2006

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Universe's First Wrinkles, Mapped

John C. Mather · George F. Smoot

When NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite launched in 1989, its mission was to look at the oldest light in the universe — the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, cooled by thirteen billion years of cosmic expansion to a mere 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. What Mather and Smoot found, buried in that ancient static, was astonishing in its precision and its implication: COBE's maps showed the radiation matched a perfect blackbody spectrum almost exactly, confirming the Big Bang's thermal signature with an exactness that made rival cosmologies untenable, and revealed temperature fluctuations of just one part in a hundred thousand — the quantum wrinkles, frozen into the infant universe, from which all subsequent structure would grow. That second finding was perhaps the more vertiginous: every galaxy, every filament, every great wall of matter in the observable cosmos traces back to an almost imperceptible unevenness in the first moments of existence. George Smoot called it "like seeing the face of God," which was either profound or overwritten, depending on your temperament. A universe without that slightly uneven start is one of infinite, featureless, empty gas — no stars, no planets, no one to notice.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Catching a Gene Mid-Sentence

Roger D. Kornberg

Every protein your body has ever made began with the same improbable act: a molecular machine called RNA polymerase clamped onto your DNA, read off a gene letter by letter, and transcribed it into messenger RNA that ribosomes could use as a recipe. Biochemists knew this had to happen; what they did not know, until Kornberg spent years coaxing protein crystals out of yeast, was what it actually looked like at atomic resolution. His crystallographic images, published in a series of papers around 2001, revealed the entire eukaryotic transcription machinery caught mid-sentence — the DNA template threading through, the RNA product emerging, the dozen or so subunit proteins arranged around the central polymerase like an audience around a reader. It was the central dogma made visible. Kornberg's father Arthur had won the Nobel in 1959 for work on DNA synthesis, making them one of very few father-and-son pairs to hold the prize — a piece of genetic inheritance that outperformed most.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Silencing System Hiding in Plain Sight

Andrew Z. Fire · Craig C. Mello

In 1998, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello published a paper in Nature that quietly rewrote the instruction manual for molecular biology. Working with the roundworm C. elegans, they showed that injecting double-stranded RNA — two complementary strands bound together — silenced whichever gene the sequence matched, far more potently than either strand alone. The mechanism, RNA interference, turned out to have been running in cells all along: a system for protecting genomes against viruses and for fine-tuning gene expression, operating in parallel to everything scientists had been studying for decades without noticing. The Nobel arrived in 2006, only eight years after the discovery, which for a committee not known for haste was essentially a standing ovation. The practical consequences were immediate and large: RNAi became a standard tool for switching off genes in the laboratory, and therapies based on the same principle are now used to treat conditions ranging from hereditary liver disease to high cholesterol.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Istanbul's Sadness, Given a Name

Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk grew up in Istanbul at a time when the city was still managing the long melancholy of imperial retreat — Ottoman grandeur reduced to rubble and nostalgia, Western modernity arriving as a kind of polite embarrassment. He turned that atmosphere into a literary mode, coining or at least popularising the Turkish word hüzün — a collective, elegiac sadness for what has passed — and made it the emotional key of novels like The Black Book, My Name Is Red, and Snow, which move between history, detective fiction, and political unease with the easy confidence of a writer entirely at home in ambiguity. The Swedish Academy described his work as an exploration of "the clash and interlacing of cultures," which was gracious, if somewhat bloodless; the Turkish government's response — a criminal prosecution the previous year for "insulting Turkishness" after he publicly acknowledged the Armenian genocide — rather confirmed the observation more vividly than the citation managed. His legacy is a body of work that takes seriously the idea that identity and history are the same argument, conducted across centuries.

