Tokyo - Stock markets throughout Asia and the Pacific fell sharply Wednesday in response to Wall Street's plunge and mounting fears over a worldwide recession.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average nosedived to its lowest closing level since June 2003, with losses amounting to the third biggest one-day drop in post-war Japan.

The Nikkei plunged 952.58 points, or 9.38 per cent, to end at 9,203.32.

The broader Topix index of all first-section issues fell 78.6 points, or 8.04 per cent, to 899.01.

Tokyo - The Japanese carmaker Honda has announced measures to improve pedestrian safety with a new generation of crash test dummies aimed at reducing pedestrian lower back and upper leg injuries.

The car maker said the Polar III dummy improved the evaluation of the injuries common in collisions between pedestrians and taller vehicles such as SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicle) or minivans.

In 1998, Honda was the first car maker to develop a pedestrian crash test dummy to help identify parts of the vehicle most often causing injuries in collisions with pedestrians.

Tokyo - The Tokyo stoc

Stockholm - US researcher Yoichiro Nambu and his Japanese colleagues Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa have won this year's Nobel Prize for Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Their discoveries were linked to describing the smallest building blocks in nature and nature's order, the academy said.

The academy cited Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics."

Stockholm  - US researcher Yoichiro Nambu and his Japanese colleagues Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Masukawa have won this year's Nobel Prize for Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Their discoveries were linked to describing the smallest building blocks in nature and nature's order, the academy said.

Tokyo - The Bank of Japan decided on Tuesday to keep its key short-term interest rate unchanged at 0.5 per cent as uncertainty spread over the future course of the world's second-largest economy amid global financial crisis.

The policy board of Japan's central bank voted unanimously to forego an interest rate hike at the end of a two-day meeting.

The Japanese economy "has been sluggish against the backdrop of high energy and materials prices and weaker growth in exports," the bank said in a statement.