New No. 1 Westwood still wary of Woods

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LONDON: Lee Westwood was officially confirmed as the new world number one on Monday ending Tiger Woods’ five-year long reign at the top.

But the 37-year-old Englishman, who moved marginally ahead of the American despite not playing last week as he had amassed more ranking points over the last two years, insisted any talk of Woods as a waning force was wrong.

“I’ve learnt never to write Tiger off,” Westwood, the first European golfer to head the rankings since compatriot Nick Faldo in 1994, told the BBC.

Woods’s seemingly well-ordered life was thrown into turmoil by revelations of an affair that led to the collapse of his marriage and a five-month break from the game he’d dominated.

The 14-times Major champion has yet to win a tournament since returning to competitive golf but Westwood believes Woods showed signs of returning to form in last month’s Ryder Cup.

Woods, 34, won three points from four matches including a final day thrashing of Francesco Molinari, although Europe still beat the United States at the Celtic Manor course in Wales.

“It certainly looked at the Ryder Cup like there were green shoots of recovery in his game,” said Westwood.

“I’ve seen him play at his best and I’ve seen him play with a broken leg when he won the US Open a couple of years ago.”

Woods, chasing fellow American great Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 Major titles, did not seem too bothered by relinquishing top spot in the rankings - a position he’s held since June 2005.

“As far as the world ranking is concerned, yes, I’m not ranked number one in the world. In order to do that you have to win and I didn’t win this year,” Woods explained.

Westwood’s time at the top could be short-lived as any one of Woods, Martin Kaymer or Phil Mickelson - who unlike Westwood have all won at least one of golf’s four Majors - could depose the new number one in the rankings when the quartet contest the WGC- HSBC Champions event in Shanghai this week.

“It’s an exciting time for golf,” Westwood added. “If anyone can put a run together it’s so close they could take the number one spot.”

Nevertheless, Westwood, sidelined recently by a calf problem, was proud of his achievement.

“It’s a dream everyone has to say there is nobody better than me at the moment. You have to say it’s a highlight.

“When you are growing up and people say what do you want to achieve, everyone says I want to be the best in the world. Right at this moment I can show people the world rankings and say I am the best on the planet.”

But he knows the acid test will come at the Majors - the US Masters, US Open, British Open and USPGA.

Now Westwood, who has secured top three finishes in four of the past five Majors, cannot wait for the Masters in April, the next Major tournament.

“Every other world number one has got one so I’m under a little bit more pressure to win a major,” said Westwood, who rebuilt his game after falling to as low as 266 in the rankings back in 2001.

“I’m hoping to get to Augusta right where I want my game and contend once more. I just need to produce that extra special thing at the right time.”

Latest leading world rankings:

1. Lee Westwood (ENG) 8.29pts

2. Tiger Woods (USA) 8.13

3. Martin Kaymer (GER) 7.98

4. Phil Mickelson (USA) 7.83

5. Steve Stricker (USA) 7.20

6. Jim Furyk (USA) 7.09

7. Paul Casey (ENG) 6.14

8. Luke Donald (ENG) 5.70

9. Rory McIlroy (NIR) 5.44

10. Graeme McDowell (NIR) 5.43

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Kiwi jailed for calling Aussie police ‘useless’

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A Waikato tourist has been thrown into a Brisbane jail - because he called a Queensland policeman “useless” after seeking directions in the city.

Engineer Paul O’Reilly, 24, of Otorohanga, said he had expected Queensland police would be like those in his home town - giving public the same sort of courtesy they themselves rightly expected.

He was desperate to find his way to his brother’s Sunshine Coast home after the pair became separated at a music festival on Doomben Racecourse last weekend, he told The Courier-Mail.

With no mobile phone or money to make a payphone call, O’Reilly approached a police sergeant for help. He was told to “go north,” and responded with “You’re the most useless police in the world.”

He was promptly arrested and spent a night in jail before appearing in Brisbane Magistrate’s Court charged with being a public nuisance.