Nobel Peace Prize

Twenty-Seven Dollars, Lent Without Collateral

Muhammad Yunus · Grameen Bank

In 1974, amid a famine in Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus — then an economics professor — walked to a nearby village and was struck by the mathematics of poverty: a woman who made bamboo stools needed the equivalent of a few cents to buy raw materials but was borrowing from a moneylender at rates that ensured she would never escape. He lent twenty-seven dollars to forty-two villagers out of his own pocket and recovered the full amount. From that experiment grew Grameen Bank, founded formally in 1983, which by 2006 had extended microcredit to roughly seven million borrowers in Bangladesh, over ninety percent of them women, on the theory that the poor are creditworthy and merely excluded from capital by structural prejudice rather than any deficiency of ambition. The model spread to dozens of countries and spawned an entire field of microfinance. Its record has since been examined with more complexity — some studies find modest effects, others smaller ones — but the Nobel committee honoured the foundational idea: that sustainable development could be built from the dignity of small loans, not the condescension of large ones.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Workers Catch On, the Curve Breaks

Edmund S. Phelps

For most of the 1960s, policymakers in the United States and Britain operated under a reassuring premise: by tolerating a little more inflation, they could reliably purchase a little less unemployment, the two variables trading off along a curve the economist A.W. Phillips had fitted to historical data. Edmund Phelps, working independently at roughly the same time as Milton Friedman, dismantled that comfort in a 1968 paper by asking what happened once workers caught on. If inflation rose, workers would demand higher wages to compensate; the real wage would stay the same; employment would return to its previous level; and the only lasting effect would be a higher price level. There was, in the long run, no trade-off — only an "expectations-augmented" Phillips curve that taught governments they couldn't trick their way to prosperity. Central banks took roughly a decade and a painful recession to absorb the lesson, but the frameworks they now use to think about credibility, inflation targets, and long-run neutrality are essentially Phelps's, stated in cleaner language.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Why Spaghetti Never Snaps Clean

Basile Audoly · Sébastien Neukirch

Richard Feynman — a man who helped develop quantum electrodynamics, won a Nobel Prize, and cracked safes for recreation — reportedly spent an embarrassing amount of time at his kitchen table trying to break a spaghetti strand in exactly two pieces and failing. The pasta always shattered into three or more. Feynman, characteristically, could not let this rest but also could not solve it. It took until 2005 for physicists Basile Audoly and Sébastien Neukirch to explain why: when a dry spaghetti rod snaps, the initial break releases a flexural wave that travels along the strand, causing localised curvature spikes at other points that exceed the breaking threshold before the vibration can damp out — cascading fractures from a single snap. The Ig Nobel celebrated what is, on reflection, a genuinely lovely piece of applied mechanics: the physics of catastrophic elastic failure as demonstrated by your dinner.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Mosquitoes Prefer Your Feet, and Cheese

Bart Knols · Ruurd de Jong

Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, and its primary vector — the female Anopheles gambiae mosquito — is fiendishly difficult to trap because it finds hosts by smell, and human odour is a complicated bouquet of several hundred volatile compounds. Researchers Bart Knols and Ruurd de Jong, working in the 1990s, discovered that the mosquito shows a marked preference for feet and ankles and is drawn, with similar enthusiasm, to Limburger cheese. The connection is not accidental: both feet and Limburger are colonised by the same genus of bacteria, Brevibacterium, which produces the characteristic volatile compounds that A. gambiae interprets as "dinner nearby." The finding was both genuinely publishable science and the sort of sentence that stops a dinner party: mosquitoes like Limburger cheese because it smells like your feet. The practical upshot — simple, cheap cheese-baited traps — was rather less absurd than it sounds.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

A Teenager-Repelling Tone, Turned Into a Ringtone

Howard Stapleton

Howard Stapleton, a Welsh inventor and father of four, noticed that teenagers loitering outside shops were troublesome and that adults could not hear sounds above about 17 kilohertz while teenagers could — the natural high-frequency hearing loss of age having its uses at last. He built the Mosquito, a device that emits a piercing 17.4-kilohertz tone, essentially inaudible to anyone over twenty-five and genuinely unpleasant to those younger, designed for installation outside shops and bus shelters to move along unwanted youth. Shopkeepers loved it. Then the teenagers, with the resource of the genuinely resourceful, discovered they could load the tone onto their mobile phones as a ringtone — allowing them to receive texts in class while their teachers heard nothing. The Mosquito had been designed to deploy adulthood as a weapon against youth; youth promptly flipped it around. The Ig Nobel committee, in awarding the Peace Prize, recognised a device that managed to irritate an entire generation and then hand them the means of revenge.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Long Words Make You Sound Dumber

Daniel M. Oppenheimer

Princeton psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer published a paper in 2006 whose argument could be summarised in a single sentence: people who write in needlessly complicated language are judged by their readers as less intelligent, not more. He demonstrated this across five studies — swapping simple and complex versions of the same text, having students read writing samples with fonts made deliberately hard to read, analysing personal statements — and found the effect consistent and significant. The paper's title, characteristically, was "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," which was either a splendid act of self-aware absurdity or a claim to the Ig Nobel assembled with unusual precision. The real finding is a small vindication of readers everywhere: the academic habit of obscuring ordinary ideas in the armour of jargon does not signal intelligence, it signals the desire to signal intelligence, which is a different and less admirable thing.

Ig Nobel Prize in Ornithology

A Built-In Seatbelt for a Woodpecker's Brain

Ivan R. Schwab · Philip R. A. May

A woodpecker drives its beak into a tree trunk at speeds up to 7 metres per second, decelerating at more than a thousand times the force of gravity with each blow, and repeats this somewhere between eight thousand and twelve thousand times a day. By any conventional neurological accounting, the bird should be concussed before lunch. Ivan Schwab and Philip R.A. May investigated why it is not, and found an engineering solution of considerable elegance: the woodpecker's skull is thick and spongy, arranged to absorb and distribute shock; the brain sits snugly within, with minimal cerebrospinal fluid to allow it to slosh; the beak is asymmetric, with the lower mandible slightly longer, so the force of impact travels around rather than directly through the cranium; and the hyoid bone — an extraordinary structure that wraps almost entirely around the skull — acts as a seatbelt for the brain. Engineers at several universities have since used the woodpecker's architecture as a model for shock-absorbing materials. The bird, characteristically, has not applied for a patent.

Ig Nobel Prize in Acoustics

The Blackboard Screech Isn't in the Treble

D. Lynn Halpern · Randolph Blake · James Hillenbrand

Halpern, Blake, and Hillenbrand set out to determine why the sound of fingernails dragged down a blackboard is so universally and viscerally unbearable. They recorded the offending noise, manipulated it to strip out different frequency bands, and played the versions back to listeners to isolate which components carried the horror. The surprising result was that removing the high frequencies did little to lessen the discomfort; it was the middle frequencies, in roughly the same range as much of human speech, that did the damage — contradicting the intuitive assumption that the shrill top notes were to blame. The team speculated that the sound might resemble a primate warning cry, though the evidence for that remained thin. The committee honoured a study that took one of the most reliably awful sounds known to humanity and examined it with commendable calm.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Listening to a Wheel of Cheddar Ripen

Antonio Mulet · José Javier Benedito · José Bon

This Spanish team measured the speed of ultrasound as it travels through cheddar cheese, and how that speed varies with temperature — which sounds like a joke until one considers that the food industry genuinely needs non-destructive ways to assess the ripeness and internal condition of a cheese without cutting it open. Ultrasound offers exactly that: the velocity of sound through the cheese depends on its density, fat content, and structure, so a careful acoustic measurement can reveal the state of the interior while leaving the wheel intact. The researchers mapped the relationship rigorously across a range of temperatures, producing data of real use to quality control. The committee honoured a paper that turned the humble cheddar into an acoustic medium; the cheese, unharmed, went on to be eaten in the ordinary way.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics

