2007

Nobel Prize in Physics

Albert Fert · Peter Grünberg

In 1988, Fert and Grünberg independently discovered that stacking thin magnetic layers produced enormous changes in electrical resistance when a small magnetic field was applied. Within a decade, engineers had put giant magnetoresistance into hard-drive read heads, cramming what had been a roomful of data onto a device you could hold in your hand.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Gerhard Ertl

Ertl spent his career studying what happens at the surface where a gas meets a solid — the reactions that make the Haber-Bosch process work, that clean exhaust from catalytic converters, that underpin fuel cells. Surface chemistry had been largely a black box; his meticulous investigations of each elementary step turned it into a rigorous science.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

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

By introducing specific DNA changes into mouse embryonic stem cells via homologous recombination, Capecchi, Evans, and Smithies created a way to knock out or alter any gene in the mouse genome. The thousands of knockout mouse strains now used in biomedical research trace back to the principles these three worked out across three separate laboratories.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Doris Lessing

Lessing was 87 when the prize was announced — the oldest ever recipient — and was photographed hearing the news on her doorstep, having just returned from shopping, her response memorably unsentimental. Her work spans realist novels, memoir, Sufi-inflected science fiction, and five decades of scrutiny of what it means to live inside a civilisation that consistently disappoints.

Nobel Peace Prize

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change · Al Gore

The IPCC had spent nearly twenty years assembling the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, report by exhausting report. Gore had spent the same period touring with a presentation that became a documentary and then an inconvenient piece of cultural furniture. The committee combined both recognitions into a single prize.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

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

Mechanism design asks: given a desired outcome, what rules should govern the game? Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson built the theory for designing institutions — auctions, regulatory systems, voting rules — that achieve goals even when the participants hold private information they have no interest in sharing. Hurwicz, at 90, was the oldest Nobel laureate ever.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Brian Witcombe · Dan Meyer

Witcombe and Meyer surveyed professional sword swallowers about their health and found a catalogue of occupational hazards — sore throats, perforations, and the peculiar risks of swallowing multiple swords simultaneously or distracted by unexpected audience behaviour. The medical literature had been silent on these matters until they spoke.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

L. Mahadevan · Enrique Cerda Villablanca

Wrinkles in thin sheets — skin, leaves, crumpled foil — follow geometric rules that Mahadevan and Cerda expressed in a single equation. The theory has since been applied to understanding the folding of the human brain, the crinkling of leaves, and the behaviour of thin films in electronics.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Mayu Yamamoto

Yamamoto extracted vanillin — the primary flavour compound in vanilla — from cow dung, using a process that is chemically sound and gastronomically challenging. A New York food fair subsequently offered vanilla ice cream made from the resulting vanillin, marketing it as "Yum-a-Moto" and presenting it to willing tasters.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Johanna E. M. H. van Bronswijk

Van Bronswijk catalogued every organism sharing a bed in Dutch households and arrived at a number exceeding 1.5 million per mattress — mites, bacteria, fungi, pseudoscorpions, and assorted others. Sleep, she established with uncomfortable thoroughness, is rarely as solitary as it feels.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Glenda Browne

Browne wrote a practical guide to the indexing problems caused by the word "the" — a three-letter article that, when it precedes a title, creates genuine confusion about where to file things alphabetically. The problem has tormented librarians since there have been libraries, and she addressed it with the seriousness it deserves.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

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

Model checking is a technique for exhaustively verifying whether a system's behaviour satisfies a formal specification — catching bugs that testing alone will miss because some sequences of events are too rare to occur during ordinary testing but guaranteed to occur eventually. Clarke, Emerson, and Sifakis developed the approach independently and saw it adopted across the semiconductor and software industries.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Ralph M. Steinman

Steinman discovered dendritic cells in 1973 and spent the rest of his career arguing that they were the key sentinels triggering adaptive immunity — a view that met considerable scepticism before being vindicated. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine three days after his death from cancer, which he had treated experimentally with dendritic cell therapy of his own design.

Induced pluripotent stem cells derived from human cells

Two groups — Yamanaka's at Kyoto and Thomson's at Wisconsin — simultaneously reported in November that human adult cells could be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state by introducing just four transcription factors. The prospect of patient-specific stem cells, grown from the patient's own skin, without any use of embryos, arrived rather faster than most of the field had expected.

First fast radio burst detected in archival data

Duncan Lorimer and David Narkevic were searching old recordings from the Parkes radio telescope when they found a pulse of radio emission lasting five milliseconds — bright enough to have come from far outside the Milky Way, yet over before any instrument could have followed it. The Lorimer Burst opened a field of radio astronomy that still has more questions than answers.

Phoenix Mars Lander launched

Phoenix launched in August bound for the Martian arctic, where ice was known to lie just centimetres below the surface. It would land the following May and become the first spacecraft to directly touch and sample water ice on Mars — a moment the scientists described, with visible restraint, as gratifying.

Dark matter ring detected in galaxy cluster collision

Hubble observations of a galaxy cluster collision revealed a ring of dark matter spanning 2.6 million light-years — a structure produced as dark matter, stripped from the colliding clusters, passed through itself and then gravitationally rebounded outward. It was the first time dark matter had arranged itself into a distinctly ring-shaped form visible in observations.