Nobel \\ Two Americans shared 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for deciphering the communication system that the body uses to sense the outside world, which will aid development of new drugs. The winners were, Dr Robert J. Lefkowitz, professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC, and Dr Brian K. Kobilka, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California. For the Nobel Prize in Physics, American physicist David Wineland, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Serge Haroche of the Collège de France and École Normale Supérieure in Paris “for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems.” British researcher John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan won this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology for discovering that mature, specialised cells of the body can be programmed into stem cells, a discovery that scientists hope to turn into new treatments. Chinese writer Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “hallucinatory realism which merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”. The most controversial award, however, turned out to be this year’s Peace Prize, awarded to to the crisis-torn European Union. It led to a Twitter backlash, though some netizens came to the decision’s defence.