Nobel Prize laureates are to receive their awards Wednesday in lavish ceremonies in two Scandinavian capitals.
Five awards - for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and economics - are presented at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden. The Nobel Peace Prize is given out at a ceremony on the same day in Oslo, Norway.
This year's winners include two French researchers, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, who in 1983 discovered the virus that causes AIDS, physicists, Japanese Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, and American Yoichiro Nambu, who helped explain the behavior of the smallest particles of matter, an American economist, Paul Krugman, who analyzed how economies of scale affect international trade, and a Finnish diplomat, Marrti Ahtisaari, who helped end fighting between in Indonesia's Aceh province in 2005.
Prize recipients get a diploma, a medal, and a $1.2-million cash prize. The awards are traditionally given out on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the inventor and industrialist who created the prize endowments.
Some information for this report was provided by AP.