The case was adjourned after magistrate John Costello told O’Reilly - who initially tried to plead guilty - he thought his behaviour did not meet the standard required to prove the charge and should get legal advice.

Today O’Reilly returned to court and his lawyer, Kate McArthur, asked the charge be struck out entirely.

Mr Costello indicated that in light of the facts he had no intention of doing anything other than admonish him and impose no other penalty, and O’Reilly pleaded guilty.

Outside court, he said the experience had ruined a much anticipated holiday and lowered his opinion of Australian police.

“In New Zealand we are taught to trust and respect police and seek them out for help when we are in trouble,” he said.

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U.S. flag raised on Iwo Jima

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February 23, 1945
During the bloody Battle for Iwo Jima, U.S. Marines from the 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Division take the crest of Mount Suribachi, the island’s highest peak and most strategic position, and raise the U.S. flag. Marine photographer Louis Lowery was with them and recorded the event. American soldiers fighting for control of Suribachi’s slopes cheered the raising of the flag, and several hours later more Marines headed up to the crest with a larger flag. Joe Rosenthal, a photographer with the Associated Press, met them along the way and recorded the raising of the second flag along with a Marine still photographer and a motion-picture cameraman.
Rosenthal took three photographs atop Suribachi. The first, which showed five Marines and one Navy corpsman struggling to hoist the heavy flag pole, became the most reproduced photograph in history and won him a Pulitzer Prize. The accompanying motion-picture footage attests to the fact that the picture was not posed. Of the other two photos, the second was similar to the first but less affecting, and the third was a group picture of 18 soldiers smiling and waving for the camera. Many of these men, including three of the six soldiers seen raising the flag in the famous Rosenthal photo, were killed before the conclusion of the Battle for Iwo Jima in late March.
In early 1945, U.S. military command sought to gain control of the island of Iwo Jima in advance of the projected aerial campaign against the Japanese home islands. Iwo Jima, a tiny volcanic island located in the Pacific about 700 miles southeast of Japan, was to be a base for fighter aircraft and an emergency-landing site for bombers. On February 19, 1945, after three days of heavy naval and aerial bombardment, the first wave of U.S. Marines stormed onto Iwo Jima’s inhospitable shores.
The Japanese garrison on the island numbered 22,000 heavily entrenched men. Their commander, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had been expecting an Allied invasion for months and used the time wisely to construct an intricate and deadly system of underground tunnels, fortifications, and artillery that withstood the initial Allied bombardment. By the evening of the first day, despite incessant mortar fire, 30,000 U.S. Marines commanded by General Holland Smith managed to establish a solid beachhead.
During the next few days, the Marines advanced inch by inch under heavy fire from Japanese artillery and suffered suicidal charges from the Japanese infantry. Many of the Japanese defenders were never seen and remained underground manning artillery until they were blown apart by a grenade or rocket, or incinerated by a flame thrower.
While Japanese kamikaze flyers slammed into the Allied naval fleet around Iwo Jima, the Marines on the island continued their bloody advance across the island, responding to Kuribayashi’s lethal defenses with remarkable endurance. On February 23, the crest of 550-foot Mount Suribachi was taken, and the next day the slopes of the extinct volcano were secured.
By March 3, U.S. forces controlled all three airfields on the island, and on March 26 the last Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima were wiped out. Only 200 of the original 22,000 Japanese defenders were captured alive. More than 6,000 Americans died taking Iwo Jima, and some 17,000 were wounded.

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Google donates $US2 million to Wikipedia

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Google, the Internet’s most profitable company, is giving $US2 million ($A2.2m) to support Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven reference tool that has emerged as one of the Web’s most-read sites.

The donation announced Wednesday matches the largest grant made so far to Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that oversees the 7-year-old Wikipedia. Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar also donated $US2 million to Wikimedia six months ago through one of his investment arms.

The latest largesse has catapulted Wikimedia beyond its $US10.6 million revenue target for its fiscal year ending in June. That goal had looked ambitious, given that it represented an increase of more than 20 percent from $US8.7 million a year earlier.

