Just because Gino D.'s Dr. Evil image cracks me up so much, here he is again for you. But on to the news. Now that the first proton particles have been injected into the Large Hadron Collider, the facility is now getting ready to start up the humongous atom smasher next Wednesday. Exciting. Excitement has been dampened for the scientists at the facility however, as they've been getting death threats to stop the operation. Details in the full article.

The issue of racism is hard to get rid of, but here's an interesting trivia amidst all the furor stemming from the issue. As it turns out James Watson, the scientist who managed to cause an uproar with his comments about Africans and their comparative intelligence, possesses black genes from an African ancestor. More details in the full article!

Amid wars and world conflicts, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to (drum roll please) Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Their award isn't without merit of course. The committee believes that uncontrolled climate change may give a reason for the world to rise in conflict again:

[It] may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the Earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.

Thus Al Gore has achieved with his film, An Inconvenient Truth, what every stereotype beauty queen always wanted: world peace. In a bit of an odd twist, the Nobel Prize was given on the same week that a judge in the UK declared that parts of the film were scientifically inaccurate - mostly those parts that had to be simplified to present a complex topic to a broad audience.

It looks like a good year for US scientists: three Nobel Prizes go to Americans! Roger Kornberg from Stanford University, USA, has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, John C. Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot of University of California Berkeley won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and Andrew Z. Fire of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Craig C. Mello of the University of Massachusetts Medical School won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Why did Roger Kornberg win? You know that DNA molecules contain our genetic code. But DNA stays in the center of the cell in a part called the nucleus. So how does genetic info get from the DNA to the other parts of the cell that needs it? The exact molecular process was described by Roger Kornberg, and that's why he won the prize.

Actually, Roger's dad won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1959 for work in genetics (he studied how information is transferred from one DNA molecule to another). Roger bagged this year's award for explaining exactly how information is transferred from the DNA molecule into an RNA molecule. This RNA molecule acts like a messenger that takes the info from the DNA to the rest of the cell. In the picture, the DNA is the blue twin-spiral, and it goes into a protein molecule (that's all the white spaghetti stuff), where RNA bits (the red stuff) are made. A springy protein (green) which is just a long string of atoms literally acts like a spring and pushes the DNA and RNA bits along. The result: an RNA copy of your DNA!

Because Roger Kornberg won the award solo, he doesn't need to split the prize money. If memory serves, it's 10 million Swedish crowns or about 1.37 million US dollars. Wow. He's smart, richer, and makes his dad proud. We suddenly feel so insecure.

The Big Bang is a big conundrum and a lot of people have been debating this topic for a long time. There are people who believe that it happened more than four hundred million years ago, others say it never happened. The cosmic background radiation is an old token from the earliest age of the universe. The small differences in  temperature offers an integral hint on how galaxies formed and it shows how matter began to collect itself. Once measured, scientists would be closer to the time when the universe exploded into creation. Ergo, someone had to find the blackbody spectrum.

It was up to John Mather of NASA and George Smoot from the University of California to find it. They were able to find proof and got a great big medal in the end--the prestigious 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics. The two made a large contribution to the Big Bang theory and they were heavily involved in the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), a satellite that measures the diffuse infrared and microwave radiation from the early ages of the universe. J. Mather was the one who revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation, while G. Smoot measured the small variations in the temperature.

Congratulations to the two scientists. We hope that with this knowledge, people will be more appreciative of how the universe , and eventually the Earth, came into being.

To defeat bad genetics, you need something small that can go in and defeat the enemy at a molecular level. Basically, it's like The Atom from DC (sorry, been watching too much Justice League Unlimited recently).

This is why Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the Nobel Prize for medicine for their discovery of how to do gene silencing. Gene silencing is switching off genes (like the bad genes for nasty diseases). This new method could eventually lead to new treatments for AIDS, blindness, and cancer.

Fire and Mello experimented with worms and RNA (RNA is ribonucleic acid; it's like DNA except it's missing the deoxy part, har har). In a process called RNAi or RNA interference, the RNA acts like a molecular weapon to hone in and target certain genes and interfere with their normal functions. In other words, we can eventually make bits of RNA that specifically attack cancer genes, genes involved in cholesterol metabolism, and other bad genes.

Fire and Mello also won 10 million Swedish crowns or about 1.37 million dollars. That makes them cooler than The Atom.