The Arithmetic of Nobody Blinking

Nic Svenson · Piers Barnes

Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of Australia's national science agency addressed a problem familiar to anyone who has tried to photograph a large group: someone always blinks. From the average frequency and duration of a blink, they worked out how many exposures a photographer needs to take to be reasonably confident of capturing at least one shot in which everyone's eyes are open. Their rule of thumb — for groups of fewer than about twenty people in good light, divide the number of subjects by three; in poor light, divide by two — is genuinely useful and grounded in honest probability. The committee honoured a calculation that converts a universal photographic frustration into a tractable statistics problem, and so offers the harried photographer something better than hope, which is arithmetic.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

A Cure for Hiccups, Discovered Twice

Francis M. Fesmire · Majed Odeh · Harry Bassan · Arie Oliven

Francis Fesmire, an emergency physician in Tennessee, published a case report describing the termination of a patient's intractable hiccups by the application of digital rectal massage — a remedy he arrived at when the standard measures had failed, and which, improbably, worked. Some years later an Israeli team of Odeh, Bassan, and Oliven independently reported the identical manoeuvre for the identical complaint, and the committee, recognising a convergence of medical minds upon an unlikely intervention, awarded the two groups jointly. The physiological logic is not absurd: stimulation of the vagus nerve, which the technique achieves, can interrupt the hiccup reflex, and other vagal manoeuvres are entirely standard. It is the particular route chosen here that lends the finding its notoriety. The committee honoured a genuine, if seldom volunteered, contribution to the treatment of a maddening condition.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

Even Dung Beetles Have Standards

Wasmia Al-Houty · Faten Al-Mussalam

Wasmia Al-Houty and Faten Al-Mussalam of Kuwait University established, through patient observation, that the dung beetle — an animal whose entire livelihood is built upon excrement — is nonetheless a discriminating eater, showing a clear preference for the dung of some animals over that of others. Offered a selection, the beetles in their study favoured horse dung, which is to say that even within a diet most creatures would decline outright, there exists a hierarchy of quality to which the connoisseur attends. The finding is a small but genuine contribution to entomology and waste ecology, given the considerable service dung beetles perform in clearing and recycling the droppings of large herbivores. The committee honoured the demonstration that fussiness survives even at the bottom of the food chain, where one might reasonably have expected it to have been given up.

Turing Award

Teaching the Compiler to Think Ahead

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Frances E. Allen

When Frances Allen joined IBM Research in 1957, she was hired to teach Fortran to scientists working on nuclear codes — a temporary assignment that lasted forty-five years. She stayed because the problem of making programs run faster turned out to be an inexhaustible one, and she was unusually good at it. Her contribution was to formalise the way compilers analyse programs before execution: techniques for building program flow graphs, for identifying which variables depend on which, for detecting which operations can be safely reordered or eliminated entirely. These methods — program dependence analysis, data-flow analysis, loop transformations — became the theoretical backbone of every optimising compiler written since, meaning that every modern processor running at its potential speed owes something to Allen's frameworks. She was the first woman to receive the Turing Award in its forty-year history, a fact that says more about computing's squandered opportunities than about any shortage of women equal to its hardest problems.

Fields Medal

Four Medals, One Declined in St Petersburg

Fields Medal

Andrei Okounkov · Grigori Perelman · Terence Tao · Wendelin Werner

The 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid distributed four Fields Medals, which is the full number allowed, and managed to generate more drama than most awards ceremonies twice the size. Andrei Okounkov was recognised for linking probability theory to algebraic geometry and representation theory, finding unexpected bridges between fields that had not previously noticed each other. Wendelin Werner was cited for work on random planar curves and their connections to statistical physics. Terence Tao, then thirty-one and already described by colleagues in terms usually reserved for exceptional historical figures, received the medal for work spanning prime numbers, partial differential equations, combinatorics, and harmonic analysis — a range so implausible it sounds assembled for a grant application. And Grigori Perelman, who had proved the Poincaré conjecture and the more general Geometrisation conjecture by adapting Richard Hamilton's Ricci flow technique, declined to appear, declined the medal, and had already declined the Clay Millennium Prize of one million dollars. He was living quietly with his mother in St Petersburg and was not particularly interested in any of this.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