But the worst recession since World War II evidently didn’t dampen support for the Internet’s most popular encyclopedia, which has more than 14 million entries written and edited by some 100,000 unpaid contributors in about 270 languages.

Wikimedia, which gets most of its revenue from donations, has collected contributions from more than 240,000 individuals so far this fiscal year, mostly in small sums.

The outpouring has allowed Wikipedia to expand while keeping its Web site commercial free, spokesman Jay Walsh said. “We intend to keep it that way, too.”

Wikimedia, based in San Francisco, plans to spend about $US9.4 million of its revenue this year, mostly to pay salaries and benefits to a staff of more than 30 people. The second-biggest expense is for operating Wikipedia’s Web site.

The donation is a pittance for Google, which ended December with $US24 billion in cash. Google makes much of its money from ads that run alongside Internet search results, many of which send people to Wikipedia.

In a statement, Google co-founder Sergey Brin hailed Wikipedia as “one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet”.

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For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk

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TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.

“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”

When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.

Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.

Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.

The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight.

“In this bitter-cold New Year’s season, the government intends to do all it can to help those who face hardship,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a video posted Dec. 26 on YouTube. “You are not alone.”

On Friday, he visited a Tokyo shelter housing 700 homeless people, telling reporters that “help can’t wait.”

Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company.

Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed.

The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says.

Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.

Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.

Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.

“Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel.

But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.

After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.

At 2 a.m. on one recent December night, two young women watched the American television show “24” on a TV inside the sauna. One said she had traveled to Tokyo from her native Gunma, north of the city, to look for work. She intended to be a hostess at one of the capital’s cabaret clubs, where women engage in conversation with men for a fee.

The woman, 20, said she was hoping to land a job with a club that would put her up in an apartment. She declined to give her name because she did not want her family to know her whereabouts.

“It’s tough to live like this, but it won’t be for too long,” she said. “At least there are more jobs here than in Gunma.”

The government says about 15,800 people live on the streets in Japan, but aid groups put the figure much higher, with at least 10,000 in Tokyo alone. Those numbers do not count the city’s “hidden” homeless, like those who live in capsule hotels. There is also a floating population that sleeps overnight in the country’s many 24-hour Internet cafes and saunas.

The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations.

These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society.

“When the country enjoyed rapid economic growth, standards of living improved across the board and class differences were obscured,” said Prof. Hiroshi Ishida of the University of Tokyo. “With a stagnating economy, class is more visible again.”

The government has poured money into bolstering Japan’s social welfare system, promising cash payments to households with children and abolishing tuition fees at public high schools.

Still, Naoto Iwaya, 46, is on the verge of joining the hopeless. A former tuna fisherman, he has been living at another capsule hotel in Tokyo since August. He most recently worked on a landfill at the city’s Haneda Airport, but that job ended last month.

“I have looked and looked, but there are no jobs. Now my savings are almost gone,” Mr. Iwaya said, after checking into an emergency shelter in Tokyo. He will be allowed to stay until Monday.

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India to be third largest economy by 2050: Carnegie Endowment

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NEW YORK: India will be the third largest economy in the world after China and United States by 2050, a US-based internationally recognised

foreign-policy think tank has said.

An article “The G20 in 2050″, carried in November bulletin of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said, “China, India, and the United States will emerge as the world’s three largest economies in 2050. Their total GDP, in real US dollar terms, will be over 70% more than that of the other G20 countries combined.”

Other main findings include, China will become the world’s largest economy in 2032, and grow to be 20% larger than the United States by 2050. Over the next forty years, nearly 60% of G20 economic growth will come from Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Mexico alone.

The article was written by Uri Dadush and Bennett Stancil. A Frenchman and former director of World Bank, Dadush is the director of the International Economics Programme at the Foundation, and Stancil is a Fellow at the Programme.

“In China and India alone, GDP is predicted to increase by nearly $60 trillion–the current world GDP–but the wide disparity in per capita GDP among these three will persist,” they noted.

