2008

Nobel Prize in Physics

Why the Universe Didn't Cancel Itself Out

Yoichiro Nambu · Makoto Kobayashi · Toshihide Maskawa

The universe, by most reckonings of its early moments, should have produced matter and antimatter in equal measure and then immediately annihilated itself into a bath of radiation — leaving nothing, certainly not us. That it failed to do so is due to a small but decisive asymmetry, and the task of explaining that asymmetry fell to Yoichiro Nambu and then to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. Nambu's contribution, developed in the 1960s, was to borrow the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking from condensed matter physics — the idea that a system can settle into a state less symmetric than its underlying equations — and show that it was the engine driving particle masses; the concept later became load-bearing in the Higgs mechanism. Kobayashi and Maskawa took a different thread: working in 1973, they noticed that the known four quarks could not account for the observed violation of matter-antimatter symmetry, and boldly predicted that two more undiscovered quarks must exist to provide enough mathematical room. All six quarks had been confirmed by 2008, the top quark last in 1995. Without CP violation of the kind they described, the cosmos would be featureless light.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Jellyfish Lantern Relights Biology

Osamu Shimomura · Martin Chalfie · Roger Y. Tsien

In the early 1960s Osamu Shimomura began collecting Aequorea victoria jellyfish by the thousand from Puget Sound, squeezing their luminescent rims into buckets, and patiently purifying whatever was causing the glow; what emerged was green fluorescent protein, or GFP, a molecule that absorbs ultraviolet light and re-emits it as vivid green — a lantern the jellyfish had quietly evolved for reasons of its own. For two decades GFP remained a curiosity of marine biology. Then Martin Chalfie had the idea, in 1992, of splicing the gene encoding GFP directly into other organisms so that it acted as a genetic tag: attach it to any protein you want to track and the cell will produce its own built-in fluorescent label, no dye, no antibody, no killing required. Roger Tsien went further still, engineering GFP's barrel-shaped structure to shift its absorption spectrum across blue, yellow, cyan, and eventually red — giving researchers a full palette with which to paint living cells. The result was that biologists could, for the first time, watch proteins move, cells divide, and signals propagate in real time inside a living animal; the entire discipline of cell biology was relit, from within.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Two Viruses, Two Decades of Denial Ended

Harald zur Hausen · Françoise Barré-Sinoussi · Luc Montagnier

The prize was split between two discoveries that between them reshaped twentieth-century medicine's relationship with infectious disease. Harald zur Hausen spent most of the 1970s and 1980s arguing, against considerable resistance, that cervical cancer — one of the most common cancers in women worldwide — was caused not by herpes simplex virus, as the field believed, but by human papillomavirus; he eventually identified the relevant strains, HPV-16 and HPV-18, in the early 1980s. The vaccine that his work made possible now prevents the majority of cases of the disease. Meanwhile, in 1983, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute isolated a retrovirus from a patient with swollen lymph nodes — what would be confirmed as HIV the following year — giving medicine both a defined target and, in time, the antiretroviral drugs that transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Together, these three had demonstrated that viruses were not exotic curiosities at the edge of human disease, but central to it.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Novelist Devoted to the World's Margins

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio published his first novel, Le Procès-verbal, in 1963 at the age of twenty-three; it won the Prix Renaudot and announced a writer whose preoccupations — displacement, the friction between so-called civilisation and the peoples it had absorbed or erased, the luminous strangeness of the ordinary — would barely shift over the following half-century. He was born in Nice to a family from Mauritius, spent years among the indigenous Embera in Panama, and wrote novels set from Mexico to West Africa, always from a position of principled estrangement from the European centre. The Swedish Academy, awarding him the prize, praised his work as one of "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" — a formulation that captures something real: Le Clézio writes the margins of the world not as a sociologist cataloguing grievance but as a novelist transfixed by what he finds there. To English readers who had largely missed him, the prize came as a mild reproach. His legacy is a body of work that refuses to treat any one civilisation's assumptions as default.

