We tend to be somewhat skeptical of university rankings just because there are so many out there, but if there's one thing we notice, it's that the University of Chicago seems to rank high in pretty much all of them. And it's no different with the rankings released by QS (Quacquarelli Symonds). The home to a bevy of Nobel Prize winners, including the recently awarded Yoichiro Nambu, has been ranked as the eighth best university IN THE WORLD! (emphasis ours). Suck on that, MIT. more ›

Screw the Cubs and Sox; Chicago is racking up some real honors this week. Following University of Chicago Prof. Yoichiro Nambu winning a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics earlier this week comes news that Chicago native (and Niles East High School grad) Martin Chalfie has been awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien, "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP." Malfie discovered he had been recgonized when he checked the Nobel website to see who earned the award. "I said, 'I wonder what schnook won?' When I looked at my laptop and saw my name, I woke up my wife and said, 'I think you have to look at this.'" Chalfie is currently a geneticist at New York's Columbia University. Chalfie is the now-closed Niles East High's second Nobel winner; Robert Horvitz (then at MIT) was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for Medicine. more ›

We'd like to congratulate University of Chicago professor Yoichiro Nambu, 87, who was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics today "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics." According to the Nobel Foundation:

The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level. more ›