Stockholm (AP): The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work with proteins.

Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London.

Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that decides on the winner, announced the prize.

In 2003, Baker designed a new protein and since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said.

Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.

Last year, the chemistry award went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots — tiny particles just a few nanometres in diameter that can release very bright coloured light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize.

The awards continue with the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on October 14.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (USD 1 million) from a bequest left by the award's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.

 

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NEW YORK: A Turkish Airlines jetliner headed from Seattle to Istanbul made an emergency landing in New York on Wednesday after the pilot died on board, an airline spokesperson said.

Pilot İlçehin Pehlivan, 59, lost consciousness at some point after Flight TK204 took off from Seattle Tuesday night, Turkish Airlines spokesperson Yahya Üstün said in a statement.

Crew members decided to make an emergency landing and worked to revive the pilot, Üstün said, but he died before the plane landed.

Data from the tracking site FlightAware shows that the Airbus A350 landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport just before 6 a.m.

Arrangements were being made for passengers to reach their destination from New York, the airline spokesperson said.

Pehlivan had worked at Turkish Airlines since 2007, Üstün said. A routine health check in March showed no health problems that would have prevented him from working, he said.

“As Turkish Airlines, we deeply feel the loss of our captain and extend our sincerest condolences to his bereaved family, colleagues, and all his loved ones,” Üstün said.