2006

Nobel Prize in Physics

John C. Mather · George F. Smoot

The COBE satellite, launched in 1989, mapped the cosmic microwave background with a precision that showed the radiation's spectrum to be essentially a perfect blackbody — and found, buried within it, temperature variations of one part in a hundred thousand that are the seeds of every galaxy. Mather and Smoot turned that map into the strongest available evidence for the Big Bang.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Roger D. Kornberg

Kornberg produced detailed crystallographic images of the eukaryotic transcription machinery caught in the act of reading DNA — the molecular assembly that copies your genes into RNA. The images showed, for the first time, how the process actually looks at atomic resolution.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Andrew Z. Fire · Craig C. Mello

Fire and Mello showed in 1998 that double-stranded RNA can silence genes with sequence-matching precision — a phenomenon called RNA interference. The discovery arrived just eight years before the Nobel, which is close to a record for speed, and opened a new layer of gene regulation that had been operating undetected in every cell.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk's Istanbul is a city layered with Ottoman memory and Western aspiration and a particular melancholy — hüzün — that he has made his own. The committee recognised his work as an exploration of "the clash and interlacing of cultures," and the Turkish government expressed its displeasure in ways that only confirmed the point.

Nobel Peace Prize

Muhammad Yunus · Grameen Bank

Yunus began lending small sums to impoverished Bangladeshis in the 1970s on the observation that the very poor are creditworthy and merely lack access to credit. The Grameen Bank he founded had by 2006 made microloans to millions of borrowers, predominantly women, demonstrating that development could grow from the bottom rather than being applied from above.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Edmund S. Phelps

Phelps showed in the late 1960s that the trade-off between inflation and unemployment assumed by the Phillips curve evaporates in the long run, because workers will eventually see through attempts to surprise them with inflation. The insight reoriented how central banks think about their own credibility.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Basile Audoly · Sébastien Neukirch

Bend a dry spaghetti strand and it almost never breaks in two — it shatters into three or more pieces. Audoly and Neukirch explained why: the initial snap sends a wave of flexing along the rod that causes additional fractures before the whole thing can settle. Richard Feynman had been bothered by this problem and never solved it.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Bart Knols · Ruurd de Jong

The female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae, Knols and de Jong found, is attracted to human feet and to Limburger cheese with approximately equal enthusiasm. The cheese and the feet share certain volatile compounds; the finding opened the intriguing possibility of cheese-baited mosquito traps.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Howard Stapleton

Stapleton's Mosquito device emits a high-frequency tone audible to teenagers but inaudible to most adults over 25, exploiting the natural decline in high-frequency hearing with age. Invented as a teenager-dispersal tool, it was promptly repurposed by the teenagers themselves as a ringtone their teachers couldn't hear.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Daniel M. Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer demonstrated that people who write in unnecessarily complex language are rated as less intelligent by their readers — the opposite of what most academic writers appear to believe. He titled the paper with the longest and most complex title that academic publishing conventions permitted.

Ig Nobel Prize in Ornithology

Ivan R. Schwab · Philip R. A. May

A woodpecker strikes a tree at 6 to 7 metres per second, decelerating at over 1,000 g with each blow, hundreds of times a day. Schwab and May worked out how the bird avoids the concussion that would floor any mammal: a combination of skull geometry, a brain tightly packed in cerebrospinal fluid, and a beak structure that offsets the impact asymmetrically.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Frances E. Allen

Allen spent her career at IBM making compilers smarter — teaching them to analyse how programs actually use data and reorder operations for maximum efficiency. Her work on program dependence analysis became the foundation for modern optimising compilers. She was the first woman to receive the Turing Award.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Andrei Okounkov · Grigori Perelman · Terence Tao · Wendelin Werner

The 2006 medals were awarded in Madrid. Perelman was recognised for completing the proof of the Poincaré conjecture and promptly declined the medal, as he had already declined a lucrative Millennium Prize. Tao, whose range across mathematics is unusual, was cited for work spanning analysis, combinatorics, and number theory.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Elizabeth H. Blackburn · Carol W. Greider · Jack W. Szostak

The tips of chromosomes are capped by telomeres — repetitive sequences that protect the genetic material from degradation during copying. Blackburn identified the telomere sequence; Szostak confirmed its protective role; Greider and Blackburn discovered the enzyme, telomerase, that replenishes it. The three would share the 2009 Nobel for the same discovery.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Aaron T. Beck

Beck developed cognitive therapy in the 1960s as a structured, short-term treatment targeting the patterns of thought that sustain depression. Decades of clinical trials made it one of the most rigorously tested psychotherapies in existence — and one of the most widely practiced.

First direct observation of dark matter

Two galaxy clusters — the Bullet Cluster — had collided millions of years ago, and the evidence was still visible. X-ray images showed the hot gas had slowed and piled up at the point of collision; gravitational lensing maps showed the mass had passed straight through. The mass was dark matter, and here, for the first time, was something you could point to.

Tiktaalik roseae described — fish-tetrapod transitional fossil

From 375-million-year-old rocks on Ellesmere Island came a creature with fins that could do push-ups: Tiktaalik roseae, positioned precisely at the transition from fish to four-limbed vertebrates. It had a neck, ribs, and proto-wrists — anatomical features that predict where it sat in evolutionary history, which turned out to be exactly where the fossil was found.

First induced pluripotent stem cells from mouse skin

Shinya Yamanaka's team at Kyoto University inserted four transcription factors into adult mouse skin cells and watched them revert to an embryonic-like state — capable, once again, of becoming almost any cell type. The experiment suggested that cellular identity is less fixed than biology had assumed, and that embryos need not be involved in making stem cells.

Pluto reclassified as a dwarf planet

On 24 August, the International Astronomical Union adopted a formal definition of planet for the first time, requiring that a body dominate its orbital neighbourhood. Pluto, which shares the Kuiper Belt with thousands of comparable objects, failed this test and was reclassified. Eight planets remained. The debate about whether this was fair to Pluto continues in certain quarters.

Stardust mission returns comet samples to Earth

On 15 January, a capsule from NASA's Stardust mission landed in Utah carrying dust grains caught in aerogel collectors as the spacecraft flew through the coma of comet Wild 2. Analysis found organic molecules and silicate minerals thought to have formed close to the young Sun — carried in comets to the outer solar system and back.

Saturn's moon Enceladus confirmed as active geysers

Cassini data published in Science confirmed that Enceladus is erupting: geysers of water ice and vapour shoot from fractures at its south pole, fed by a liquid reservoir below the surface. A moon that barely 300 kilometres across turned out to have more going on inside it than most bodies ten times its size.