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When I called Jeremy Duvall and Damian Young, two of the Ó³»­´«Ã½'s organic chemists, to talk about the winners, I was checking in with them to discuss the relevance of the work recognized. What was surprising to me was that the work from the winners represents not just some piece of obscure chemical synthesis minutia. This was chemistry that we use on a daily basis here at the Ó³»­´«Ã½.

Researchers at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ are looking for clues about how fat cells develop. Last week, we posted a news story about research published in the journal that shows how scientists are using epigenomic maps to find factors that control fat cell development.

Kiran Musunuru, a clinical and research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and research affiliate at the Ó³»­´«Ã½, has received the Ó³»­´«Ã½â€™s Lawrence H. Summers Fellowship for research for 2010-2011.

The year-long fellowship, named after former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, gives scientists an opportunity to advance their research at the Ó³»­´«Ã½. Kiran intends to deepen his research into the causes of heart attacks, as well as the role that genetics plays in regulating levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood.

Today, Robert G. Edwards, a British physiologist who spent much of his career at Cambridge University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing in vitro fertilization (IVF), a technique used to help people conceive children. The procedure involves mixing eggs and sperm in a laboratory dish, and then returning the embryo to the womb to resume development.

The Ó³»­´«Ã½'s creative director Bang Wong writes about visual salience -- that quality that makes objects "pop" off the page -- in his column for this month's issue of . Salience allows viewers to spot trends and patterns in data faster and process multiple features of the data. Understanding how salience works could help scientists communicate information in figures as well as in presentations.