2004

Nobel Prize in Physics

David J. Gross · H. David Politzer · Frank Wilczek

The force binding quarks inside protons behaves backwards from anything familiar: the closer the quarks get, the weaker it becomes, so they move almost freely at short range. Gross, Politzer, and Wilczek discovered this asymptotic freedom in 1973, making the strong nuclear force finally calculable and completing the theoretical foundations of the Standard Model.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Aaron Ciechanover · Avram Hershko · Irwin Rose

Cells do not merely build proteins — they also dismantle them, tagging unwanted or damaged ones with a small molecule called ubiquitin and feeding them to a molecular shredder, the proteasome. Ciechanover, Hershko, and Rose worked out this disposal system, revealing a quality-control mechanism as important, in its way, as the ribosome that builds the proteins in the first place.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Richard Axel · Linda B. Buck

You can distinguish perhaps a trillion distinct smells, yet the machinery starts with roughly a thousand receptor proteins coded by the largest gene family in the human genome. Axel and Buck found those genes, showed how signals from different receptors combine to encode odour identity in the brain, and revealed how the nose talks to the mind.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Elfriede Jelinek

Jelinek's novels — especially The Piano Teacher — are exercises in discomfort, their prose crammed with society's clichés and turned against the characters who mouth them. The Swedish Academy cited her "extraordinary linguistic zeal" and a vision of subjugation that offers no reassurance to anyone.

Nobel Peace Prize

Wangari Maathai

Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in 1977 and over the decades oversaw the planting of tens of millions of trees, linking reforestation directly to women's rights and democratic governance — three causes that turned out, in her hands, to be the same cause. She was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Finn E. Kydland · Edward C. Prescott

Kydland and Prescott showed that a government promising low inflation today can credibly be predicted to inflate its way out of trouble tomorrow, so that the promise is not believed — the time-consistency problem that explains why independent central banks with clear mandates tend to work better than political ones. Their real business cycle models were simultaneously controversial and influential.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Ben Wilson · Lawrence Dill · Robert Batty · Magnus Whalberg · Håkan Westerberg

Herrings, the researchers discovered, communicate by releasing bubbles from their hind ends — a phenomenon given the acronym FRT, for Fast Repetitive Tick. The sounds appear at night and may help schools stay together in the dark, though the fish in question could not be reached for comment.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Steven Stack · James Gundlach

Stack and Gundlach found a statistically significant association between country music radio airplay and metropolitan suicide rates, independent of other social factors. The study generated lively debate about whether the music causes the despair or simply keeps it company.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Ramesh Balasubramaniam · Michael Turvey

Balasubramaniam and Turvey characterised the body movements that keep a hula hoop aloft as a form of nonlinear coupled oscillation. Children in playgrounds worldwide had been solving this problem empirically for decades without any assistance from biomechanics.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Daisuke Inoue

Inoue built the first karaoke machine in Kobe in 1971, apparently not foreseeing what he was setting in motion. The Ig Nobel citation credited him with providing "an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other" — a description that anyone who has spent an evening at a karaoke bar will find thoroughly earned.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Daniel Simons · Christopher Chabris

Simons and Chabris showed that subjects concentrating on counting basketball passes routinely failed to notice a person in a gorilla costume walking through the scene. Half the population watched the footage and still don't believe it, which is rather the point.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Vinton G. Cerf · Robert E. Kahn

The internet's basic operating rules — how packets are addressed, routed, and reassembled across incompatible networks — were laid out in a 1974 paper by Cerf and Kahn. Every device you have ever connected to the internet speaks a protocol that paper invented.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Pierre Chambon · Ronald M. Evans · Elwood V. Jensen

Oestrogen, testosterone, thyroid hormone — these small molecules travel through the bloodstream and find their way inside cells to directly change which genes are read. Chambon, Evans, and Jensen identified the nuclear receptors that make this possible, revealing a signalling system of vast importance in development, physiology, and disease.

Graphene isolated for the first time

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at Manchester used ordinary adhesive tape to peel single-atom-thick sheets of carbon from a graphite block — a method so simple that colleagues had dismissed it as implausible. The resulting material was stronger than steel, nearly transparent, and a superb electrical conductor; the two would share the 2010 Nobel Prize for it.

Homo floresiensis announced

A partial skeleton from Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores turned out to belong to an adult female hominin who stood roughly one metre tall and had a brain about the size of a chimpanzee's — yet the bones dated to just 80,000 years ago, when modern humans were already living elsewhere. Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the Hobbit, implied that small-brained hominins survived far longer into modern human history than anyone had suspected.

Spirit and Opportunity rovers confirm ancient water on Mars

Spirit landed on 4 January and Opportunity on 25 January. Within weeks, Opportunity's instruments found sedimentary rocks layered and cross-bedded by flowing water, and haematite spherules that form only in liquid — evidence that Meridiani Planum had once been the floor of a salt sea. Mars had been wet, and the rovers were sitting in the evidence.

Cassini enters Saturn orbit

On 1 July, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft fired its main engine for 96 minutes to slow into Saturn orbit — the first spacecraft to do so. The initial passes revealed Titan's thick nitrogen atmosphere in unprecedented detail and set the stage for the Huygens probe's descent, six months away.

Death of Francis Crick

Francis Crick

Crick died in San Diego on 28 July at 88. He and Watson determined the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953; in his later decades at the Salk Institute he turned his attention to the neural basis of consciousness, a problem he found no less interesting and considerably more difficult. The work on DNA earned the 1962 Nobel; the work on consciousness remains unfinished.