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Best of Last Week – Nobel prize winners announced, new kind of fusion reactor and a new drug that destroys tumors

Nobel Medals

It was another banner week for physics as the —Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura shared the prize for their work in inventing a new kind of LED. Also, mysteriously, a team of researchers working in Australia found .

Another team at the Joint Quantum Institute has used —it's taking them into a fuzzy area between classical and quantum light. And, the —researchers with the University of Warwick found the particle (dubbed Ds3*(2860)) using the Large Hadron Collider. They believe it will "transform our understanding" of the fundamental force of nature that binds the nuclei of atoms.

In applied applications, a team of engineers at Washington University has come up with a design for —they claim scaling it to the size of a coal plant would make the plant economical. Meanwhile another team of researchers has come to the conclusion that —they used data from OpenStreetMap and mathematics to come to this conclusion.

Also, some good news came from a combined team of researchers looking into the mechanism that underlies diabetes—they've actually discovered —a new class of molecules that appears to protect both mice and humans from the onset of the debilitating disease. And in an interesting bit of research, a team of scientists has and in so doing, have found a long evolution of toxic mercury resistance—a finding that could have implications on research that involves looking for life on other planets.

And finally, researchers at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute announced that they've found —it's still preliminary work, but the implications are staggering—imagine if doctors could actually destroy cancer tumors with a simple drug made from the seeds of a rainforest plant.

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