A new analysis of audiotape of the May 4, 1970, shootings that left four students dead at Kent State University has found evidence that shortly before Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on the antiwar protesters, there was a loud, violent confrontation nearby that culminated in four pistol shots, according to today's Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper. The commotion and the gunfire, if the new analysis is accurate, could help explain why the 28 Guardsmen were quick to pull the trigger after they received an order of "prepare to fire." But the 70-second gap between the pistol shots and the Guardsmen's own gunfire leaves it open to question whether the two episodes are connected at all, suggesting that the mystery surrounding this tragic event will remain unresolved.

A former literature faculty member at Beijing Normal University who has repeatedly pressured Chinese authorities as a human-rights activist, and who currently sits in a Chinese prison, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this morning. Liu Xiaobo, who is 54, was recognized by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for "his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." Mr. Liu, the country's best-known dissident, won the prize, worth about $1.5-million, after two decades of writing essays and engaging in other peaceful work urging China to reform its authoritarian political system. He took part in the student-led Tiananmen Square protests, which were ruthlessly crushed by the Chinese government in 1989, and since then, blacklisted from academe, he has led efforts to push for free elections, freedom of expression, and other human rights, which the Nobel Committee said were...

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded this morning to Mario Vargas Llosa, the versatile Peruvian writer and politician, for what the Swedish Academy hailed as "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." Mr. Vargas Llosa, who is 74, will receive the award, worth about $1.5-million, at a ceremony in December. His prolific writings include plays, literary criticism, journalism, and more than a dozen novels, several of which have been turned into movies. An early admirer of communism and the Cuban Revolution of Fidel Castro, Mr. Vargas Llosa, whose papers are stored at Princeton University, has steadily moved to the right in the course of his life, in part in reaction to brutal leftist guerrilla movements that have plagued his country. He ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru in 1990 and since then has...

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded this morning, like the physics prize yesterday, for pioneering work with carbon. The three organic chemists who won the chemistry prize -- Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi, and Akira Suzuki -- were honored for developing new, more efficient ways of linking together carbon atoms, which ordinarily are not readily reactive, to build more complex molecules. The prize, worth about $1.5-million, will be shared equally by Mr. Heck, 79, a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware; Mr. Negishi, 75, a professor at Purdue University; and Mr. Suzuki, 80, a professor emeritus at Hokkaido University, in Japan. The three men are being recognized for their development of palladium-catalyzed cross coupling, a technique that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences hailed as allowing scientists to create chemicals "as complex as those created by nature itself,"...

Columbia University's business school has received a $100-million pledge from Henry R. Kravis, an alumnus who is a co-founder and co-chief executive of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, a global private-equity firm best known for its multibillion-dollar leveraged buyouts of major corporations. According to a news release issued by Columbia, the pledge will be used to help build new facilities for the school as part of the university's controversial expansion into the Manhattanville neighborhood north of Columbia's main campus. One of the school's new buildings will be named for Mr. Kravis.

Continuing a British sweep of this year's Nobel Prizes, two professors at the University of Manchester this morning were awarded the physics prize for what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described as their "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene," a film of carbon just a single atom thick, with unusual and exciting properties for both studies in quantum physics and practical applications in consumer electronics.

The winners, Andre Geim, 51, and Konstantin Novoselov, 36, were born in Russia and worked together in the Netherlands before moving to Manchester. They will split the prize, worth about $1.5-million this year, which is to be presented at a ceremony in December. For Mr. Geim, at least, this is not the first Nobel recognition: In 2000 he was a recipient of an Ig Nobel Prize, an award presented by a science-humor magazine at Harvard...

The British scientist who pioneered techniques of in vitro fertilization, which in the last generation has revolutionized treatment for infertile couples who wish to bear children, was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this morning. The researcher, Robert G. Edwards, an 85-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, will receive the prize, worth about $1.5-million this year, at a ceremony in December. Mr. Edwards's work, which began in the 1950s and was conducted at Britain's National Institute for Medical Research as well as at Cambridge and at the Bourn Hall Clinic, was crowned in 1978, with the birth of Louise Brown, dubbed the world's first "test-tube baby." Some four million more have followed. Sweden's Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, hailed Mr. Edwards, who worked with the now-deceased Patrick Steptoe, for not only making IVF possible...

Harvard University announced today that it had received a $10-million gift for its Humanities Center from an alumnus who is an Indian industrialist, Anand Mahindra. According to a Harvard press release, it's the largest donation for the humanities in university history and will further the indisciplinary work of the center, whose director, Homi K. Bhabha, is a periodic contributor to The Chronicle Review.

The Education Department announced today that it would award $19-million to help loan servicers in the defunct guaranteed-loan program retrain their workers for new jobs. The awards range in size from $6,000 to nearly $5-million, with the largest going to locations where employees will have the hardest time finding new work if they are laid off.

The president of Western Governors University, an online, nonprofit institution founded in 1996, will be honored later today as one of three winners of the 2010 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education. The university's president, Robert W. Mendenhall, was cited for creating "a compelling example of how technology and a competency-based academic model -- where students earn degrees by demonstrating what they know and can do -- can expand access to higher education." The other winners are Christopher Cerf, a pioneer in literacy and other television programming for children, and Larry Rosenstock, founder of an innovative public charter school in San Diego. Each winner receives a gift of $25,000 and a bronze sculpture.