If you haven’t had a good laugh this holiday weekend, read this brief story from the Scientific American’s blog (hat-tip, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit). Writer Clara Moskowitz interviews astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics. Schmidt’s grandmother wanted to see the prize — that is, the actual gold medal, and so Schmidt, like a good grandson, flew to her home in Fargo, N.D. Moskowitz quotes him as follows:

“You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays — it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.