It’s Nobel Prize Week! Which is when regular people get their egos crushed under the weight of the giants of literature, chemistry, physics, economics, and “peace”. Which sucks. But click through, and you can wow your friends with your knowledge of this year’s Nobel winners, and give that ego a little boost.

Ending the all-white, all-male streak seen in the rest of the Nobel Prize winners, the Nobel Peace Prize goes jointly to the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, and Yemeni Tawakkul Karman, “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is the Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer, because “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”

The winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is Israeli scientist, Dan Schechtman, for the discovery of “quasi crystals.” No, I don’t know what you use them for either, but people used to think they were impossible. So there’s that.

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics are American scientists, Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess, “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae.” Perlmutter gets half, Schmidt and Reiss share the other half of the Nobel cash prize.

Half of the Nobel Prize for Medicine went to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann “for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity” and the other half (posthumously) to Ralph M. Steinman “for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity”. Yay science.

Yay, gallery full of old white dudes!

Stay tuned for the announcement of this year’s laureate for the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday.

Given that last year’s Peace Prize recipient was Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiabo, and Barack Obama the year before, there’s reason to hope that the Peace Prize announcement brings a little diversity up in here.

[Source: NobelPrize]