Nobel Prize updates - have you got your scorecard out?

Since my last Nobel prize post, two more of the Nobel prizes for 2006 have been handed out.

On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for their efforts to peer into the earliest moments of the universe. Dr. Smoot should not be confused with Oliver Smoot, another MIT alum whose physical stature was the basis for the smoot, a somewhat non-standard unit of measurement.

Wednesday dawned with the announcement that Roger Kornberg had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the mechanisms of genetic translation (the process by which our DNA is decoded into, well, us). Dr. Kornberg follows in the footsteps of his father, Arthur Kornberg, who took home the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1959; they are the 6th father-and-son laureate pair in the history of the Nobel Prizes.

[More on the Nobel website.]