Nobel laureate Dr. George Smoot, who conducted groundbreaking research into the origins of the universe, has died. He was 80. The University of California, Berkeley, says Smoot died Sept. 18 in Paris of a heart attack. Along with John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for finding the background radiation that finally pinned down the Big Bang theory of the universe’s beginning. Smoot joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. Lab director Mike Witherell says Smoot “spent a distinguished career uncovering the secrets of the universe.”