India’s annual average GDP growth between 2009-2050 is predicted to 6.19 per cent, and these emerging markets will not rise among the world’s richest countries in per capita terms- their average income in 2050 will still be 40% below that of the G7 nations presently.

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Cyber attacks smite atheist websites

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Author Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion, lends his support as the London bus atheism advertising campaign is launched.Author Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion, lends his support to an atheism advertising campaign. Photo: Reuters

Australian atheists are under attack, with the websites of both the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention knocked offline in a major cyber attack yesterday afternoon.

The “distributed denial of service” attacks flooded the websites with traffic, forcing them offline about 5.20pm yesterday.

As of this morning, the foundation had still not been able to restore the websites.

The attacks may be related to the Global Atheist Convention, which is being held in Melbourne in March next year. Speakers include Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and comedy writer Catherine Deveny.

About 1000 tickets have been sold so far through the Global Atheist Convention website, which was set up, and is operated, by the AFA.

The AFA is billing the event as the largest gathering of atheists in Australian history but ticket sales have had to be halted for now due to the cyber attack.

David Nicholls, president of the AFA, said it was not yet clear whether the attacks were motivated by religion or conservative Christian groups’ anger at the AFA’s lobbying for a more secular society.

However, the fact that two separate atheism-related websites were hit suggested the attack was targeted at atheists.

“We have been informed that the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention sites were the specific target of the attacks,” Nicholls said, adding he had reported the incident to the Australian Federal Police.

“This may not be just an attack on atheism, but an attack on freedom of speech.”

The company hosting the websites has disconnected them in the face of the attacks, which knocked out other websites hosted by the provider.

Now, the AFA must find a new host and Nicholls said he expected the sites to be back online within half a day.

“Our aim is to keep the Australian government, education and welfare systems secular,” Nicholls said.

“Unfortunately, some people in our society find that very confronting.”

The cyber attacks are reminiscent of last year’s major attacks on Scientology websites by a group of loosely connected online miscreants that called themselves Anonymous.

In May this year, 19-year-old Dmitriy Guzner from New Jersey agreed to plead guilty to playing a part in the attacks, which crashed Scientology websites. The final outcome of the case is not clear but he faced up to 10 years in prison.

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World wide web inventor admits forward slashes ‘a mistake’

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WASHINGTON: Nearly two decades after he invented the world wide web, British scientist Sir Tim Berners -Lee has admitted that “forward slashes”
Claiming the // at the front of a web address was pointless and unnecessary, Sir Tim confessed at a recent talk in US that at the time of creating the www, he had failed to predict how much effect what he was producing would have on people now.

“When I designed the URL, this thing which starts http://, the slash was to indicate we’re actually starting at the top, not starting down at the next slash. Really, if you think about it, it doesn’t need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //. Boy, now people on the radio are calling it ‘backslash backslash’.

“People are having to use that finger so much. Look at all the paper and trees that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years — not to mention the human labour and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes,” the media quoted him as saying.

He said these while speaking at a symposium organised by Finland’s Technology Academy Foundation, and hosted in the Finish Embassy in Washington DC, on the future of technology.

Sir Tim invented the web while working at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland 20 years ago. In his spare time, he developed a revolutionary idea of linking pages which he named the world wide web, and launched the first website in 1991.

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: A profile

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LONDON: He may have migrated to the US long back, but Indian-American Venkatraman Ramakrishnan on Wednesday made a billion people back home proud

by winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his pioneering work on ribosome, a cellular machine that makes proteins.

57-year-old Ramakrishnan, born in the temple town of Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, is the seventh Indian or of Indian origin to win the prestigious award.

Born in 1952, Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc. in Physics (1971) from Baroda University in Gujarat and later migrated to the US to continue his studies where he later got settled and attained US citizenship.

He earned his Ph.D in Physics from Ohio University in the US and later worked as a graduate student at the University of California from 1976-78.

During his stint at the varsity, Ramakrishnan conducted a research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist and later designed his own 2-year transition from physics to biology.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since.