The Enzyme That Rebuilds Chromosome Tips

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

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

Every time a cell divides and copies its DNA, it faces a structural problem: the machinery that replicates the chromosome cannot copy all the way to the tip, so a little is lost with each round. Without some mechanism of repair, chromosomes would erode to nothing over a lifetime of cell division. Elizabeth Blackburn, studying a single-celled organism called Tetrahymena in the late 1970s, identified the repetitive sequences at chromosome ends — telomeres — and worked out that they serve as expendable buffers, protecting the meaningful genetic material behind them. Jack Szostak confirmed, by elegant experiment, that telomeres protect chromosome ends from being degraded. Then in 1984, Blackburn and her graduate student Carol Greider discovered the enzyme telomerase, which replenishes telomere sequences after copying, explaining how cells can divide repeatedly without catastrophic loss. The three shared the Lasker in 2006 and, three years later, the Nobel. Telomerase is now understood to be implicated in both ageing — its decline contributing to cellular senescence — and cancer, where tumours reactivate it to divide without limit.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

A Psychoanalyst Who Tested His Own Theory

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Aaron T. Beck

In the 1960s, Aaron Beck was a practising psychoanalyst in Philadelphia who had the scientific instinct to test his own assumptions — a quality not universal in his field — and found, somewhat inconveniently, that the psychoanalytic theory of depression did not match what his patients actually reported. Rather than the inward aggression the theory predicted, they described a persistent stream of negative automatic thoughts about themselves, their futures, and the world. Beck developed cognitive therapy to address exactly those patterns: short-term, structured, collaborative sessions in which patients learned to identify distorted thinking, examine the evidence for it, and construct more accurate alternatives. It was systematic in a way that psychotherapy had rarely been, and it invited clinical trials. Those trials, accumulated over decades, established cognitive therapy as one of the most robustly tested treatments for depression in existence, and its descendant cognitive-behavioural therapy is now practised in some form by therapists on every continent. Beck received the Lasker at ninety-five years old, having watched his essentially practical idea become the backbone of a global therapeutic infrastructure.

First direct observation of dark matter

Something You Could Finally Point To

Dark matter had been inferred from its gravitational effects since the 1930s — galaxies spinning faster than their visible mass could explain, galaxy clusters bending light more than they should — but inference is not observation, and physicists had spent decades with no way to point at the stuff directly. Then in 2006, a team led by Doug Clowe published Chandra X-ray and gravitational-lensing data from the Bullet Cluster, the smoking aftermath of a collision between two galaxy clusters roughly 3.8 billion light-years away. The collision had sorted the contents by how they interact: the hot gas, which experiences the electromagnetic force and thus smashes and slows, had piled up between the clusters as a bright X-ray mass; but the gravitational-lensing maps showed that most of the mass had sailed straight through the collision point without slowing at all — because whatever it was, it barely interacted with anything except gravity. This was exactly what dark matter predicts. The paper did not resolve what dark matter actually is. But it did provide something scientists had been waiting decades for: something you could point to.

Tiktaalik roseae described — fish-tetrapod transitional fossil

A Fish That Could Almost Do a Push-Up

In 2004, Neil Shubin, Ted Daeschler, and Farish Jenkins went to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic — one of the more hostile field sites imaginable — because the rocks there are 375 million years old and were once a shallow tropical river delta, precisely the kind of environment where evolutionary theory predicted the water-to-land transition in vertebrates ought to have left a record. They were looking for a transitional form between fish and four-limbed animals, and they found one: Tiktaalik roseae, a creature with scales and fins but also a neck it could move independently of its body, ribs that could bear weight, and fins with an internal bone structure — a proto-wrist, an elbow, a shoulder — that foreshadow the forelimbs of every terrestrial vertebrate since. It could, in the right circumstances, do something like a push-up. The discovery was the result of a deliberate, theory-driven prediction about where to dig, which is either inspiring or unremarkable, depending on whether you think science is supposed to work that way. It is.

