Nobel Foundation

Shirin Ebadi of Iran was awarded the Nobel Peace Price for her work for human rights, especially for women and children.

The Nobel Foundation announced that the Austrian novelist and dramatist Elfriede Jelinek was the 2004 winner of the literature prize.

Linda B. Buck and Richard Axel , both based in the USA, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system.

The Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Albert Fert of France and Peter Grünberg of Germany for discovering the quantum mechanical effect of giant magnetoresistance (the basis of the smaller laptop and the iPod).