2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winners

PHYSICS
We live in a world designed by Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle, and George E. Smith. Their work on the physics of light made possible the fiber optic cables carrying this web page to your phone, and the digital camera on the other side. And on December 10th, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden will award them the Nobel Prize in physics for their work.
Boyle and Smith started their career together at Bell Labs, and in 1969, created the foundation of digital cameras. Utilizing the phenomena that won Albert Einstein his Nobel, Boyle and Smith devised a way to measure the electrons knocked lose when light strikes silicon. This essentially created the first digital camera pixel.
When Kao began working on fiber optics, the most advanced cables could only carry a light signal about 65 feet. By determining how the purity of the glass and the manufacturing methods influenced the transparency of a fiber optic cable, Kao laid down the principles that would lead to a half-mile-long cable within 4 years.
MEDICINE
Military leaders throughout history have supposedly goaded on their troops with the phrase, "You wanna live forever?" In 2009, the answer for many people is "Yes, please," and the Nobel Committee has today honored three U.S. scientists for discovering the genetic code that regulates aging in cells. The announcement comes as researchers race to develop anti-aging medicine or technology that can make humans immortal.
Merging humans with artificial intelligence remains some ways off, but there's also plenty of focus on extending the natural human lifespan. The latest Nobel Prize winners helped illuminate the aging process by discovering the repetitive genetic sequences on the ends of chromosomes known as telomeres. The telomeres serve as protective caps that gradually shorten as genetic material is copied many times over during cell division -- a process that parallels human aging, even if other factors also come into play.
The researchers who will receive this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and share $1.4 million are: Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California in San Francisco; Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and Jack Szostak, a geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. This is the first time that the Nobel Prize in medicine has gone to more than one woman in a single year.

OTHER CATEGORIES TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON.