2007

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Thin Sandwich That Reads Minute Fields

Albert Fert · Peter Grünberg

In 1988, Albert Fert in Paris and Peter Grünberg in Jülich were working independently on ultrathin magnetic multilayers — sandwiches of iron and chromium just a few atoms thick — when they each noticed that tiny magnetic fields could swing the electrical resistance of these structures by an extraordinary proportion, sometimes tens of percent in a single step. The effect, which they named giant magnetoresistance, was not just large; it was so large it defied intuitions built up over a century of classical physics. Engineers at IBM realised within a decade that this sensitivity was exactly what a hard-drive read head needed: the same GMR principle could detect the minute magnetic fluctuations encoding bits on a spinning disk, and by the late 1990s virtually every hard drive on the market used it. The result was a compression of storage density that turned terabytes from an engineering fantasy into something you could drop in your jacket pocket. A world without Fert and Grünberg's quiet discovery is one where cloud computing remains a niche curiosity and where the laptop's hard drive holds roughly what a shoebox of floppy disks once managed.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Choreography Hiding on a Metal Surface

Gerhard Ertl

For most of the twentieth century, the surfaces of solid catalysts were treated by industry as useful mysteries — you knew they worked, roughly how to tune them, and almost nothing about why. Gerhard Ertl spent his career at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin dismantling that ignorance one elementary reaction step at a time, developing ultrahigh-vacuum techniques that let him watch individual molecules adsorb, dissociate, migrate, and combine on a pristine metal surface. His dissection of the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis — the reaction that underpins the nitrogen fertilisers feeding roughly half the world's population — revealed a sequence of molecular gymnastics that had been occurring in industrial reactors since 1913 without anyone knowing its choreography. He did the same for the catalytic converter and for the oxidation of carbon monoxide, establishing surface chemistry as a rigorous discipline rather than an artisanal craft. The Nobel committee rewarded a man who had, with characteristic patience, turned a black box into a transparent one.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Mouse Missing One Gene on Purpose

Mario R. Capecchi · Sir Martin J. Evans · Oliver Smithies

The central question of developmental genetics — what does any particular gene actually do in a living animal? — requires a method for switching genes off one by one and watching what breaks. Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies each worked out, in separate American laboratories during the 1980s, that a cell's own DNA-repair machinery could be hijacked to swap out a native gene for a version of your choosing, a trick called homologous recombination. Martin Evans, at Cambridge, had separately established how to grow mouse embryonic stem cells in culture without losing their ability to form every tissue in the body. Put the three discoveries together and you get the knockout mouse: an animal carrying a precise genetic deletion, a controlled experiment that nature could never run on its own. Thousands of strains now catalogue what happens when you silence each gene in the mammalian repertoire, and a large fraction of current drug targets were identified first in mice that couldn't make a particular protein. The committee, wisely, gave three prizes for what was really one idea.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Shopping Bags in Hand, the Call Came Anyway

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing had been writing for more than half a century — autobiographical African novels, the five-volume Children of Violence sequence, the iconoclastic The Golden Notebook, a stretch of Sufi-influenced science fiction that baffled readers who had just found their footing — when the Swedish Academy finally rang her in 2007. She was 87, the oldest Nobel laureate in literature to that point, and she was photographed on her doorstep carrying shopping bags, having returned from the supermarket entirely uninformed of the announcement. Her response, captured on film, was memorably dry: a small shrug, a mild 'oh Christ,' the evident reluctance of someone who had long since declined to perform surprise on command. Lessing's achievement is not that she wrote one masterpiece but that she kept refusing to write the same book twice, tracking what she called 'the small personal voice' through five decades of war, colonialism, feminism, and civilisational unease. The work does not comfort. That, perhaps, is its legacy.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Panel of Scientists and a Slideshow

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change · Al Gore

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization to do something that sounded straightforward and proved heroic: assemble, every few years, what the world's scientists actually knew about the climate, strip away the hyperbole, and produce a document that governments could use. By 2007, its fourth assessment report had reached a level of confidence in human-caused warming that the committee decided warranted recognition not just as science but as service to peace. Al Gore had been making roughly the same argument to audiences since the early 1990s, latterly via a documentary — An Inconvenient Truth — that won him an Oscar and placed the hockey-stick graph before millions of people who would never read an IPCC summary for policymakers. The Nobel committee combined the two recognitions into a single prize, which managed to be simultaneously apt and slightly awkward, as prizes shared between institutions and documentary filmmakers usually are.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Writing Rules Backward From the Outcome

Leonid Hurwicz · Eric S. Maskin · Roger B. Myerson

Most economic analysis asks: given these rules, what will rational agents do? Mechanism design reverses the question with elegant ambition: given the outcome you want, what rules should you write? Leonid Hurwicz had posed the problem in the 1960s, recognising that the central difficulty lay in private information — participants in any system know things about themselves that they have every incentive to conceal or misrepresent, and the rules must be designed to make honesty, or at least truthful revelation, their best option. Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson extended the theory into a rigorous framework that now underpins the design of spectrum auctions, government procurement rules, regulatory regimes, and voting systems. Hurwicz, who received the prize at 90, was the oldest Nobel laureate in any discipline at the time, having waited half a century for the economics profession to catch up with his question. A mechanism, well designed, makes people do the right thing for the wrong reasons — which is, arguably, the oldest problem in political philosophy, finally given a mathematical address.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

The Occupational Hazards of Sword Swallowing

Brian Witcombe · Dan Meyer

The medical literature had, prior to Witcombe and Meyer's intervention, maintained a dignified silence on the occupational health of professional sword swallowers — a gap that is either an oversight or a comment on editorial priorities. Their survey of forty-six practitioners produced a careful taxonomy of the hazards involved: sore throats being the occupational equivalent of the programmer's stiff wrist, with more serious perforations and lacerations forming the long tail of the risk distribution. Particularly illuminating was their finding that complications spiked when swallowers attempted multiple swords simultaneously, or when they were distracted by unexpected audience behaviour — a finding that is, on reflection, exactly what you would expect and somehow more alarming written in the passive voice of a peer-reviewed journal. The authors noted, with the understatement appropriate to the genre, that there appeared to be no formal training curriculum. Medicine, it turns out, has corners that have been waiting a long time for someone with a clipboard.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

One Equation for Every Wrinkle

L. Mahadevan · Enrique Cerda Villablanca

Thin sheets wrinkle. Everyone knows this; nobody, until L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda sat down to think about it carefully, had written a single equation that predicted exactly how. Their analysis of tensional wrinkling — the fine parallel ridges that appear when a thin elastic membrane is stretched at its edges — produced a formula relating wavelength to the thickness of the sheet, the elasticity of the material, and the tension applied, and it worked for everything from stretched skin to crumpled aluminium foil to plastic wrap draped over a bowl. The Ig Nobel is a gentle joke, but the physics is not: versions of their framework have been applied to understanding the folding of the cortex as the developing brain runs out of skull space, to the buckling of thin films in flexible electronics, and to the wrinkling of leaves under water stress. A single equation for all the wrinkles in the world is, upon reflection, either very tidy or slightly unsettling.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Vanilla, Extracted From an Unlikely Source

Mayu Yamamoto

Vanillin — the primary aroma compound that makes vanilla smell like vanilla — is one of the most widely used flavouring agents in the world, synthesised at industrial scale from petrochemical feedstocks or extracted from the cured pods of Vanilla planifolia. Mayu Yamamoto, working at the International Medical Center of Japan, demonstrated that it could also be extracted from cow dung, which is technically a lignocellulosic biomass and therefore not an absurd starting material from a chemistry standpoint, even if it is from every other standpoint. The process worked. The vanillin was identical. A New York dessert fair subsequently served vanilla ice cream made with the resulting compound, calling it 'Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist' and offering it to willing volunteers who were, presumably, told after the fact. What makes the prize work is not the grossness but the lesson: that our strongest associations between origin and quality are mostly constructed, and that a molecule is a molecule regardless of the provenance of the cow.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

