It's Nobel Prize announcement week, and if you had Carol W. Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn, or Jack Szostak in your office pool, you're off to a good start (the trio will share this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine). As we await news of the rest of the winners, here are some stories about past Nobel laureates. 1. Robert Lucas, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the theory of "rational expectations," split his $1 million prize ...

Former Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who resigned from his post after appearing intoxicated at a news conference earlier this year, was found dead in his home Sunday, police told CNN. Tokyo police found Nakagawa, 56, lying face down on a bed on the second-floor of his home, Kyodo reported. Nakagawa submitted his resignation February 17, just three days after he appeared intoxicated at the G7 news conference in Rome, Italy. Japan's prime minister quickly appointed Kaoru Yosano, the economics ...

New research suggests penicillin is becoming obsolete, and antibiotic resistance could lead to a "major health crisis" unless governments act to promote research into new drugs. Antibiotics such as penicillin have been key to the decline of infectious diseases over the last 60 years, but bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to existing drugs. That means many antibiotics are no longer effective at combating common diseases, and a lack of research into new drugs means there is a dire ...

Phillip Garrido was registered as a sex offender, required to meet with parole officers and fitted with an ankle bracelet to track his movements -- but nothing prevented him from being around children, according to a victim's advocacy group. Garrido, who is charged with kidnapping and raping Jaycee Lee Dugard -- a young woman police say lived with her two daughters in a huddle of tents and outbuildings hidden behind Garrido's home - was arrested last week along with his ...

Crouching in a verdant pasture in the early summer sun, Eduardo Sousa plucks a few blades of grass and extends them toward a flock of geese. "Hello, my darlings," he coos. "Hello, hello, hello." It is the Spanish farmer's first visit to the Stone Barns Center, a farm and education center dedicated to sustainable agriculture in Pocantico Hills, some 30 miles north of New York City, and Sousa is impressed with what he sees. "If I ...

By 2010, Seoul's women should officially be happy — at least the ones with driver's licenses. In May, the city government started to paint 4,929 public and private parking places pink throughout the city, with thousands more slated to go under the brush next year. The pink parking spots, reserved for women drivers so they don't have to walk so far to work or the mall, are part of the South Korean capital's Women Friendly Seoul Project, an effort ...

With local economies flailing, communities across the U.S. are trying to drum up more action on Main Street. "Buy Local" campaigns are one way to go. But many towns--from Ojai, Calif., to Greensboro, N.C.--are considering going a step further and printing money that can only be spent locally. Issuing an alternative currency is perfectly legal, as long as it is treated as taxable income and consists of paper bills rather than coins. In the U.S., where local currencies ...

Sri Lanka's 26 years of civil war effectively ended on May 19, 2009 with a single image. Televisions across the globe broadcast a government-issue photo of slain Tamil Tiger head, Velupillai Prabhakaran, lying on a muddy patch of ground with wide eyes and a fractured skull. His life's end terminated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's decades-long fight for an independent homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority — about ten percent of the population — and a cycle of ...

It's probably been a while since you bought new software. That's because so many tech firms — buoyed by ads placed in Web-based applications like the Google Docs word processor and the thousands of apps on Facebook — can now afford to give their programs away for free. But don't expect the same deal when you're shopping for add-ons to bling out your iPhone. On July 11, Apple will launch its hotly anticipated iPhone App Store — and it'll ...

"Buy Local"—you see the decal in the store window, the sign at the farmer's market, the bright, cheerful logos for Local First Arizona, Think Boise First, Our Milwaukee, and homegrown versions across the states. The apparent message is "let's-support-local-business", a kind of community boosterism. But buying close to home may be more than a feel-good, it's-worth-paying-more-for-local matter. A number of researchers and organizations are taking a closer look at how money flows, and what they're finding shows the profound ...