The Nobel Prizes

The Physics Prize
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half to
Charles K. Kao, Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong,
"for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"
and the other half jointly to
Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA,
"for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor".
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today's networked societies. They have created many practical innovations for everyday life. These two inventions together have revolutionised the field of communication technology.
Read more about these achievements in the separate article.
The Chemistry Prize
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 jointly to
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom,
Thomas A. Steitz, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, and
Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel,
"for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life's core processes: the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life.  Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.  
See the related article on the origin of life for more details.
The Medicine Prize
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009 jointly to
Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak
for the discovery of 
"how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase".
This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists who have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes - the telomeres - and in an enzyme that forms them, the telomerase.