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Nobel Prize — all stories

Kagan and Soai win chemistry Nobel for mirror-molecule work

The academy says Kenso Soai’s reaction was the first in which only one of two possible mirror images formed, a feat no one but life had achieved.

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Pages of handwritten lecture notes by Louis Pasteur on crystal structure and tartaric acid, the substance whose mirror-image crystals he studied in the 19th century

Nobel medicine prize goes to light switch for nerve cells

Hegemann and Nagel found the protein behind optogenetics in a single-celled alga that swims towards light, in the early 2000s.

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Transmission electron microscope image of a Chlamydomonas green alga cell, the kind of single-celled alga whose light-sensitive protein led to optogenetics