A Census of Everything Living in Your Bed

Johanna E. M. H. van Bronswijk

Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University set out to perform a comprehensive ecological census of the domestic bed — not just the dust mites that feature in allergen pamphlets, but every organism sharing the mattress with its human occupants. The resulting inventory encompassed mites in impressive numbers, bacteria, fungi, insects at various stages of development, and, memorably, pseudoscorpions, which are arachnids you almost certainly did not know were living at close quarters with you. Her estimate, across Dutch households, suggested a mattress might comfortably host more than 1.5 million individual organisms. The science was meticulous, the sampling protocols were sound, and the findings were published in proper venues, which is what elevates the project from eccentric curiosity to genuine ecological survey. Van Bronswijk's real contribution was not the census itself but the epistemic jolt it delivers: that 'a good night's sleep' is, from a biodiversity standpoint, an extremely social occasion.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

The Three Letters That Break an Index

Glenda Browne

The definite article 'the' is, by most measures, the most common word in the English language, which makes it either a triumph of linguistic efficiency or, if you are an indexer, a persistent administrative nuisance. Glenda Browne, an Australian indexing professional, wrote 'The Definite Article: Acknowledging "The" in Index Entries' — a patient, serious examination of the many ways this three-letter word creates genuine filing chaos when it precedes a title, name, or entry, and the inconsistent conventions libraries and databases have developed over the years to handle it. Do you file 'The Beatles' under T or B? 'The Hague' under T or H? Different systems answer differently, and the inconsistency is maddening for anyone who depends on indexes to function. Browne's paper brought the dignity of formal analysis to a problem that librarians had been quietly suffering through for as long as alphabetical order has existed. The Ig Nobel committee recognised it with the Literature prize, which was, for once, precisely the right category.

Ig Nobel Prize in Aviation

Hamsters Beat Jetlag on the Little Blue Pill

Patricia V. Agostino · Santiago A. Plano · Diego A. Golombek

This Argentine team discovered that hamsters recover from jetlag faster when given sildenafil — Viagra. Simulating a transmeridian flight by advancing the animals' light cycle by six hours, they found that hamsters dosed with the drug reset their circadian rhythms more quickly than untreated ones, apparently because the compound interferes with the biochemical pathway that governs the body clock's response to light. The relevance to the grounded, sleep-deprived human traveller is obvious enough to have made headlines, though the researchers were careful to note that the effect worked only for eastward shifts and only at doses that did the hamsters no other conspicuous favours. The committee honoured a finding that manages to unite two of pharmacology's more reliably newsworthy subjects — the body clock and the little blue pill — in a single sentence about hamsters.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

A Net That Drops From the Ceiling

Kuo Cheng Hsieh

Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan patented a device for catching bank robbers by dropping a net over them from the ceiling, trapping the miscreant on the spot until the authorities could arrive. The mechanism, triggered by a teller or an alarm, deploys the net over the counter area and, in the inventor's conception, immobilises the robber in a tidy bundle of mesh, converting the tense standoff of an armed robbery into something closer to a fishing expedition. Whether any bank has installed the apparatus, and whether any robber has ever been apprehended in it, the record does not say. The committee honoured a solution of admirable directness to a problem usually addressed with cameras and silent alarms — the criminal simply caught, like a large and unwelcome fish, in a net.

Ig Nobel Prize in Linguistics

Rats Can Tell Japanese From Dutch

Juan Manuel Toro · Josep B. Trobalon · Núria Sebastián-Gallés

This team of Spanish researchers demonstrated that rats can be trained to distinguish spoken Japanese from spoken Dutch — a real finding about the rhythmic perception of language in a non-human animal — but that the ability collapses when the sentences are played backwards. Forwards, the two languages carry distinct prosodic signatures that a rat can learn to tell apart; reversed, the distinguishing rhythm is destroyed, and the rat is lost. The result bears on a genuine question in the science of language: how much of speech perception rests on general auditory machinery shared across mammals, and how much is peculiar to humans. The committee honoured a study proving, among other things, that a rat unable to tell backwards Japanese from backwards Dutch is, in this one respect, no worse off than the rest of us.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

