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The US swept the board for Nobel prizes awarded this week.

John Mather of the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland and George Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley, share the ?720,000 prize for physics for their role in helping to prove the big bang theory.

Andrew Fire of Stanford University and Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts won the prize for medicine. Roger Kornberg of Stanford University, who was a postdoctorate at Cambridge University in the 1970s, won the prize for chemistry.