First induced pluripotent stem cells from mouse skin

A Skin Cell Persuaded to Forget

For most of the twentieth century, the assumption was that cellular development ran in one direction: an embryonic stem cell, capable of becoming anything, would specialise over time into a liver cell or a neuron or a skin cell, losing its options permanently as it went. Shinya Yamanaka's team at Kyoto University upended this in 2006 with an experiment of elegant simplicity: they introduced just four transcription factors — Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc — into ordinary adult mouse skin cells, and watched the cells revert to something indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells, capable again of differentiating into virtually any tissue type. Yamanaka called them induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs. The implications were immediate and significant. A method for producing patient-specific stem cells without using embryos bypassed the central ethical objection that had politicised stem cell research for a decade, and opened the prospect of personalised regenerative medicine — growing replacement tissue from a patient's own cells, removing the rejection problem at the root. Yamanaka received the Nobel in 2012. The skin cell, it turned out, had not forgotten anything; it had merely been persuaded to stop pretending.

Pluto reclassified as a dwarf planet

Eight Planets, Settled by a Vote

Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, who was twenty-four years old and had been scanning photographic plates for the predicted Planet X, and it was called the ninth planet for seventy-six years largely because no one had written down what a planet actually was. The problem came to a head in the early 2000s as astronomers kept finding Kuiper Belt objects of comparable size — Eris, announced in 2005, was actually slightly more massive — which raised the uncomfortable prospect of a solar system with ten planets, or twelve, or eventually dozens. On 24 August 2006, the International Astronomical Union adopted its first formal definition, requiring a planet to orbit the Sun, be massive enough for gravity to pull it into a roughly spherical shape, and have cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit of other debris. Pluto, embedded in the Kuiper Belt among thousands of comparable bodies, failed the third test and became a "dwarf planet." Eight planets remained. The decision was ratified by a vote of the assembled astronomers — a somewhat unusual way to settle a question in astronomy — and has been contested with surprising passion in certain quarters, most of whom seem to feel mainly that Pluto, having been a planet for their entire childhoods, deserved a more dignified retirement.

Stardust mission returns comet samples to Earth

Comet Dust, Caught in Frozen Smoke

NASA's Stardust spacecraft launched in 1999 on a mission of remarkable specificity: to fly through the coma of comet Wild 2, catch some of it in a collector filled with aerogel — a material so porous it is barely more substantial than air — and bring it home. On 15 January 2006, a capsule re-entered the atmosphere over the Utah desert and landed by parachute, carrying thousands of dust grains extracted at the cost of roughly a decade of cruise, encounter, and return. The samples, once analysed, told a complicated story: alongside the primitive organic compounds expected in a comet were silicate minerals that apparently formed in the hot inner solar system, close to the young Sun, and were then somehow transported to the frigid outer reaches where comets assemble. The implication is a more dynamic and well-mixed early solar system than the tidy condensation models had assumed — material formed near the Sun scattered to the outer system by processes not yet fully understood, carried in comets that would spend billions of years in cold storage before occasionally swinging past our instruments.

Saturn's moon Enceladus confirmed as active geysers

Ice That Looked Younger Than It Should

When Voyager 2 flew past Enceladus in 1981, it photographed a small, bright moon with a suspiciously young and smooth surface — evidence that something had been resurfacing it, though what was unclear. The Cassini spacecraft, arriving at Saturn in 2004, looked more carefully and found the answer above the south pole: towering plumes of water vapour and ice particles erupting from a system of fractures — the "tiger stripes" — at temperatures warmer than the surrounding terrain, fed by a liquid water reservoir beneath the icy shell. The findings, published in Science in 2006, transformed Enceladus from a geological curiosity into one of the most consequential bodies in the solar system: a moon barely 500 kilometres across, which should by rights have frozen solid long ago, maintaining a warm subsurface ocean, venting its chemistry directly into space for any spacecraft to sample. It has since become one of the primary targets in the search for conditions that might support life — a discovery that began with a spacecraft noticing that some ice looked younger than it should.