The Bowl That Never Seemed to Empty

Brian Wansink

Brian Wansink of Cornell rigged a set of soup bowls to refill themselves imperceptibly from below, through a hidden tube, and invited diners to eat their fill. Those eating from the self-replenishing bowls consumed some seventy percent more soup than those with ordinary bowls, yet reported feeling no fuller and estimated they had eaten no more — demonstrating that people gauge how much they have eaten less by the sensations of the stomach than by the visual evidence of the bowl. Remove the visual cue and appetite obligingly follows the eye rather than the gut. The committee honoured an ingenious and mildly unsettling piece of research into the psychology of satiety; some of Wansink's later work would fall under serious question for data problems, but the bottomless bowl endures as a clean and memorable demonstration of how the eye governs the appetite.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

A Three-Page Proposal for a Love Bomb

Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio

The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, was honoured for a 1994 proposal to develop a chemical weapon — the "gay bomb," as it inevitably came to be known — that would be sprayed on enemy troops and cause them to become irresistibly sexually attracted to one another, thereby, in theory, dissolving the discipline and morale of the opposing force. The three-page proposal requested several million dollars, sat in a drawer, and surfaced years later through a freedom-of-information request, to considerable public astonishment. It was never built, and the military distanced itself from the idea with some speed. The committee honoured the laboratory for instinctively pursuing a nonlethal weapon of such unusual conception; the proposal survives as a small monument to the strange places a research brief can travel when asked to imagine everything.

Turing Award

Checking Every Corner a Test Suite Misses

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Edmund M. Clarke · E. Allen Emerson · Joseph Sifakis

Testing a complex system by running it and observing what happens is, at some level, a counsel of despair: the number of possible states in a modern microprocessor or communications protocol is so large that no finite test suite can cover them all, and the bugs that matter most — the ones that cause a fly-by-wire aircraft to behave unexpectedly or a cryptographic protocol to leak a key — tend to lurk in the rare corners that ordinary testing never reaches. Edmund Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis, working in the early 1980s at Carnegie Mellon and Grenoble, each contributed to model checking: a technique that represents a system's possible states as a graph and then exhaustively explores that graph to verify whether a formal specification — a property you require to hold — is satisfied everywhere or violated somewhere. The approach turned 'this software is correct' from an aspiration into a provable statement, within the bounds of what you can model. It is now embedded in the verification flows used to design Intel processors, in the tools that check communication protocols, and in the certification of safety-critical software. Clarke and Emerson liked to say the computer checks the computer — which is either reassuring or the beginning of an infinite regress, depending on your temperament.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

The Sentinel Cell That Wakes the Immune System

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Ralph M. Steinman

Ralph Steinman was a young cell biologist at Rockefeller University in 1973 when he and Zanvil Cohn described a new type of cell in lymphoid tissue — irregular, many-branched, unlike anything catalogued before — that they named dendritic for its resemblance to a neuron's arbour. The immunology establishment was, for a decade or more, politely unconvinced that these cells were anything more than background noise. Steinman spent the rest of his career proving otherwise, demonstrating that dendritic cells are the sentinels of the adaptive immune system: they ingest pathogens, process their proteins into peptide fragments, and present those fragments to T-cells in the signal that initiates an immune response. Vaccines, it turned out, work largely by activating dendritic cells. When Steinman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, he co-designed an experimental dendritic cell therapy for himself, incorporating his own tumour antigens, and received it alongside standard treatment — surviving four years with a cancer whose median survival was then measured in months. The 2011 Nobel Prize was announced three days after his death; the committee, having not known he had died, decided the award stood. It was an unusual posthumous honour for a man who had, in the end, used his own discovery to buy himself time.

