All tag results for 'nobel prize'

He's really doing Playboy!!

James Franco is a poet, author, actor, olympic curler, producer, blogger, Nobel Prize winning chemist, and now he's even a magazine columnist!

Okay, we made two of those up, but the guy is definitely a jack James of all trades.

He's a poor man's Orson Welles! He's a rich man's Vanilla Ice!

In the July/August double issue, James has a nice fireside chat with performance artist Marina Abramović. It's the first of six regular Francophile columns Playboy asked him to write!

We know

Tags: amanda seyfried, james franco, nobel prize, orson welles, playboy, vanilla ice, velociraptor

Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli scientist, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering "quasicrystals."

"What the hell is a quasicrystal?" you're asking!

Well:

His discovery, which was made in 1982, has "fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter," according to the academy. Unlike other crystals, quasicrystals do not have a repeating pattern at the molecular level. They are very hard, but break easily, like glass.

Incredible! We had no idea. We're no chemists.

So what does that mean for us? And why does he deserve the $1.44 million dollar prize that comes with the distinction?

"Due to their unique atomic structure, they are also bad conductors of heat and electricity, and have nonstick surfaces. Their poor thermal transport properties may make them useful as so-called thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity."

Nevermind. He deserves it.

Ha!

[Image via AP Images.]

Tags: break, chemistry, incredible, israeli scientist, nobel prize, strong

As the week of Nobel Prize announcements wraps up, many are surprised to see that the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature went to the Peruvian novelist, journalist and politician Mario Vargas Llosa.

It was a surprise to some, since the expected winners were the candidates from South Korea, Kenya and the United States.

Llosa is an extremely political writer and is known for his political involvement, his novels do include historical works, political thrillers, comedies and murder mysteries.

The Academy honors the 74-year-old author for what it called "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat."

Llosa was very happy and proud to receive this award. Now we just have to wait until tomorrow to find out who won the Peace prize.

[Image via AP Images.]

Tags: author, award, nobel prize, world