1995

Nobel Prize in Physics

Martin L. Perl · Frederick Reines

Perl detected the tau lepton at SLAC in 1975 — a third, heavier version of the electron that nobody had predicted needing. Reines, with Clyde Cowan, had confirmed the existence of the neutrino in 1956 by catching the particles from a nuclear reactor; forty years later, the prize caught up with the detection.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Paul J. Crutzen · Mario J. Molina · F. Sherwood Rowland

Molina and Rowland showed in 1974 that chlorofluorocarbons released into the atmosphere would destroy stratospheric ozone; Crutzen had already shown that nitrogen oxides catalyse the same process. The science was unwelcome to industries that made CFCs, but it underpinned the Montreal Protocol, which actually worked.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Edward B. Lewis · Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard · Eric F. Wieschaus

Lewis identified homeotic genes — the master switches that tell a body which end is the head — in the fruit fly; Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus systematically screened the entire fly genome for genes controlling the body plan and found the key ones. Their Drosophila work turned out to apply, with surprising directness, to vertebrate development.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Seamus Heaney

Heaney's poems drew from the bogs and fields of rural Northern Ireland a record of history, violence, and the poet's responsibilities to both. The committee found in his collections lyrical beauty alongside a weight of ethical seriousness that the two sustained each other rather than pulling apart.

Nobel Peace Prize

Joseph Rotblat · Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs

Rotblat was the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project on moral grounds; he spent the rest of his career in the Pugwash Conferences, which brought scientists together to talk about what they had made. The prize recognised both his conscience and the value of that particular conversation.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Robert E. Lucas Jr.

Lucas showed that if workers and firms form rational expectations about policy, systematic monetary interventions will be anticipated and therefore neutralised. The conclusion — that you cannot reliably fool people with predictable tricks — reshaped macroeconomics, though the exact implications remained contested for decades.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Shigeru Watanabe · Junko Sakamoto · Masumi Wakita

The winners trained pigeons to discriminate reliably between paintings by Picasso and paintings by Monet, suggesting that the visual processing underlying aesthetic response is not an exclusively human capacity. Whether this says more about pigeons or about the paintings was left as an exercise for the reader.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Nick Leeson · Barings Bank · Robert Citron · Orange County

Leeson's unauthorised futures trading lost Barings £827 million and brought down Britain's oldest investment bank; Citron's derivatives strategy bankrupted Orange County, California. The committee gave them a shared prize for bold but unsuccessful attempts to use financial instruments for personal and municipal enrichment.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Marcia Buebel · David S. Shannahoff-Khalsa · Michael R. Boyle

Their study 'The Effects of Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing on Cognition' investigated whether breathing exclusively through one nostril affects cognitive performance. It reported differential effects depending on the nostril. People have been breathing through both nostrils for millions of years, but perhaps they have been leaving performance on the table.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Dominique Georget · Roland Parker · Andrew Smith

For carefully characterising the exact water content at which breakfast cereal goes soggy in milk — mapping the structural collapse of puffed grains as a function of time and moisture. This is, at heart, a materials science problem, and it received the rigour it deserved.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

Martha Bakkevig · Ruth Nielsen

For quantifying the effect of wet underwear on thermoregulation in the cold, demonstrating that damp undergarments measurably impair the body's ability to maintain core temperature. The finding has practical implications for cold-weather safety and ought to surprise no one, yet here it is, peer-reviewed.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Manuel Blum

Blum built the foundations of computational complexity theory and then aimed them at cryptography and program checking — showing how to verify that a program is correct without running it, and how to generate randomness that is indistinguishable from true randomness. Both ideas turned out to matter enormously.

First exoplanet around a sun-like star confirmed

On 6 October, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the detection of 51 Pegasi b — a gas giant roughly half Jupiter's mass, orbiting its star every 4.2 days. No theory of planet formation had predicted a planet that close to a sun-like star, and astronomers had to revise their models almost immediately to account for a universe that turned out to be more various than expected.

Top quark discovered at Fermilab

On 2 March, the CDF and D0 collaborations at Fermilab announced the top quark, the sixth and heaviest member of the quark family and the last piece of the Standard Model's matter sector. Its mass — around 173 GeV, comparable to a gold atom — was far larger than almost anyone had anticipated, which is perhaps why it took so long to find.

First sequencing of a free-living organism's complete genome

Scientists at TIGR published the full genome of Haemophilus influenzae — the first time anyone had read the complete DNA of a free-living organism. Using shotgun sequencing to assemble the 1.8-million-base-pair genome, they demonstrated that whole-genome sequencing was not just theoretically possible but practically achievable, at speed.

First HIV protease inhibitor approved

In December, the FDA approved saquinavir. Ritonavir and indinavir followed in 1996, and the combination of three drugs — HAART — could suppress HIV to undetectable levels in blood. A disease that had been taking tens of thousands of lives each year became, for patients with access to treatment, something people survived.

Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem published

In May, Andrew Wiles's corrected proof, completed with Richard Taylor, was published in the Annals of Mathematics — an entire issue of the journal, for a problem that Fermat claimed to have solved in a margin. The proof used modular forms and elliptic curves to settle a conjecture 358 years old.

Galileo probe enters Jupiter's atmosphere

On 7 December, Galileo's atmospheric probe plunged into Jupiter and transmitted data for 57 minutes before being crushed, measuring winds exceeding 600 km/h and finding far less water than models had predicted. The Galileo orbiter, arriving simultaneously, began an eight-year study of the Jovian system.

Java programming language released publicly

Sun Microsystems unveiled Java at SunWorld on 23 May under the promise 'write once, run anywhere' — meaning a Java program should run on any computer that had a Java Virtual Machine installed, without modification. The promise was approximately kept, and Java became one of the most widely used programming languages ever written.