Kazuo Ishiguro Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro
British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro
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Kazuo Ishiguro Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro
British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro

British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his book "The Remains of the Day," has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy said.

Ishiguro, "in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world," the Academy wrote.

The prize is worth 9 million kronor ($1.1 million).

A revolutionary technique dubbed cryo-electron microscopy, which has peered closer at the Zika virus and an Alzheimer's enzyme, earned scientists Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson the Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday.

Thanks to the international team's "cool method", which uses electron beams to examine the tiniest structures of cells, "researchers can now freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualise processes they have never previously seen," the Nobel chemistry committee said.

This has been "decisive for both the basic understanding of life's chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals," it added. 

The ultra-sensitive imaging method allows molecules to be flash-frozen and studied in their natural form, without the need for dyes.

It has laid bare never-before-seen details of the tiny protein machines that run all cells.



Taipei Zoo's Veteran Giant Panda Celebrates 20th Birthday

Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
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Taipei Zoo's Veteran Giant Panda Celebrates 20th Birthday

Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)

With politics set aside, well-wishers gathered to wish the Taipei zoo’s senior panda a happy 20th birthday.
Visitors crowded around Yuanyuan's enclosure to take photos of her with a birthday cake in the shape of the number 20.
Yuanyuan was born in China and arrived in 2008 with her partner Tuantuan. He died in 2022 at age 18 but not before fathering two female cubs, Yuanzai and Yuanbao, now 11 and 4 respectively and still living at the zoo.
Danielle Shu, a 20-year-old Brazilian student in Taiwan, said she found online clips of the pandas an enjoyable distraction. “And I just find it really funny and cute,” The Associated Press quoted Shu as saying.
Giant pandas are native only to China, and Beijing bestows them as a sign of political amity. Yuanyuan and Tuantuan arrived in Taiwan during a period of relative calm between the sides, which split amid civil war in 1949. China claims the island its own territory, to be annexed by military force if necessary.
Faced with declining habitat and a notoriously low birthrate, giant panda populations have declined to around 1,900 in the mountains of western China, while 600 pandas live in zoos and breeding centers in China and around the world.