Nobel Peace Prize

Four Decades of Getting Enemies to Sign

Martti Ahtisaari

Martti Ahtisaari was a Finnish diplomat and former president who spent roughly four decades doing the unglamorous, painstaking work of persuading people who hated each other to sign pieces of paper and then, more improbably, to act on them. He negotiated Namibia's path to independence in 1988, helped broker the end of the Kosovo conflict in 1999, and led the mediation effort in Aceh, Indonesia, in 2005 that ended a three-decade separatist war within two months of serious talks — a pace that surprised everyone, including him. The Nobel committee cited his efforts on "several continents over more than three decades," which is both accurate and a fair example of Nordic understatement about what is, in total, an extraordinary record. Ahtisaari's method was essentially to treat conflict resolution as a craft: the right preparation, the right parties in the room, the right sequencing of concessions. His organisation, Crisis Management Initiative, continued the work after the prize.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Why Similar Countries Trade the Most

Paul Krugman

The classical theory of international trade, tracing from Ricardo, said that countries trade because they are different — each specialising in what it does relatively well. What it could not easily explain was why the bulk of global trade flows between countries that are broadly similar, and why those countries happily sell each other what appear to be the same things. Paul Krugman's answer, developed in a series of papers from the late 1970s onward, invoked economies of scale and consumers' appetite for variety: it is cheaper to manufacture one model of car in one country and trade it than to manufacture all models everywhere, even when the countries are otherwise alike. His related work on economic geography explained why manufacturing clusters in particular cities and regions — a self-reinforcing process once a concentration begins — rather than spreading uniformly across space. The Nobel Prize was awarded in October 2008, as the global financial system was achieving its own rather different form of concentration. Krugman, characteristically, was already busy writing about that too.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Coca-Cola, Contraceptive, Maybe

Sheree Umpierre · Joseph Hill · Deborah Anderson · Chuang-Ye Hong · C.C. Shieh · P. Wu · B.N. Chiang

The Ig Nobel committee honoured not one but two published, peer-reviewed studies on the contraceptive properties of Coca-Cola — which is itself already a remarkable sentence. The studies, appearing in respectable journals, reached opposite conclusions: one found the beverage effective as a spermicide, the other found it ineffective. Both teams were awarded the prize jointly, which is perhaps the most elegant possible acknowledgment that science had spoken on the matter, clearly, in two directions at once. The genuine biochemical question — whether acidic solutions or the compound properties of carbonated drinks affect sperm motility — is not entirely uninteresting; it is the confidence of the conclusions, and the symmetry of their contradiction, that elevates the affair into something approaching art.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Dog Fleas Jump Higher Than Cat Fleas

Marie-Christine Cadiergues · Christel Joubert · Michel Franc

Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc devoted careful scientific attention to a question that had presumably long intrigued anyone who has ever owned both a dog and a cat: which of the two species' fleas jumps higher? The answer, established through precise comparative measurement, is that dog fleas outleap cat fleas by a meaningful margin — a finding that is both reproducible and, on reflection, entirely unexplained by anything obvious about the evolutionary relationship between flea and host. The researchers did not speculate on whether this reflects something dogs offer that cats do not, or simply that fleas have their own standards. The committee, awarding the prize with its customary solemnity, noted that the work documented what they called "an important fact."

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

The Crunch Is Part of the Flavour

Massimiliano Zampini · Charles Spence

Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence of Oxford demonstrated, with some elegance, that what a potato chip sounds like as you bite into it is not a harmless side effect of eating but a constituent of the flavour itself. Their method was direct: subjects wore headphones through which the crunch of their own chewing was played back at amplified volume, and the chips tasted crisper, fresher, and more enjoyable than identical chips consumed in silence. Reduce the crunch, and the same chip tastes stale. The brain, it emerges, assembles the experience of food from every available channel simultaneously — texture, smell, appearance, and sound are not accessories to taste but equal partners in constructing it. Food manufacturers had known this intuitively for years; now there was a paper. The crisp bag that crinkles too loudly is not a design oversight.

Ig Nobel Prize in Cognitive Science

A Brainless Blob Redraws the Tokyo Rail Map

Toshiyuki Nakagaki · Hiroyasu Yamada · Ryo Kobayashi · Atsushi Tero · Akio Ishiguro · Ágota Tóth

Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled slime mould that spreads across damp forest floors in a yellow, branching network, eating bacteria and fungal spores — an organism so far from conventionally brainy that it seems almost unkind to put it in a maze. Toshiyuki Nakagaki and colleagues did exactly that, placing food at several exits and watching what happened. The mould, extending pseudopods and then withdrawing those that found nothing, gradually reorganised its entire network into the shortest path connecting the food sources — efficiently, repeatedly, and without anything resembling a nervous system. Later work by the same group showed that Physarum, given a map of the Tokyo metropolitan area with food placed at major city locations, spontaneously grew a network strikingly similar to the actual Tokyo rail network, which engineers had spent decades optimising. It has no neurons. It is still better at this than most committees.

