NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Canadian author Alice Munro, hailed by the award-giving Swedish Academy as a "master of the contemporary short story." Known as "Canada's Chekhov" for her astute, unflinching and compassionate depiction of seemingly unremarkable lives. She produced several story collections chronicling the lives of girls and women before and after the 1960s social revolution, including "The Moons of Jupiter," ''The Progress of Love" and "Runaway." Munro, 82, was too frail to travel to Stockholm, so her daughter, Jenny Munro, is representing her at the ceremony.
NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY
Three U.S.-based scientists for developing computer models that can predict chemical reactions for use in creating new drugs and other tasks. Their approach combined classical physics and quantum physics. The winners are Martin Karplus of the University of Strasbourg, France, and Harvard University; Michael Levitt of the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS
Peter Higgs of Britain and Francois Englert of Belgium for their 1964 theory, advanced independently of each other, about how subatomic particles get their mass. Their theory made headlines last year when the CERN laboratory in Geneva confirmed it by discovering the so-called Higgs particle.
NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE
Three U.S.-based researchers for their breakthroughs in understanding how key substances move within a cell. They developed better understanding of vesicles, tiny bubbles that deliver their cargo within a cell to the right place at the right time. Disturbances in that delivery system can lead to neurological diseases, diabetes or immunological disorders. The prize was shared by Americans James E. Rothman of Yale University and Randy W. Schekman of the University of California at Berkeley; and German-American Dr. Thomas C. Sudhof of the Stanford University School of Medicine.