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Tag: Nobel Prizes

  • Belarus frees Nobel Prize winner, opposition figure as US lifts sanctions

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    VILNIUS, Lithuania — Belarus freed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, key opposition figure Maria Kolesnikova and dozens of other political prisoners on Saturday, capping two days of talks with Washington aimed at improving ties and getting crippling U.S. sanctions lifted on a key Belarusian agricultural export.

    President Alexander Lukashenko pardoned 123 prisoners, Belarus’ state news agency, Belta, reported. In exchange, the U.S. said it was lifting sanctions on the Eastern European country’s potash sector,

    A close ally of Russia, Minsk has faced Western isolation and sanctions for years. Lukashenko has ruled the nation of 9.5 million with an iron fist for more than three decades, and the country has been repeatedly sanctioned by the West for its crackdown on human rights and for allowing Moscow to use its territory during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

    John Coale, the U.S. special envoy for Belarus who met with Lukashenko in Minsk on Friday and Saturday, described the talks to reporters as “very productive” and said normalizing relations between the two countries was “our goal,” Belta reported.

    “We’re lifting sanctions, releasing prisoners. We’re constantly talking to each other,” Coale said, adding that the relationship between the U.S. and Belarus was moving from “baby steps to more confident steps” as they increased dialogue, the Belarusian news agency reported.

    Belarus has released hundreds of prisoners since July 2024. Among the 123 freed Saturday were a U.S. citizen, six citizens of U.S. allied countries, and five Ukrainian citizens, a U.S. official told The Associated Press in an email. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private diplomatic negotiations, described the release as “a significant milestone in U.S.-Belarus engagement” and “yet another diplomatic victory” for U.S. President Donald Trump.

    The official said Trump’s engagement so far “has led to the release of over 200 political prisoners in Belarus, including six unjustly detained U.S. citizens and over 60 citizens of U.S. Allies and partners.”

    Pavel Sapelka, an advocate with the Viasna rights group, confirmed to the AP that Bialiatski and Kolesnikova were among those released.

    Bialiatski, a human rights advocate who founded Viasna, was in jail when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 along with the prominent Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties. He was later convicted of smuggling and financing actions that violated public order — charges that were widely denounced as politically motivated — and sentenced to 10 years in 2023.

    Bialiatski told the AP by phone Saturday that his release after 1,613 days behind bars came as a surprise — in the morning, he was still in an overcrowded prison cell.

    “It feels like I jumped out of icy water into a normal, warm room, so I have to adapt. After isolation, I need to get information about what’s going on,” said Bialiatski, who seemed energetic but pale and emaciated in post-release videos and photos.

    He vowed to continue his work, stressing that “more than a thousand political prisoners in Belarus remain behind bars simply because they chose freedom. And, of course, I am their voice.”

    Kolesnikova, meanwhile, was a key figure in the mass protests that rocked Belarus in 2020 and is a close ally of an opposition leader in exile, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

    Known for her close-cropped hair and trademark gesture of forming a heart with her hands, Kolesnikova became an even greater symbol of resistance when Belarusian authorities tried to deport her in September 2020. Driven to the Ukrainian border, she briefly broke away from security forces at the frontier, tore up her passport and walked back into Belarus.

    The 43-year-old professional flutist was convicted in 2021 on charges including conspiracy to seize power and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

    Among the others who were released, according to Viasna, was Viktar Babaryka — an opposition figure who had sought to challenge Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential election, widely seen as rigged, before being convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison on charges he rejected as political.

    Viasna reported that the group’s imprisoned advocates, Valiantsin Stefanovic and Uladzimir Labkovich, and prominent opposition figure Maxim Znak were also freed. But it later said it was clarifying its report about Stefanovic’s release, and Bialiatski told the AP that Stefanovic had not been freed, though he hopes he will be soon.

    Most of the freed prisoners were sent to Ukraine, Franak Viachorka, Tsikhanouskaya’s senior adviser, told the AP. Eight or nine others, including Bialiatski, were being sent to Lithuania on Saturday, and more prisoners will be taken to the Baltic country in the next few days, Viachorka said.

    Ukrainian authorities confirmed that Belarus had handed over 114 civilians, including five Ukrainian nationals. Freed Belarusian nationals “at their request” and “after being given necessary medical treatment” will be taken to Poland and Lithuania, they said.

    Lukashenko’s press secretary, Natalya Eismont, said those released were sent to Ukraine because Kyiv was to free several imprisoned Belarusian and Russian nationals as part of the deal, although Ukrainian officials haven’t confirmed the claim yet.

    When U.S. officials last met with Lukashenko in September, Washington eased some of the sanctions on Belarus while Minsk released more than 50 political prisoners.

    “The freeing of political prisoners means that Lukashenko understands the pain of Western sanctions and is seeking to ease them,” Tsikhanouskaya, the opposition leader in exile, told the AP on Saturday.

    She added: “But let’s not be naive: Lukashenko hasn’t changed his policies, his crackdown continues and he keeps on supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine. That’s why we need to be extremely cautious with any talk of sanctions relief, so that we don’t reinforce Russia’s war machine and encourage continued repressions.”

    Belarus, which previously accounted for about 20% of global potash fertilizer exports, has been forced to sharply cut them after Western sanctions targeted state producer Belaruskali and cut off transit through Lithuania’s port in Klaipeda, the country’s main export route.

    “Sanctions by the U.S., EU and their allies have significantly weakened Belarus’s potash industry, depriving the country of a key source of foreign exchange earnings and access to key markets,” Anastasiya Luzgina, an analyst at the Belarusian Economic Research Center BEROC, told the AP, noting that Minsk likely hopes this paves the way for easing the more painful European sanctions.

    The latest round of U.S.-Belarus talks also touched on Venezuela, as well as Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Belta reported.

    Coale told reporters that Lukashenko had given “good advice” on how to address the war, saying that Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin were “longtime friends” with “the necessary level of relationship to discuss such issues.”

    The U.S. official told the AP that “continued progress in U.S.-Belarus relations” also requires steps to resolve tensions between Belarus and neighboring Lithuania, which is a member of the EU and NATO.

    The Lithuanian government this week declared a national emergency over security risks posed by meteorological balloons sent from Belarus. The balloons forced Lithuania to repeatedly shut down its main airport, stranding thousands of people.

