 89. Dr. Kornberg, an active professor emeritus of biochemistry at Stanford University's School of Medicine, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dr. Severo Ochoa of New York University. Kornberg discovered the chemical mechanism that demonstrated how DNA, the blueprint of heredity, gets constructed in the cell.

Baruj Benacerraf, who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his groundbreaking work in immunology and who for many years led the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, died yesterday of pneumonia at his home in Jamaica Plain. He was 90. Dr. Benacerraf, who was George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology Emeritus at Harvard Medical School, had been chairman of the pathology department from 1970 to 1991. Dr. Benacerraf was born in Venezuela and grew up in France.

STOCKHOLM -- Kai Siegbahn, who shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in physics, died July 20. He was 89. Dr. Siegbahn, whose father, Manne, was awarded the 1924 Nobel Prize in physics, received the award for his contribution to the development of high-resolution electron spectroscopy, a technique for analyzing materials through an examination of their electrons. Dr. Siegbahn died of a heart attack at his summer cabin in southern Sweden, said his wife, Anna Brita. He shared the Nobel prize with Dutch-born Nicolaas...

COPENHAGEN - Aage Bohr, a nuclear physics professor and Nobel laureate like his father, has died. He was 87. Mr. Bohr received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1975. His father, Niels Bohr, who was a colleague and close friend of Albert Einstein, received the Nobel Prize in physics for nuclear research in 1922. The institute named after his father and where Aage Bohr was a professor of physics said yesterday that Mr. Bohr died Tuesday. A funeral will take place Monday, his family said.

F. Sherwood Rowland, the Nobel prize-winning chemist who sounded the alarm on the depletion of the Earth's ozone layer, has died. The University of California, Irvine says Rowland died Saturday at his home in Southern California. He was 84. The cause was complications from Parkinson's disease. Rowland was among three scientists awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for chemistry for discovering that a byproduct of aerosol sprays, deodorants and other consumer products could destroy the earth's atmospheric blanket.

Dan Mosher took college classes here and there - at Bunker Hill Community College and the University of Massachusetts Boston - but his real academic career began three years ago. That is when he became the chauffeur for a large slice of the Boston area's unusually large population of Nobel laureates, peppering them with questions as he drives them to appearances across the state. He has driven nine Nobel Prize recipients and is scheduled to chauffeur his 10th, MIT professor Robert Merton, Tuesday.

Dan Mosher took college classes here and there - at Bunker Hill Community College and the University of Massachusetts Boston - but his real academic career began three years ago. That is when he became the chauffeur for a large slice of the Boston area's unusually large population of Nobel laureates, peppering them with questions as he drives them to appearances across the state. He has driven nine Nobel Prize recipients and is scheduled to chauffeur his 10th, MIT professor Robert Merton, Tuesday.

1. Dudley Herschbach, a professor at Harvard who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986. 2. Richard Roberts, the chief scientific officer for New England BioLabs in Ipswich. Roberts won the Nobel Prize in 1993 in the Physiology or Medicine category. 3. Jerome Friedman, a professor emeritus at MIT who won the 1990 Nobel Prize for Physics. 4. Sheldon Glashow, a professor at Boston University who won the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics. 5. David Hubel, a professor emeritus at Harvard who won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Every Sunday, Boston Globe photographer Stan Grossfeld asks the subject of one of his photos to explain what's happening in the shot: Metta World Peace: "My aggressiveness on the court will never change. That's basketball, competition. I'm not going to be a nice guy on the court. It will never, ever happen. I'm very protective of my teammates. I'm a very hard-nosed player. I'm mixing it up all the time. The fans are brutal. Boston fans have no mercy. One guy said, ‘Hey, crazy boy, you still cuckoo?

WARSAW - Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature whose simple words and playful verse plucked threads of irony and empathy out of life, has died. She was 88. Ms. Szymborska, a heavy smoker, died in her sleep of lung cancer Wednesday evening at her home in Krakow. She died surrounded by relatives and friends. The Nobel award committee's citation called her the "Mozart of poetry," who mixed the elegance of language with "the fury of Beethoven" and tackled serious subjects with humor.

NEW YORK — Mario Vargas Llosa, the newest recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, has never found much honor in boundaries. “Literature shouldn’t be secluded, provincial, or regional,’’ the Peruvian author said in New York after yesterday’s announcement in Sweden. “It should be universal, even if it has deep roots in one place.’’ The 74-year-old author and political activist, a charter member of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s, has for decades been regarded as one of the world’s greatest and most adventurous writers, an...

NEW YORK -- Raymond Davis Jr., who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting particles produced by nuclear reactions in the sun, has died at his home on Long Island. He was 91. His death on Wednesday was announced by Brookhaven National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy facility where Mr. Davis was a chemist for four decades before retiring in 1984. The cause was complications from Alzheimer's disease, it said. Mr. Davis' s prizewinning work on solar neutrinos took him to figurative highs and literal lows.

The following was submit ted by the Jewish Community Center of the North Shore: The JCC's popular series Manhattan in Marblehead is back with an impressive lineup of speakers, live in New York City and simulcast here at the J.  These are interactive programs — people in the Marblehead audience can ask the speakers questions and hear the answers live. The J debuted the program last year with Steve Martin, Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten, Moneyball author Michael Lewis and Seinfeld creator Larry David.