Induced pluripotent stem cells derived from human cells

Skin Cells, Wound Back to the Beginning

The stem-cell debates of the early 2000s — bioethical, congressional, occasionally ferocious — rested on a single assumption: that pluripotent stem cells, capable of becoming any tissue in the body, could only be obtained from human embryos, which had to be destroyed in the process. Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University had in 2006 shown that mouse skin cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state by inserting just four transcription factors — Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc — and in November 2007 both Yamanaka's group and James Thomson's at the University of Wisconsin reported simultaneously that the same trick worked in human cells. The resulting induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, were not quite identical to embryonic stem cells, and years of careful work would be needed to understand the differences, but the principle was established: a patient's own skin cells could, in theory, be wound back to a developmental starting point and then nudged forward into any tissue needed for therapy or research — without embryos, without immune rejection, without the political firestorm that had slowed the field for nearly a decade. Yamanaka would receive the Nobel Prize in 2012. The four factors he identified are now simply called the Yamanaka factors, which is the kind of eponymous shorthand that tends to stick when a discovery reorganises an entire field.

First fast radio burst detected in archival data

A Five-Millisecond Pulse, Sleeping in Old Data

Duncan Lorimer, a radio astronomer at West Virginia University, and his student David Narkevic were working through archived recordings from the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales — data collected in 2001 during a survey of the Magellanic Clouds — when they found something that did not belong: a single pulse of radio emission, five milliseconds long, so bright it saturated the detector, yet dispersed across frequencies in a way that indicated it had travelled an enormous distance through ionised plasma before arriving. The dispersion measure placed the source at cosmological distances, well outside the Milky Way, which meant that whatever had produced this pulse had released, in a fraction of a second, more energy in radio waves than the Sun emits in thousands of years. Lorimer published in Science in 2007, and the phenomenon — fast radio bursts, or FRBs — was initially met with some scepticism: one unrepeated pulse in archival data is a hard thing to build a field on. It has since become a field of nearly feverish activity, with hundreds of bursts catalogued, at least one known to repeat, one detected within our own galaxy from a magnetar, and the underlying emission mechanism still actively contested. The Lorimer Burst was, in the taxonomy of discoveries, a door opened by accident into a room whose dimensions are still being measured.

Phoenix Mars Lander launched

Ice, Waiting Three Feet Down

The Phoenix Mars Lander lifted off from Cape Canaveral in August 2007 on a trajectory that would carry it to the Martian arctic after ten months of interplanetary transit — a region chosen because orbital observations by Mars Odyssey had detected hydrogen-rich material just centimetres below the surface, a nearly certain signature of buried water ice. Phoenix was not a rover; it was a stationary lander with a robotic arm, designed to dig trenches and deliver soil and ice samples to onboard instruments. It arrived in May 2008, and in the weeks that followed its arm scraped down to the ice layer and the TEGA instrument confirmed by direct measurement what had only been inferred from orbit: water ice, on Mars, accessible from the surface, tasted for the first time by instruments from Earth. The discovery did not establish that Mars was habitable — the arctic surface is frigid, radiation-bathed, and desiccated by any biological standard — but it established something more precise: that the water which once shaped Martian geology had not all escaped to space. Some of it was still there, waiting three feet down, patient as permafrost.

Dark matter ring detected in galaxy cluster collision

Ripples From Two Invisible Stones

Dark matter had been inferred from its gravitational effects since Fritz Zwicky noticed in the 1930s that galaxy clusters moved as if they contained far more mass than their visible stars could account for — but inferring something from its gravity and actually watching it organise into a recognisable geometric structure are different orders of evidence. In 2007, astronomers analysing Hubble Space Telescope observations of a galaxy cluster collision — the supercluster Cl 0024+17 — found a ghostly ring of excess mass encircling the collision site, spanning roughly 2.6 million light-years and detected through gravitational lensing, the distortion of background galaxy images by intervening mass. The proposed explanation was striking: during the collision, the dark matter from the two clusters had passed through itself — dark matter interacts so weakly it largely ignores other dark matter — and then, under its own gravity, had rebounded outward in a ring, like ripples in a pond after two stones are dropped simultaneously. It was the first time dark matter had been observed arranged in a structure whose shape was explained by the dynamics of the collision rather than simply tracing the galaxies. The ring had been there for roughly five billion years, entirely invisible, until someone thought to look at how the background galaxies were bent.