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    Associated Press writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • Nobel laureate Han Kang’s first nonfiction book in English to be released next spring

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    NEW YORK (AP) — Nobel laureate Han Kang’s first book of nonfiction to come out in English will be released next spring.

    The Korean author’s “Light and Thread” is scheduled to be published March 24 by Penguin Random House imprints in the U.S., the United Kingdom and other English-speaking regions. Published in Korean this year and translated into English by Maya West, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, “Light and Thread” includes Han’s Nobel lecture from 2024, along with other writings and photographs.

    “As I arranged the essays, poems, diary entries, and photographs to be included in this book, I imagined all of its spaces — from the first page to the last — enveloped in light,” Han said in a statement released Friday. “I am grateful and glad that this light, imbued into this English translation, continues to encounter readers.”

    Han, the first South Korean to win the Nobel literature prize, is best known for the novel “The Vegetarian,” winner of the International Booker Prize in 2016.

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  • James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix shape of DNA, has died at age 97

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    James D. Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died. He was 97.

    The breakthrough — made when the brash, Chicago-born Watson was just 24 — turned him into a hallowed figure in the world of science for decades. But near the end of his life, he faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people are less intelligent than white people.

    Watson shared a 1962 Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for discovering that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is a double helix, consisting of two strands that coil around each other to create what resembles a long, gently twisting ladder.

    That realization was a breakthrough. It instantly suggested how hereditary information is stored and how cells duplicate their DNA when they divide. The duplication begins with the two strands of DNA pulling apart like a zipper.

    Even among non-scientists, the double helix would become an instantly recognized symbol of science, showing up in such places as the work of Salvador Dali and a British postage stamp.

    The discovery helped open the door to more recent developments such as tinkering with the genetic makeup of living things, treating disease by inserting genes into patients, identifying human remains and criminal suspects from DNA samples, and tracing family trees and ancient human ancestors. But it has also raised a host of ethical questions, such as whether we should be altering the body’s blueprint for cosmetic reasons or in a way that is transmitted to a person’s offspring.

    “Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, that was pretty clear,” Watson once said. He later wrote: “There was no way we could have foreseen the explosive impact of the double helix on science and society.”

    Watson never made another lab finding that big. But in the decades that followed, he wrote influential textbooks and a best-selling memoir and helped guide the project to map the human genome. He picked out bright young scientists and helped them. And he used his prestige and contacts to influence science policy.

    Watson died in hospice care after a brief illness, his son said Friday. His former research lab confirmed he passed away a day earlier.

    “He never stopped fighting for people who were suffering from disease,” Duncan Watson said of his father.

    Watson’s initial motivation for supporting the gene project was personal: His son Rufus had been hospitalized with a possible diagnosis of schizophrenia, and Watson figured that knowing the complete makeup of DNA would be crucial for understanding that disease — maybe in time to help his son.

    He gained unwelcome attention in 2007, when the Sunday Times Magazine of London quoted him as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — where all the testing says not really.” He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with Black employees find this is not true.”

    He apologized, but after an international furor he was suspended from his job as chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He retired a week later. He had served in various leadership jobs there for nearly 40 years.

    In a television documentary that aired in early 2019, Watson was asked if his views had changed. “No, not at all,” he said. In response, the Cold Spring Harbor lab revoked several honorary titles it had given Watson, saying his statements were “reprehensible” and “unsupported by science.”

    Watson’s combination of scientific achievement and controversial remarks created a complicated legacy.

    He has shown “a regrettable tendency toward inflammatory and offensive remarks, especially late in his career,” Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, said in 2019. “His outbursts, particularly when they reflected on race, were both profoundly misguided and deeply hurtful. I only wish that Jim’s views on society and humanity could have matched his brilliant scientific insights.”

    Long before that, Watson scorned political correctness.

    “A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid,” he wrote in “The Double Helix,” his bestselling 1968 book about the DNA discovery.

    For success in science, he wrote: “You have to avoid dumb people. … Never do anything that bores you. … If you can’t stand to be with your real peers (including scientific competitors) get out of science. … To make a huge success, a scientist has to be prepared to get into deep trouble.”

    It was in the fall of 1951 that the tall, skinny Watson — already the holder of a Ph.D. at 23 — arrived at Britain’s Cambridge University, where he met Crick. As a Watson biographer later said, “It was intellectual love at first sight.”

    Crick himself wrote that the partnership thrived in part because the two men shared “a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, and an impatience with sloppy thinking.”

    Together they sought to tackle the structure of DNA, aided by X-ray research by colleague Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Watson was later criticized for a disparaging portrayal of Franklin in “The Double Helix,” and today she is considered a prominent example of a female scientist whose contributions were overlooked. (She died in 1958.)

    Watson and Crick built Tinker Toy-like models to work out the molecule’s structure. One Saturday morning in 1953, after fiddling with bits of cardboard he had carefully cut to represent fragments of the DNA molecule, Watson suddenly realized how these pieces could form the “rungs” of a double helix ladder.

    His first reaction: “It’s so beautiful.”

    Figuring out the double helix “goes down as one of the three most important discoveries in the history of biology,” alongside Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s fundamental laws of genetics, said Cold Spring Harbor lab’s president, Bruce Stillman.

    Following the discovery, Watson spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, then joined the faculty at Harvard in 1955. Before leaving Harvard in 1976, he essentially created the university’s program for molecular biology, scientist Mark Ptashne recalled in a 1999 interview.

    Watson became director of the Cold Spring Harbor lab in 1968, its president in 1994 and its chancellor 10 years later. He made the lab on Long Island an educational center for scientists and non-scientists, focused research on cancer, instilled a sense of excitement and raised huge amounts of money.

    He transformed the lab into a “vibrant, incredibly important center,” Ptashne said. It was “one of the miracles of Jim: a more disheveled, less smooth, less typically ingratiating person you could hardly imagine.”

    From 1988 to 1992, Watson directed the federal effort to identify the detailed makeup of human DNA. He created the project’s huge investment in ethics research by simply announcing it at a news conference. He later said it was “probably the wisest thing I’ve done over the past decade.”

    Watson was on hand at the White House in 2000 for the announcement that the federal project had completed an important goal: a “working draft” of the human genome, basically a road map to an estimated 90 percent of human genes.

    Researchers presented Watson with the detailed description of his own genome in 2007. It was one of the first genomes of an individual to be deciphered.

    Watson knew that genetic research could produce findings that make some people uncomfortable. In 2007, he wrote that when scientists identify genetic variants that predispose people to crime or significantly affect intelligence, the findings should be publicized rather than squelched out of political correctness.

    James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, into “a family that believed in books, birds and the Democratic Party,” as he put it. From his birdwatcher father he inherited an interest in ornithology and a distaste for explanations that didn’t rely on reason or science.

    Watson was a precocious child who loved to read, studying books like “The World Telegraph Almanac of Facts.” He entered the University of Chicago on a scholarship at 15, graduated at 19 and earned his doctorate in zoology at Indiana University three years later.

    He got interested in genetics at age 17 when he read a book that said genes were the essence of life.

    “I thought, ‘Well, if the gene is the essence of life, I want to know more about it,’” he later recalled. “And that was fateful because, otherwise, I would have spent my life studying birds and no one would have heard of me.”

    At the time, it wasn’t clear that genes were made of DNA, at least for any life form other than bacteria. But Watson went to Europe to study the biochemistry of nucleic acids like DNA. At a conference in Italy, Watson saw an X-ray image that indicated DNA could form crystals.

    “Suddenly I was excited about chemistry,” Watson wrote in “The Double Helix.” If genes could crystallize, “they must have a regular structure that could be solved in a straightforward fashion.”

    “A potential key to the secret of life was impossible to push out of my mind,” he recalled.

    In the decades after his discovery, Watson’s fame persisted. Apple Computer used his picture in an ad campaign. At conferences, graduate students who weren’t even born when he worked at Cambridge nudged each other and whispered, “There’s Watson. There’s Watson.” They got him to autograph napkins or copies of “The Double Helix.”

    A reporter asked him 2018 if any building at the Cold Spring Harbor lab was named after him. No, Watson replied, “I don’t need a building named after me. I have the double helix.”

    His 2007 remarks on race were not the first time Watson struck a nerve with his comments. In a speech in 2000, he suggested that sex drive is related to skin color. And earlier he told a newspaper that if a gene governing sexuality were found and could be detected in the womb, a woman who didn’t want to have a gay child should be allowed to have an abortion.

    More than a half-century after winning the Nobel, Watson put the gold medal up for auction in 2014. The winning bid, $4.7 million, set a record for a Nobel. The medal was eventually returned to Watson.

    Both of Watson’s Nobel co-winners, Crick and Wilkins, died in 2004.

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    Ritter is a retired AP science writer. AP science writers Christina Larson in Washington and Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York contributed to this report.

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    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Nigeria’s Nobel-winning author Wole Soyinka says his US visa was revoked

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    DAKAR, Senegal — Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka said on Tuesday that his non-resident visa to enter the United States had been rejected, adding that he believes it may be because he recently criticized U.S. President Donald Trump.

    The Nigerian author, 91, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, becoming the first African to do so.

    Speaking to the press on Tuesday, Soyinka said he believed it had little to do with him and was instead a product of the United States’ immigration policies. He said he was told to reapply if he wished to enter again.

    “It’s not about me, I’m not really interested in going back to the United States,” he said. “But a principle is involved. Human beings deserve to be treated decently wherever they are.”

    Soyinka, who has taught in the U.S. and previously held a green card, joked on Tuesday that his green card “had an accident” eight years ago and “fell between a pair of scissors.” In 2017, he destroyed his green card in protest of President Trump’s first inauguration.

    The letter he received informing him of his visa revocation cites “additional information became available after the visa was issued,” as the reason for its revocation, but does not describe what that information was.

    Soyinka believes it may be because he recently referred to Trump as a “white version of Idi Amin,” a reference to the dictator who ruled Uganda from 1971 until 1979.

    The U.S. Consulate in Nigeria’s commercial hub, Lagos, directed all questions to the State Department press office in Washington, D.C., which did not respond to immediate requests for comment.

    Soyinka jokingly referred to it as a “love letter” and said that while he did not blame the officials, he would not be applying for another visa.

    “I have no visa. I am banned, obviously, from the United States, and if you want to see me, you know where to find me.”

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  • The Nobel economics prize is set to be announced Monday

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    STOCKHOLM — STOCKHOLM (AP) — The final Nobel of this year’s prize season is being announced Monday morning when organizers reveal the winner or winners of the Nobel memorial prize in economics.

    Last year’s award went to three economists — Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson — who studied why some countries are rich and others poor and have documented that freer, open societies are more likely to prosper.

    The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.

    Since then, it has been awarded 56 times to a total of 96 laureates. Only three of the winners before Monday’s announcement were women.

    Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, but it is always presented together with the others on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

    Nobel honors were announced last week in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

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    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

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  • A look at how Venezuelans in the US are reacting to Maria Corina Machado’s Nobel Prize win

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    DORAL, Fla. — DORAL, Fla. (AP) — Venezuelans in “Little Venezuela” — the largest home for the country’s natives in the United States — are welcoming the news that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize with bittersweetness as deportation threats loom.

    The Trump administration has ended Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole programs that together allowed more than 700,000 Venezuelans to live and work legally in the U.S, putting them at risk of deportation. The Republican government has deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, claiming that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and were “invading” the U.S.

    Millions of Venezuelans had been forced to leave their country in the last decade due to its prolonged economic and political instability; the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates more than 7.7 million have left since 2014 in the largest exodus in Latin America in recent history. Most have settled in the Americas, and more than 1 million came to the U.S.

    While Machado’s Nobel win is being met with joy, there’s also acknowledgement that it will do little to improve the situation Venezuelans at risk of deportation face in the U.S., as the former opposition presidential candidate has aligned herself with President Donald Trump’s policy on Venezuela.

    In February, after Trump announced he was ending TPS for Venezuelans, Machado told reporters her team had been in contact with members of Congress to “find a type of effective protection” for law-abiding Venezuelans. But after the Supreme Court on Oct. 3 allowed the Trump administration to end the program, she expressed no concerns of progress in her effort for an alternative protection for migrants.

    Machado, honored for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in Venezuela as President Nicolás Maduro took power, wrote on X hours after her win dedicating her prize to “the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”

    Frank Carreño, the former president of the Venezuelan American Chamber of Commerce who has lived in Doral, the city known as “Little Venezuela,” for 18 years, was pleased with the news that Machado won the Nobel Prize but warned that Machado will not pressure Trump to protect Venezuelans living in the U.S.

    “She sees the United States government as part of her strategy to restore democracy to Venezuela,” the Venezuelan American said. “She’s in that camp, not in this camp.”

    José Antonio Colina, a retired Venezuelan military officer who arrived in South Florida in 2003, said the Nobel Prize represents a recognition to Machado’s fight for democracy and liberty in Venezuela.

    “We hope that the award can give impetus or strength to remove Nicolas Maduro from power,” said Colina, a refugee in the U.S.

    Iris Wilthew, a Venezuelan American retiree, came to Doral with her husband expecting a large crowd celebrating at one of Venezuela’s most popular restaurants. But business carried on as usual in the city, and she was surprised to find almost no one in the restaurant at noon.

    Before leaving, she placed a poster with Machado’s name, her photo and the title “The Nobel Prize 2025″ and the message “#VenezuelaLibre” in one of the restaurant’s windows.

    “She is a tireless fighter,” said Wilthew, who has lived in the U.S. since 1998. “She has achieved this through his extraordinary effort.”

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    Associated Press reporter Regina Garcia Cano contributed from Mexico City.

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  • A list of this year’s Nobel Prize winners so far

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    OSLO, Norway — OSLO, Norway (AP) — The award Friday of the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has brought this week’s Nobel announcements to a conclusion. Only, the economics prize on Monday remains.

    The peace prize is the only Nobel awarded in Oslo, Norway. The others are awarded in Stockholm.

    The award ceremony will be held on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.

    Here are this year’s winners so far:

    On Oct. 6, the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to three scientists for their work on the immune system.

    Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi uncovered a key pathway the body uses to keep the immune system in check, viewed as critical to understanding autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

    In separate projects, the trio identified the importance of what are now called regulatory T cells. Scientists are using those findings in a variety of ways: to discover better treatments for autoimmune diseases, to improve organ transplant success and to enhance the body’s own fight against cancer, among others.

    Bronkow, 64, is now a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Ramsdell, 64, is a scientific adviser for San Francisco-based Sonoma Biotherapeutics. Sakaguchi, 74, is a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan.

    On Oct. 7, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to another trio of scientists for their research on the “weirdness” of subatomic particles called quantum tunneling. That has enabled the ultrasensitive measurements achieved by MRI machines and laid the groundwork for better cellphones and faster computers.

    The work by John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis took the seeming contradictions of the subatomic world — where light can be both a wave and a particle and parts of atoms can tunnel through seemingly impenetrable barriers — and applied them in the more traditional physics of digital devices. The results of their findings are just starting to appear in advanced technology and could pave the way for the development of supercharged computing.

    Clarke, 83, conducted his research at the University of California, Berkeley; Martinis, 67, at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Devoret, 72, is at Yale and also at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Clarke spearheaded the project.

    On Oct. 8, another scientific trio won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their development of new molecular structures that can trap vast quantities of gas inside. Experts say the work lays the groundwork to potentially suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere or harvest moisture from desert environments.

    Experts say the work of Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges.”

    Kitagawa, 74, is with Japan’s Kyoto University, while Robson, 88, is affiliated with the University of Melbourne in Australia. Yaghi, 60, is with the University of California, Berkeley.

    On Oct. 9, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for work the judges said upholds the power of art in the midst of “apocalyptic terror.” His surreal and anarchic novels combine a bleak world view with mordant humor,

    Krasznahorkai, 71, has since written more than 20 books, including “The Melancholy of Resistance,” a surreal, disturbing tale involving a traveling circus and a stuffed whale, and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” the sprawling saga of a gambling-addicted aristocrat.

    Krasznahorkai has been a vocal critic of autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, especially his government’s lack of support for Ukraine after Russia launched an all-out war.

    On Oct. 10, Machado of Venezuela won the Nobel Peace Prize, and was lauded for being a “key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided.”

    Machado was set to run against President Nicolás Maduro last year, but the government disqualified her. The lead-up to the election saw widespread repression, including disqualifications, arrests and human rights violations.

    Machado went into hiding and hasn’t been seen in public since January, and as a result it’s unclear whether she will attend the awards ceremony in Stockholm in December.

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  • Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai wins the Nobel Prize in literature

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    Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai wins the Nobel Prize in literature

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  • UC Berkeley professor Omar Yaghi wins Nobel prize in chemistry

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    UC Berkeley professor Omar Yaghi, a Jordanian immigrant molded by the American public school system, reached the pinnacle of his field on Wednesday, sharing the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

    After receiving the award for his work on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which have incalculable applications, Yaghi acknowledged the role his American education played in the realization of his work at a press conference.

    “This recognition is really a testament of the power of the public school system in the U.S. that takes people like me — with a major disadvantaged background, a refugee background — and allows you to work hard and distinguish yourself,” Yaghi said. “Especially UC Berkeley, where the faculty are given full freedom to explore, fail and succeed.”

    Yaghi’s discoveries with MOFs – along with co-winners Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan – have broad implications for emerging technologies such as water capture from desert winds, toxic gas containment and carbon sequestration from the atmosphere.

    Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan, left, and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne are co-winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with UC Berkeley professor Omar Yaghi, on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2025. (Kyodo News via AP) 

    The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in its announcement, lauded the MOF breakthroughs for their ability to craft customizable materials with applications across the scientific field. Yaghi built on Robson and Kitagawa’s discoveries by creating a stable MOF that could be modified to have new properties: Imagine a porous filter programmed to selectively remove any atom or molecule at the command of a scientist.

    Since the trio’s discoveries, “chemists have built tens of thousands of different MOFs,” the academy wrote in its award announcement, noting that some may be key to solving humanity’s greatest challenges.

    “Metal–organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions,” said Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

    On Wednesday, Yaghi spoke with reporters via Zoom from Brussels, Belgium, to discuss the award. He described the moment he was exiting a plane in Frankfurt, Germany, when his phone buzzed with a call from Sweden. On the line was the secretary of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry with the news that he had won.

    “It was absolutely thrilling. You cannot prepare for a moment like that,” Yaghi said. “Since then, my phone hasn’t stopped ringing, buzzing, receiving emails, hundreds and hundreds of emails. I have no idea how I’m going to respond to all of them.”

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  • Your phone rings, and it’s a number from Sweden. Do you answer? A Nobel Prize winner didn’t

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    BERLIN — BERLIN (AP) — For some Nobel Prize winners this year, the news came with a knock at the door before dawn. For others, it was a long-awaited phone call honoring a discovery made decades ago.

    One of the medicine prize winners, meanwhile, was on vacation in Yellowstone National Park without cellular service. It would be hours before he found out.

    The Nobel Prizes are considered among the world’s most prestigious honors for achievements in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics and peace. The winners join the pantheon of Nobel laureates, from Albert Einstein to Mother Teresa.

    Sometimes, the award is anticipated. Potential winners plan tentative news conferences or, in the western U.S., wait up all night for the news.

    While some prizes might feature household names — such as 2009 peace prize winner then-U.S. President Barack Obama or 2016 literature laureate and singer-songwriter Bob Dylan — the natural science categories typically go to people whose names the general public doesn’t know, for decades-old research.

    Five of this year’s nine science winners were in the U.S. when the news broke. Some were fast asleep.

    Two winners in Japan, seven hours ahead of Stockholm, were awake and working when the call came from a Swedish number. One thought it was a telemarketer.

    Wednesday’s chemistry prize was the first time this year that the Nobel committee reached all three winners ahead of the formal announcement.

    Here’s how some of this year’s winners found out:

    When Associated Press photographer Lindsey Wasson knocked on the door of Mary E. Brunkow’s Seattle home around 4 a.m. local time Monday, it was the scientist’s dog who woke up first. Zelda’s barking roused Brunkow’s husband, Ross Colquhoun.

    “I don’t think he really knew what I was there for,” Wasson said. “And I said, ‘You know, sir, I think your wife just won the Nobel Prize.’”

    Wasson’s photographs captured Colquhoun waking up Brunkow and telling her the life-changing news: She was among three winners sharing the 2025 medicine prize.

    “Don’t be ridiculous,” she told her husband.

    But it was true. The trio had, in research dating back two decades, uncovered a key pathway the body uses to keep the immune system in check, called peripheral immune tolerance. Experts called the findings critical to understanding autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

    The following day, AP photographers Mark J. Terrill and Damian Dovarganes headed to Santa Barbara, California, to find physicist John Martinis before the sun rose. His wife, Jean, answered the door and told them to come back later: Martinis needed to sleep.

    “For many years, we would stay up on the night the physics award was announced,” she told the photographers. “At some point we just decided, that’s nuts. We’ll figure it out if it’s happening, but let’s just get our sleep.”

    She added, laughing: “I was trying to think how I can introduce this. Like, ‘Do you think you should plan a trip to Sweden?”

    She finally woke her husband up just before 6 a.m. local time (1300 GMT), telling him only that the AP wanted an interview.

    “I kind of knew that the Nobel Prize announcements was this week, so I kind of put two and two together,” Martinis said later. “I opened my computer and looked under the Nobel Prize 2025 and saw my picture along with Michel Devoret and John Clarke. So I was kind of in shock.”

    The trio won the physics prize for their research on the weird world of subatomic quantum tunneling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.

    Martinis will get that trip to Sweden. The Dec. 10 award ceremony is in Stockholm.

    Everyone but Fred Ramsdell seemed to know he had just won the Nobel Prize in medicine.

    Ramsdell was away on a backpacking trip Monday, driving through Yellowstone National Park with his wife and two dogs, Larkin and Megan. He kept his cellphone in airplane mode as he often does on family trips.

    As they drove through a small town hours later, his wife started screaming as notifications flooded her phone. She told him he’d just won the Nobel Prize in medicine alongside Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi.

    “I said, ‘No, I didn’t,’” Ramsdell told the AP in an interview the following day from his car. “She said, ‘Yes, you did. I have 200 text messages that say you won the Nobel Prize.’”

    Later Monday, Ramsdell drove to a Montana hotel to connect to Wi-Fi and call friends and colleagues. He didn’t speak with the Nobel committee to get their congratulations until midnight.

    He said he was stunned and awed to receive the recognition. But he has no plans to change his phone habits, which he says are important for work-life balance.

    The Nobel Committee calls the winners shortly before the formal announcement is made. Some ignore the Swedish number — like Brunkow, who assumed the pre-dawn call was spam.

    When his phone rang Wednesday, chemistry winner Susumu Kitagawa was skeptical. He said he answered “rather bluntly, thinking it must be yet one of those telemarketing calls I’m getting a lot recently.”

    The Nobel announcements continue with the literature prize Thursday. Will that winner pick up the phone?

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    Ramakrishnan reported from New York. Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed.

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    AP coverage of Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

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  • Molecular discovery wins Nobel Prize in chemistry

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    STOCKHOLM — STOCKHOLM (AP) — Scientists Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for their development of metal–organic frameworks — which an expert likened to Hermione Granger’s enchanted handbag in the fictional “Harry Potter” series — that could play a part in solving some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

    From capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or sucking water out of dry desert air, the trio’s new form of molecular architecture can absorb and contain gases inside stable metal organic frameworks.

    The frameworks can be compared to the timber framework of a house, and Hermione’s famous beaded handbag, in that they are small on the outside but very large on the inside, according to Olof Ramström, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

    The chemists worked separately but added to each other’s breakthroughs, which began in 1989 with Robson.

    “Metal-organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a news release.

    The committee cited the potential for using the frameworks to separating so-called “forever chemicals” from water.

    Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a group of chemicals that have been around for decades and have now spread into the air, water and soil. They are also referred to as “forever chemicals.”

    Hans Ellegren, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced Wednesday’s prize in Stockholm. It was the third prize announced this week.

    Robson, 88, is affiliated with the University of Melbourne in Australia, Kitagawa, 74, with Japan’s Kyoto University and Yaghi, 60, with the University of California, Berkeley.

    Kitagawa spoke to the committee, and the press, over the phone Wednesday after his win was announced.

    “I’m deeply honored and delighted that my long-standing research has been recognized,” he said.

    The 2024 prize was awarded to David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.

    The three were awarded for discovering powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins, the building blocks of life. Their work used advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, and holds the potential to transform how new drugs and other materials are made.

    The first Nobel of 2025 was announced Monday. The prize in medicine went to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

    Tuesday’s physics prize went to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for their research on the weird world of subatomic quantum tunneling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.

    This year’s Nobel announcements continue with the literature prize Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics prize next Monday.

    The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.

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    Dazio reported from Berlin. Christina Larson contributed from Washington.

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    AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

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  • Nobel Prize in physics goes to 3 scientists whose work advanced quantum technology

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    STOCKHOLM — STOCKHOLM (AP) — John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for research on the weird world of sub-atomic quantum tunneling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.

    One of the winners said that quantum mechanics research already has wound up in our everyday communications. Speaking from his cellphone, Clarke said: “One of the underlying reasons that cellphones work is because of all this work.’’

    Clarke, 83, conducted his research at the University of California, Berkeley; Martinis, 67, at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Devoret, 72, is at Yale and also at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Clarke, who spearheaded the research team, told The Associated Press he was “pleased to receive this prize” alongside his two colleagues.

    Martinis’ wife, Jean, told Associated Press reporters who called at his home some two-and-a-half hours after the announcement that he was still asleep and did not yet know. She said in the past they had stayed up on the night of the physics award, but at some point they decided that sleep was more important.

    AP reporters were later able to speak with Martinis, once his wife decided it was late enough to wake him up.

    Devoret could not immediately be contacted.

    The prize winning research in the mid-1980s took the sub-atomic “weirdness of quantum mechanics” and found how those tiny interactions can have real world applications on the human scale level, said Jonathan Bagger, CEO of the American Physical Society. They have the potential to supercharge computing and communications.

    The 100-year-old field of quantum mechanics deals with the seemingly impossible subatomic world where switches can be on-and-off at the same time and parts of atoms tunnel through what seems like impenetrable barriers.

    What the three physicists did “is taking the scale of something that we can’t see, we can’t touch, we can’t feel and bringing it up to the scale of something recognizable and make it something you can build upon,” said Physics Today editor-in-chief Richard Fitzgerald, who in the 1990s worked in the field on a competitors’ group.

    The work is a crucial building block in the fast-developing world of quantum mechanics.

    “Quantum computers is one very sort of obvious use, but they’re also can be used for quantum sensors, so to be able to make very sensitive measurements of, for example, magnetic fields, and perhaps also for cryptography, so to encode information so it cannot be easily listened to by a third party,” Mark Pearce, a professor of astrophysics and Nobel Physics Committee member, told The Associated Press.

    Quantum computing when fully achieved would be a large leap from what we now know, scientists said.

    Clarke said the research “in some ways is the basis of quantum computing. Exactly at this moment where this fits in is not entirely clear to me.”

    Both Bagger and Fitzgerald said it’s a bit of a stretch to say our everyday cellphones now use the breakthrough made by Clarke and colleagues. But ultra-sensitive measuring devices rely on that team’s work and while we could have magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) without their work, it makes it far more sensitive and useful, Bagger said.

    “Quantum mechanics is everywhere in everything we do, from the cellphone to the satellite communications that are connected to the cellphones to the screens on which we watch our videos on our cellphones,” Bagger said.

    Normally quantum mechanics “is associated with tiny objects, things smaller and atoms where your intuition doesn’t apply,” Bagger said. “They found a way to demonstrate the weirdness of quantum mechanics” at the level where humans live.

    “It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology,” said Olle Eriksson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

    Clarke told the AP he was stunned and overwhelmed to hear the news. His daughter called early in the morning to congratulate him on the win, and he said he had hundreds of emails in his inbox.

    “It had never occurred to me, ever, that I would win the Nobel Prize,” Clarke told The Associated Press.

    “To put it mildly, it was the surprise of my life,” Clarke told reporters at the announcement by phone after being told of his win.

    It is the 119th time the prize has been awarded. Last year, artificial intelligence pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the physics prize for helping create the building blocks of machine learning.

    On Monday, Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries about how the immune system knows to attack germs and not our bodies.

    Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics on Oct. 13.

    The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel, the wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite who founded the prizes.

    The prizes carry priceless prestige and a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).

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    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands, Borenstein from Washington, D.C., Adithi Ramakrishnan contributed from New York.

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  • Nobel Prize in medicine goes to 3 scientists for work on peripheral immune tolerance

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    STOCKHOLM — STOCKHOLM (AP) — Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi have won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

    The trio will be formally awarded the prize, Officially known as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, during a ceremony on Dec. 10.

    Peripheral immune tolerance is one way the body helps keep the immune system from getting out of whack and attacking your own tissues instead of foreign invaders.

    Monday’s announcement took place in Stockholm.

    THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

    STOCKHOLM (AP) — The 2025 Nobel Prize announcements start Monday with the medicine prize being announced by a panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

    Officially known as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the honor has been awarded 115 times to 229 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2024.

    Last year’s prize was shared by Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it.

    Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics Oct. 13.

    The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.

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    Dazio reported from Berlin.

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    AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

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  • AI scientist says ‘learning how to learn’ will be next generation’s most needed skill

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    ATHENS, Greece — A top Google scientist and 2024 Nobel laureate said Friday that the most important skill for the next generation will be “learning how to learn” to keep pace with change as Artificial Intelligence transforms education and the workplace.

    Speaking at an ancient Roman theater at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind, said rapid technological change demands a new approach to learning and skill development.

    “It’s very hard to predict the future, like 10 years from now, in normal cases. It’s even harder today, given how fast AI is changing, even week by week,” Hassabis told the audience. “The only thing you can say for certain is that huge change is coming.”

    The neuroscientist and former chess prodigy said artificial general intelligence — a futuristic vision of machines that are as broadly smart as humans or at least can do many things as well as people can — could arrive within a decade. This, he said, will bring dramatic advances and a possible future of “radical abundance” despite acknowledged risks.

    Hassabis emphasized the need for “meta-skills,” such as understanding how to learn and optimizing one’s approach to new subjects, alongside traditional disciplines like math, science and humanities.

    “One thing we’ll know for sure is you’re going to have to continually learn … throughout your career,” he said.

    The DeepMind co-founder, who established the London-based research lab in 2010 before Google acquired it four years later, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing AI systems that accurately predict protein folding — a breakthrough for medicine and drug discovery.

    Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis joined Hassabis at the Athens event after discussing ways to expand AI use in government services. Mitsotakis warned that the continued growth of huge tech companies could create great global financial inequality.

    “Unless people actually see benefits, personal benefits, to this (AI) revolution, they will tend to become very skeptical,” he said. “And if they see … obscene wealth being created within very few companies, this is a recipe for significant social unrest.”

    Mitsotakis thanked Hassabis, whose father is Greek Cypriot, for rescheduling the presentation to avoid conflicting with the European basketball championship semifinal between Greece and Turkey. Greece later lost the game 94-68.

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    Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this story.

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  • ABBA, Radiohead and The Cure musicians sign AI protest letter against ‘unlicensed use’ of works

    ABBA, Radiohead and The Cure musicians sign AI protest letter against ‘unlicensed use’ of works

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    LONDON — Musicians from ABBA, Radiohead and The Cure have joined actors and authors in signing a protest letter against the mining of their artistry to build artificial intelligence tools.

    Thousands of artists signed the letter released Tuesday — the latest public warning about AI tools that can spit out synthetic images, music and writings after being trained on huge troves of human-made works.

    “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” says the petition.

    Among the signatories are Björn Ulvaeus of the Swedish supergroup ABBA, The Cure’s Robert Smith and Thom Yorke and his Radiohead bandmates. Also signing were writers including Nobel-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and actors Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon and Rosario Dawson.

    Bestselling novelist James Patterson signed Tuesday’s letter and another open letter last year organized by the Authors Guild, which later brought a lawsuit against AI companies that is still proceeding in a New York federal court.

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  • AI is having its Nobel moment. Do scientists need the tech industry to sustain it?

    AI is having its Nobel moment. Do scientists need the tech industry to sustain it?

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    Hours after the artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel Prize in physics, he drove a rented car to Google’s California headquarters to celebrate.

    Hinton doesn’t work at Google anymore. Nor did the longtime professor at the University of Toronto do his pioneering research at the tech giant.

    But his impromptu party reflected AI’s moment as a commercial blockbuster that has also reached the pinnacles of scientific recognition.

    That was Tuesday. Then, early Wednesday, two employees of Google’s AI division won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for using AI to predict and design novel proteins.

    “This is really a testament to the power of computer science and artificial intelligence,” said Jeanette Wing, a professor of computer science at Columbia University.

    Asked about the historic back-to-back science awards for AI work in an email Wednesday, Hinton said only: “Neural networks are the future.”

    It didn’t always seem that way for researchers who decades ago experimented with interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain. Hinton shares this year’s physics Nobel with another scientist, John Hopfield, for helping develop those building blocks of machine learning.

    Neural network advances came from “basic, curiosity-driven research,” Hinton said at a press conference after his win. “Not out of throwing money at applied problems, but actually letting scientists follow their curiosity to try and understand things.”

    Such work started well before Google existed. But a bountiful tech industry has now made it easier for AI scientists to pursue their ideas even as it has challenged them with new ethical questions about the societal impacts of their work.

    One reason why the current wave of AI research is so closely tied to the tech industry is that only a handful of corporations have the resources to build the most powerful AI systems.

    “These discoveries and this capability could not happen without humongous computational power and humongous amounts of digital data,” Wing said. “There are very few companies — tech companies — that have that kind of computational power. Google is one. Microsoft is another.”

    The chemistry Nobel Prize awarded Wednesday went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google’s London-based DeepMind laboratory along with researcher David Baker at the University of Washington for work that could help discover new medicines.

    Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, told the AP in an interview Wednesday his dream was to model his research laboratory on the “incredible storied history” of Bell Labs. Started in 1925, the New Jersey-based industrial lab was the workplace of multiple Nobel-winning scientists over several decades who helped develop modern computing and telecommunications.

    “I wanted to recreate a modern day industrial research lab that really did cutting-edge research,” Hassabis said. “But of course, that needs a lot of patience and a lot of support. We’ve had that from Google and it’s been amazing.”

    Hinton joined Google late in his career and quit last year so he could talk more freely about his concerns about AI’s dangers, particularly what happens if humans lose control of machines that become smarter than us. But he stops short of criticizing his former employer.

    Hinton, 76, said he was staying in a cheap hotel in Palo Alto, California when the Nobel committee woke him up with a phone call early Tuesday morning, leading him to cancel a medical appointment scheduled for later that day.

    By the time the sleep-deprived scientist reached the Google campus in nearby Mountain View, he “seemed pretty lively and not very tired at all” as colleagues popped bottles of champagne, said computer scientist Richard Zemel, a former doctoral student of Hinton’s who joined him at the Google party Tuesday.

    “Obviously there are these big companies now that are trying to cash in on all the commercial success and that is exciting,” said Zemel, now a Columbia professor.

    But Zemel said what’s more important to Hinton and his closest colleagues has been what the Nobel recognition means to the fundamental research they spent decades trying to advance.

    Guests included Google executives and another former Hinton student, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist and board member at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Sutskever helped lead a group of board members who briefly ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year in turmoil that has symbolized the industry’s conflicts.

    An hour before the party, Hinton used his Nobel bully pulpit to throw shade at OpenAI during opening remarks at a virtual press conference organized by the University of Toronto in which he thanked former mentors and students.

    “I’m particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman,” Hinton said.

    Asked to elaborate, Hinton said OpenAI started with a primary objective to develop better-than-human artificial general intelligence “and ensure that it was safe.”

    “And over time, it turned out that Sam Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits. And I think that’s unfortunate,” Hinton said.

    In response, OpenAI said in a statement that it is “proud of delivering the most capable and safest AI systems” and that they “safely serve hundreds of millions of people each week.”

    Conflicts are likely to persist in a field where building even a relatively modest AI system requires resources “well beyond those of your typical research university,” said Michael Kearns, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.

    But Kearns, who sits on the committee that picks the winners of computer science’s top prize — the Turing Award — said this week marks a “great victory for interdisciplinary research” that was decades in the making.

    Hinton is only the second person to win both a Nobel and Turing. The first, Turing-winning political scientist Herbert Simon, started working on what he called “computer simulation of human cognition” in the 1950s and won the Nobel economics prize in 1978 for his study of organizational decision-making.

    Wing, who met Simon in her early career, said scientists are still just at the tip of finding ways to apply computing’s most powerful capabilities to other fields.

    “We’re just at the beginning in terms of scientific discovery using AI,” she said.

    ——

    AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this report.

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  • South Koreans are joyful after Han Kang wins Nobel Prize for literature

    South Koreans are joyful after Han Kang wins Nobel Prize for literature

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    SEOUL, South Korea — South Koreans reacted with joy and astonishment on Thursday after learning that homegrown writer Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in literature, an unexpected moment that stoked national pride about the country’s growing cultural influence.

    Han, known for her experimental and often disturbing stories that explore human traumas and violence and incorporate the brutal moments of South Korea’s modern history, is the country’s first writer to win the preeminent award in world literature.