Ramakrishnan, now a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge has authored several important papers in academic journals.

In the August 26, 2000 issue of Nature, Ramakrishnan and his co-workers published the structure of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus, a heat-stable bacterium related to one found in the Yellowstone hot springs.

With this 5.5 Angstrom-resolution structure, Ramakrishnan’s group identified key portions of the RNA and, using previously determined structures, positioned seven of the subunit’s proteins.

In the September 21, 2000 issue of Nature, Ramakrishnan published two papers. In the first of these, he presented the 3 Angstrom structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit.

His second paper revealed the structures of the 30S subunit in complex with three antibiotics that target different regions of the subunit. In this paper, Ramakrishnan discussed the structural basis for the action of each of these drugs.

After his postdoctoral fellowship, Ramakrishnan joined the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory in ther US. There, he began his collaboration with Stephen White to clone the genes for several ribosomal proteins and determine their three-dimensional structures.

He was also awarded a Guggenheim fellowship during his tenure there, and he used it to make the transition to X-ray crystallography.

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Indian-origin scientist, two others win Nobel chemistry prize

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STOCKHOLM: Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for

Indian-origin scientist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan wins Nobel chemistry prize.

mapping ribosomes, the protein-producing factories within cells, at the atomic level.

India-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is a senior scientist at the MRC Laborartory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge.

Born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, Ramakrishnan shares the Nobel prize with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel) for their “studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”.

Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc. in Physics (1971) from Baroda University and his Ph.D. in Physics (1976) from Ohio University.

He moved into biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he took a year of classes, then conducted research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist.

“This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level,” the Nobel committee said in its citation.

All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome, it said.

“This year’s three Laureates have all generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the citation said.

Better known as Venky among friends, Ramakrishnan started out as a theoretical physicist. After graduate school, he designed his own 2-year transition from physics to biology.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since.

Ramakrishnan has authored several important papers in academic journals.

In the August 26, 2000 issue of Nature, Ramakrishnan and his coworkers published the structure of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus, a heat-stable bacterium related to one found in the Yellowstone hot springs.

With this 5.5 Angstrom-resolution structure, Ramakrishnan’s group identified key portions of the RNA and, using previously determined structures, positioned seven of the subunit’s proteins.

In the September 21, 2000 issue of Nature, Ramakrishnan published two papers. In the first of these, he presents the 3 Angstrom structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit.

His second paper reveals the structures of the 30S subunit in complex with three antibiotics that target different regions of the subunit. In this paper, Ramakrishnan discusses the structural basis for the action of each of these drugs.

After his postdoctoral fellowship, Ramakrishnan joined the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory in ther US. There, he began his collaboration with Stephen White to clone the genes for several ribosomal proteins and determine their three-dimensional structures.

He was also awarded a Guggenheim fellowship during his tenure there, and he used it to make the transition to X-ray crystallography.

Ramakrishnan moved to the University of Utah in 1995 to become a professor in the Department of Biochemistry. There, he initiated his studies on protein-RNA complexes and the entire 30S subunit.

He since moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he is a Senior Scientist and Group Leader in the Structural Studies Division. He joins the list of several Nobel laureates who worked at the laboratory.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life and has helped researchers develop antibiotic cures for various diseases.

Yonath is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the prize.

This year’s three laureates all generated three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes.

“These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the academy said in its announcement.

“All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome,” the academy said.

Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, established the Nobel Prizes in his will in 1895. The first awards were handed out six years later.

Each prize comes with a 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) purse, a diploma, a gold medal and an invitation to the prize ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. The Peace Prize is handed out in Oslo.

On Monday, three American scientists shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

The physics prize on Tuesday was split between a Hong Kong-based scientist who helped develop fiber-optic cable and two Canadian and American researchers who invented the “eye” in digital cameras _ technology that has revolutionized communications and science.

The literature and peace prize winners will be announced later this week and the economics announcement is set for Monday.

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