The scientists' work led to a test to protect blood transfusion recipients from hepatitis C and drugs to treat the infection that have saved millions of lives, according to the Nobel Assembly.
Esther Duflo is the first female economist to win the Nobel Prize. Planet Money talks to her about her win, the state of gender inequality in economics, and her new book.
An American woman, Frances H. Arnold, has won half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and George Smith of the U.S. and Sir Gregory Winter of the U.K. will share the other half.
Three members of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature, protested its response to a simmering scandal by resigning their permanent roles. Now, the group is in a tough spot.
He's the biochemist Har Gobind Khorana, who discovered the grammar that organizes DNA. But first he had to overcome the accent and mannerisms of his Indian village.
The physicist had just won the 1921 Nobel Prize when he scribbled his theory of happy living on a piece of hotel stationery and handed it to the courier at the Imperial Hotel Tokyo.
The Swedish Academy said it was awarding Thaler the prize in economics for his pioneering work in incorporating "psychologically realistic assumptions into analyses of economic decision-making."
Three scientists won the prize after a 25-year-long search of the cosmos for gravitational waves — the waving of space — the one test missing for Einstein, says astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser.
For years, three physicists worked to prove Albert Einstein's idea that gravitational waves are rippling through space-time. In 2015, they made history as part of the LIGO Collaboration.
The scientists honored with a Nobel Prize in medicine helped discover that every cell in the body has its own clock. When we ignore those clocks, we increase the risk of weight gain and diabetes.
Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young share the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discoveries about how internal clocks govern human biology.
The annual awards for research "that makes you laugh, then think" also singled out scientists who determined that having contact with a crocodile influences a person's willingness to gamble.
This car race involved years of training, feats of engineering, high-profile sponsorships, competitors from around the world and a racetrack made of gold. And it's invisible to the naked eye.
A letter from 370 economists, including eight Nobel Prize winners, says the Republican presidential candidate has misled the country about trade, jobs and growth.
Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström — professors at Harvard and MIT, respectively — were awarded the prize for their work on understanding and improving contract agreements.
Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa share the 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. By designing a tiny chain, axle and rotor blade, they made molecular machines a reality.
One half of the prize went to David J. Thouless; the other half was shared by F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz. They used math to explain the odd behavior of unusual states of matter.
He shared chemistry's top prize in 1996 for finding buckyballs, and had Lou Gehrig's disease when he died. Making art was his first love. "Remember your humanity," he said, "and forget the rest."