    Han’s triumph adds to the growing global influence of South Korean culture, which in recent years included the successes of director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning “Parasite,” the brutal Netflix survival drama “Squid Game” and K-pop groups like BTS and BLACKPINK.

    “I’m so surprised and honored,” Han, 53, said in a telephone interview posted on the X account of the Nobel Prize.

    As the news spread in South Korea, some online bookstores temporarily froze following a sudden jump in traffic. South Korean social media were flooded with jubilant messages expressing admiration and pride. Some internet users found it meaningful that Han was the first Asian woman to win the award and portrayed it as a statement toward the country’s traditionally male-dominated literature scene.

    “It’s always the women who do the big things,” one Facebook user wrote.

    In South Korea’s parliament, multiple government hearings were paused as lawmakers cheered and applauded Han’s award.

    While visiting Laos for a meeting of Asian leaders, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol issued a statement, congratulating Han on her award, calling it a “great achievement in the history of Korean literature” and a “special moment for the nation.”

    “You converted the painful wounds of our modern history into great literature,” Yoon wrote. “I send my respects to you for elevating the value of Korean literature.”

    Han, the daughter of renowned South Korean novelist Han Seung-won, made her publishing debut as a poet in 1993. She won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for the novel “The Vegetarian,” a story in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat brings devastating consequences and raises concern among family members that she’s mentally ill. The book sold more than 100,000 in the U.S.

    Another one of Han’s well-known novels is “Human Acts,” which is set in 1980 in her birth city of Gwangju and follows a boy searching for the body of a friend who was killed in a violent suppression of a student protest. South Korea’s former military government that year sent troops to Gwangju for a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that left around 200 people dead and hundreds of others injured.

    “The decision came all too sudden. I could also describe it as a feeling of bewilderment,” Han Seung-won, Han’s father, told reporters Friday about the moment he heard the news that his daughter had won the Nobel Prize.

    He praised his daughter’s writing, which he described as poetic and exhibiting unique “fantastical realism,” and also commended British translator Deborah Smith, who translated “The Vegetarian” and “The White Book.”

    “The translator has somehow managed to convey Han Kang’s sentences, bringing to life the delicate and beautiful prose and melancholic sensibility,” he said.

    Han Kang’s award generated excitement among South Korean writers and critics, who in comments to local media expressed hope that it would bring more global attention to South Korean literature. But it remains to be seen whether Han’s stories would become widely popular among casual readers around the world, said Brother Anthony of Taize, a British-born scholar and prolific translator of Korean literature.

    “It’s not always an easy read,” he said, describing how her novels are often complicated stories about communication failures, misunderstandings, “unhappy people and troubled relationships and pain.”

    If Han’s works have anything in common with South Korea’s other cultural products that garnered international acclaim in recent years, it is that they often reflect the dark side of the country’s society. Both Parasite and Squid Game provided biting commentaries on the country’s deepening inequality and other problems that have many young and poor people describing their lives as a hellish nightmare.

    South Korea has one of the largest gaps between rich and poor among developed economies and is grappling with decaying job markets, soaring household debt and a record-low birth rate as struggling couples put off having babies. The country also struggles to deal with the pains of its brutal transition from dictatorship to democracy.

    “Korean society is rather dark and it’s probably the aspect that resonates,” Brother Anthony said.

    Jung Yoon-young, a 49-year-old resident in Seoul, said Han’s triumph was a refreshing moment for the country during depressing times.

    “It’s a miraculous event and really a breath of fresh air,” she said. “I’m grateful and proud.”

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  • Nobel Prize in literature is awarded to South Korean author Han Kang

    Nobel Prize in literature is awarded to South Korean author Han Kang

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    STOCKHOLM — South Korean author Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for what the Nobel committee called “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

    Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised Han’s “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.

    “She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style, has become an innovator in contemporary prose,” Olsson said.

    Nobel literature committee member Anna-Karin Palm said Han writes “intense lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal, and sometimes slightly surrealistic as well.”

    Han becomes the first Asian woman and the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize. She also becomes the second South Korean national to win a Nobel Prize, after late former President Kim Dae-jung won the peace prize in 2000. He was honored for his efforts to restore democracy in South Korea during the country’s previous military rule and improve relations with war-divided rival North Korea.

    Han wins the Nobel at a time of growing global influence of South Korean culture, which in recent years has included the success of films like director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning “ Parasite,” the Netflix survival drama “Squid Game” and the worldwide fame of K-pop groups like BTS and BLACKPINK.

    Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

    At the time of winning that award, Han said writing novels “is a way of questioning for me.”

    “I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes – well – sometimes demanding,” she said.

    With “The Vegetarian,” she said, ”I wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race any longer.”

    Her novel “Human Acts” was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.

    Han made her publishing debut as a poet in 1993; her first short story collection was published the following year and her first novel, “Black Deer,” in 1998. Works translated into English include “The Vegetarian,” “Greek Lessons,” “Human Acts” and “The White Book,” a poetic novel that draws on the death of Han’s older sister shortly after birth. Her most recent novel, “We Do Not Part,” is due to be published in English next year.

    Olsson, the committee chair, called “Human Acts” a work of “witness literature.” It is based on the real-life killing of pro-democracy protesters in Han’s home city of Gwangju in 1980.

    The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates until this year’s award. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.

    Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize on Tuesday. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

    The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award next Monday.

    The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

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    Lawless reported from London. Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands. Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, South Korea, contributed.

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  • The Nobel Prize in literature is being awarded in Stockholm

    The Nobel Prize in literature is being awarded in Stockholm

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    STOCKHOLM — After three days of Nobel prizes honoring work in the sciences, the literature award is being announced Thursday by the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy.

    The winner will follow Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who was honored last year for writing in Nynorsk, one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language, that prize organizers said gives “voice to the unsayable.”

    The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.

    Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize on Tuesday. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

    The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.

    The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

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    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

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  • The Nobel prize in chemistry is being awarded in Stockholm

    The Nobel prize in chemistry is being awarded in Stockholm

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    STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work with proteins.

    Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London.

    Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that decides on the winner, announced the prize.

    In 2003, Baker designed a new protein and since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said.

    Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.

    Last year, the chemistry award went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots — tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can release very bright colored light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.

    Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize.

    The awards continue with the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.

    The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

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    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

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