Nobel Prizes in Sciences

2014's Nobel Prizes for Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine

 Well lets just talk about my favorite in detail, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry:

Press release from nobelprize.org; on October 8th, 2014 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell, and William E. Moerner "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy". 

 Now what does super-resolved fluorescence microscopy mean?, well it's a microscope gone nano, but it isn't a regular optical light microscope which we use to see samples to only as little at 200 nanometers as a big blurry blob, it's a kind of electron microscope called the STED microscope and it can see closer than 0.2 nanometers, micrometers or 0.2 millionths of a meter however you call the unit, in really nice high resolution. The difference between normal electron microscopes and the STED microscope is that the STED can see living cells and organisms by making molecules fluoresce under a laser beam.

 (Overall how it works from nobelprize.org) 1.In a STED microscope, an annular laser beam quenches all fluorescence except that in a nanometre-sized volume. 2.The laser beams scan over the sample. Since scientists know exactly where the beam hits the sample, they can use that information to render the image at a much higher resolution. 3.The final image gets a resolution that is much better than 0.2 micrometre.

 Now scientists can have a greater understanding of how diseases develop and can now monitor the interplay between individual molecules inside cells.

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     "They can see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos." 

 I think this microscope will one day help cure Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease, it doesn't seem impossible if they made this beauty. Maybe IBM's brain-inspired microchip can use information gathered from it by looking at how a human brain's neuron cells at work. I think real worthy artificial intelligence with self consciousness truly isn't far along, I even think we can create artificial human life since it's possible to make working artificial brain tissue.  I think we can play god, and reach for beyond the stars one day, mankind is getting there, the future is definitely happening. 

 The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources".

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 was divided, one half awarded to John O'Keefe, the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain".