Aldous Huxley, author of “Brave New World” 1932, was nominated for a #NobelPrize 9 times between 1938 and 1964, but never awarded. Aldous Huxley’s  half-brother,  Andrew Huxley, was awarded the 1963 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine for figuring out how an electrical impulse travel through a nerve cell.

Since the nominations are kept secret for 50 years, you can today look at the nominations from 1901 to 1964.

Nominations for Aldous Huxley in the Nomination Database: http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=4397

Photo: Aldous Huxley, Wikimedia Commons

10 Nobel Laureates are born in Hungary:
Philipp Lenard, Physics 1905
Eugene Paul Wigner, Physics 1963
Dennis Gabor, Physics 1971
George de Hevesy, Chemistry 1943
George A. Olah, Chemistry 1994
Avram Hershko, Chemistry 2004
Albert von Szent-Györgyi, Medicine 1937
Georg von Békésy, Medicine 1961
John C. Harsanyi, Economic Sciences 1994
Imre Kertész, Literature 2002

The Hungarian Revolution of 1848 grew into a war for independence from the Austrian Empire. The anniversary of the Revolution's outbreak, 15 March, is one of Hungary's three national holidays.

Image: Albert von Szent-Györgyi who discovered vitamin C.

A happy 90th Leo Esaki!
By means of some deceptively simple experiments he proved in a paper published in 1958 the existence of a new kind of tunneling phenomenon in a semiconductor.

Esaki’s work at Sony was in the field of quantum mechanics and concentrated on the phenomenon of tunneling, in which the wavelike character of matter enables electrons to pass through barriers that the laws of classical mechanics say are impenetrable. He devised ways to modify the behaviour of solid-state semiconductors by adding impurities, or “doping” them. This work led to his invention of the double diode, which became known as the Esaki diode. It also opened new possibilities for solid-state developments that his co-recipients of the 1973 prize, Ivar Giaever and Brian Josephson, exploited separately.

"There have been some stories in Turkish media, the gist of it being that the Swedish Academy was subjected to pressure from Kurdish exile groups in order to deny the recently deceased author Yaşar Kemal the Nobel Prize in literature, and that the Academy also caved in to this.

Let me be perfectly clear here: none of this is true.

I have seen no such campaign trying to stop Kemal from receiving the prize, neither have I ever heard of such a campaign taking place. The plain silliness of this story is demonstrated by the fact that..."
Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, blog post. More at:
https://akademiblogg.wordpress.com/

Ada Yonath is 1 of 4 women awarded a ‪#‎NobelPrize‬ in Chemistry, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".
Ribosomes are the protein builders, found within all living cells.
‪#‎WomensDay‬

Happy birthday Mo Yan!
Literature Laureate Mo Yan turns 60 years old 5 March. You can read an excerpt from The Garlic Ballads here: http://goo.gl/KLlQEH

”… the doubt of the others has the advantage of leaving the field uncrowded. ”
Ernst Ruska, Nobel Banquet Speech 1986.
 
An electron microscope uses electrons to create an image with much higher resolving power than a normal light microscope. As Ernst Ruska discovered, having an ingenious idea like the electron microscope can occur in the blink of an eye, but overcoming the finer details to create a successfully working instrument can take years. Read the story here: http://goo.gl/MLdicv

Ernst Ruska shared the 1986 Physics Prize for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope". ”Magnetic converging lens of short field length” was patented on17 March 1932; Patent granted on 3 August 1939.
 
Photos: 1. Deutsches Museum, First electron microscope with resolving power higher than that of a light microscope, Berlin 1933. For the first time the apparatus had a condensor in front of the specimen and two magnifying lenses. Magnification is around 12,000 times (Creative Commons)
2.  A cell committing suicide (programmed cell death or apoptosis) and 3. some bacteriophages (virus particles that infect bacteria). (Photos taken in a Transmission Electron Microscope by Björn Afzelius).

The Nobel Prize is perhaps Alfred Nobel's most famous invention
Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, wrote his last will in 1895. Nobel was against inherited fortunes that he meant contributed to the laziness of humanity. The will was an ingenious way of solving this dilemma. The inheritance, in the form of a prize, would reward those who have made themselves worthy by way of their work: "prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

Alfred Nobel's last will and testament in public for the first time at the Nobel Museum: http://goo.gl/Ne7dfz

Best loved Irish poem of the past century: When All The Others Were Away at Mass
by Seamus Heaney. The poem, recalls a morning shared between the young author and his mother, peeling potatoes.

Heaney is awarded the 1995 ‪#‎NobelPrize‬ in Literature for "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".
You can read the poem at The Irish Times:
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/seamus-heaney-poem-voted-ireland-s-favourite-1.2135284#.VQCBEUyVD_M.twitter

We celebrate the #NobelPrize awarded women and their achievements: http://goo.gl/13Dcrg  #WomensDay

The Mould Juice
Alexander Fleming first called the bacteria-killing substance that he had discovered in 1928 in moulds for "mould juice". On 7 March 1929 he named it penicillin.
Penicillin, a group of antibiotics derived from Penicillium fungi, was among the first drugs effective against many serious bacterial infections caused by staphylococci and streptococci. Penicillin are still widely used, though misuse has now made many types of bacteria resistant – something Fleming warned against in his Nobel Lecture from 1945 (in the end of the lecture):
http://goo.gl/64tuRC
Penicillin would undoubtedly still have remained a fairly unknown substance, hadn’t Howard Florey and Ernst Chain actually made a useful and effective drug out of it. The three shared the 1945 Medicine Prize.
It was wartime and countless wounded soldiers suffering from bacterial infections would benefit from penicillin. With insufficient supplies of the drug it was desirable to find out whether penicillin could be prepared by chemical methods and for this purpose it was essential to determine the molecular structure of penicillin. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin managed to do this and was awarded the 1964 ‪#‎NobelPrize‬ in Chemistry.
Read the exciting story here: http://goo.gl/3SOUJ8

NEWS from the Norwegian Nobel Committee:
There are 276 candidates for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. 49 of these are organizations, and 227 are persons. 276 is the second highest number of candidates ever. The record, 278 candidates, was set in 2014.
The 2015 #NobelPeacePrize will be announced in October.

From the statutes of the Nobel Foundation:
Proposals received for the award of a prize, and investigations and opinions concerning the award of a prize, may not be divulged. A prize-awarding body may, however, after due consideration in each individual case, permit access to material which formed the basis for the evaluation and decision concerning a prize, for purposes of research in intellectual history. Such permission may not, however, be granted until at least 50 years have elapsed after the date on which the decision in question was made.
Read more on the selection of the Peace Prize Laureates: http://goo.gl/kXLcRa

Photo: The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 was awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education".