Bright sparks among 'Asia's Nobel Prize' winners

Two scientists who are probing the brightest flashes in the universe were Tuesday named among the winners of the Shaw Prize, the $1 million award known as the Nobel Prize of the east. NASA scientist Gerald Fishman and Italian astro-physicist Enrico Costa won the astronomy prize for their work on gamma rays.
A press statement from the organisers said they were picked "for their leadership of space missions that enabled the demonstration of the cosmological origin of gamma ray bursts, the brightest sources known in the universe". A gamma ray burst is believed to mark the final death throe of a star as it collapses, billions of light years away from Earth. The Shaw Prize, now in its eighth year, consists of three annual awards each carrying a $1 million prize. The life science and medicine award went jointly to Jules Hoffmann, from the University of Strasbourg, Yale University's Ruslan Medzhitov and Bruce Beutler, from The Scripps Research Institute, California.