With the Nobel Prizes having just been announced, the official website - NobelPrize.org - is a busy place right now. The site includes a lot more than just profiles of the Nobel laureates, including some features that may surprise you.
"The mission is to inform about the Nobel Prizes and to increase the public understanding for science, literature and peace work. And also, we would like to interest young people for the discoveries and works awarded a Nobel Prize," says Agneta Wallin Levinovitz, the executive editor of NobelPrize.org, which has just celebrated its 10th anniversary. It features a complete roster of the Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics and peace, plus multimedia and other features.
"We have a biography for almost every Nobel Prize winner. And when they come to Stockholm or Oslo - that's the Peace Prize - they have to give a lecture. So you have the lecture and you have a biography," she says. "And since 1999 we also have interviews with the new laureates, and actually we have also interviewed old laureates, so we have now more than 100 interviews with the different Nobel laureates."
In addition to the text, many of the interviews and lectures are online in streaming video format, such as this conversation with 1998 chemistry laureate Walter Kohn. "The fact that you received the Nobel Prize suddenly means that, broadly speaking, people take you more seriously," he says.
The Nobel Prizes are a great honor, and are taken very seriously. So you might be surprised to find quite a few games on the website, as Agneta Wallin Levinovitz explains. "We think that by making games on the Nobel Prize discoveries, that we could interest young people [in]science. So we tried [what] they think is fun and they forget that they're actually learning while playing. We think it's very important to interest young people [in[science, and also literature and peace work, so we do games in all our areas, but mostly in science," she says.
Learn more about Nobel Prizes from this year or years past at NobelPrize.org.