Ig Nobel Prize in Archaeology

An Armadillo Stirs the Dig Site

Astolfo G. Mello Araujo · José Carlos Marcelino

These Brazilian researchers demonstrated that armadillos, in the course of their industrious digging and burrowing, can rearrange the contents of an archaeological site — shifting artefacts up and down through the soil layers and thereby scrambling the careful stratigraphy on which archaeologists depend to date their finds. An object nudged by a tunnelling armadillo may come to rest in a layer older or younger than the one it belongs to, quietly corrupting the record. The team studied the effect experimentally and warned excavators to allow for it. The committee honoured a genuinely useful caution to the profession: that the neat chronological cake of an archaeological deposit may have been, at some point, thoroughly stirred by a small armoured mammal with no regard for the record.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Tips That Track a Fertility Cycle

Geoffrey Miller · Joshua Tybur · Brent Jordan

Miller, Tybur, and Jordan investigated whether the menstrual cycle affects a woman's earnings, taking as their study population the lap dancers of certain American clubs, whose income arrives largely in tips and is therefore measurable almost to the dollar. Tracking earnings across the cycle, they found a clear peak during the fertile window around ovulation and a marked trough during menstruation — dancers earned roughly twice as much at their most fertile as at their least. The finding bears on a real and contested question in evolutionary biology: whether human ovulation, long assumed to be concealed, in fact leaks subtle cues that others detect. The committee honoured a study that located, in the economics of the strip club, unusually clean evidence for one of the field's more delicate hypotheses.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Scholarship for Calling Someone a Bastard

David Sims

David Sims of the University of Hull was honoured for his scholarly paper "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations" — a serious study, published in a serious management journal, of the moment when an employee, wronged by a colleague or the institution, arrives at that most human of workplace verdicts. Sims examined how people construct and rehearse the stories of their own indignation, the private narratives in which they cast themselves as the injured party and someone else as the bastard of the title, and how those stories go on to shape behaviour at work. The scholarship is real; only the title startles. The committee honoured a paper that dignifies, with the full apparatus of organisational theory, an emotion that anyone who has ever held a job will recognise at once.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

The Sticker Price Does Some of the Healing

Dan Ariely · Rebecca L. Waber · Baba Shiv · Ziv Carmon

Dan Ariely and colleagues demonstrated that a placebo painkiller works better when the patient is told it is expensive. They administered a dummy pill to volunteers, describing it in some cases as a premium drug costing $2.50 a dose and in others as a discounted version at ten cents, then delivered calibrated electric shocks and measured the reported relief. The expensive placebo eased more pain than the cheap one, though both were identical sugar — the price alone altered the physiological experience of the drug. The finding is a striking demonstration of how expectation shapes perception, with real consequences for how medicines are marketed and prescribed. The committee honoured proof that, in medicine as in wine, the sticker price is doing some of the tasting.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Reading a Carrot Its Rights

Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology

The prize honoured the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology, and by extension the Swiss citizenry, for adopting the legal principle that plants possess an inherent dignity that must be respected. A clause in the Swiss constitution requires account to be taken of the dignity of living things where animals, plants, and other organisms are concerned, and the committee produced a report grappling in earnest with what it might mean to wrong a plant — concluding, among other things, that arbitrary harm to vegetation was morally troubling even if the plant itself could not be said to mind. The document is a genuine and thoughtful piece of applied ethics, and also an open invitation to picture a botanist reading a carrot its rights. The committee honoured a nation willing to extend its moral seriousness all the way down to the salad.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

String Left Alone Will Betray You

Dorian Raymer · Douglas Smith

Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, proved mathematically and experimentally what every owner of headphones, garden hose, or Christmas lights already knew in their bones: that a string, agitated in a confined space, will spontaneously tie itself in knots. They placed lengths of string in a box, tumbled it, and repeated the operation thousands of times, then classified the resulting tangles using knot theory — the branch of topology devoted to precisely this. Longer strings and more tumbling produced more knots, and more complicated ones, and the distribution of knot types they observed matched theoretical prediction. The committee honoured a study that lends the full authority of topology to one of life's small, reliable frustrations: that anything flexible, left alone with a little motion, will conspire against you.

Turing Award

Data That Is Defined by What It Does

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov arrived at MIT in 1972 as one of the first women to hold a faculty position in computer science in the United States, and spent the following decades doing the kind of foundational work that is invisible precisely because it succeeded. Her programming language CLU, developed in the 1970s, introduced the notion of abstract data types — the idea that a data structure should be defined by what it does rather than how it is built, a separation that underlies nearly every modern programming language's design. It also gave the world iterators, now so standard that programmers use them without knowing they had to be invented. The Liskov Substitution Principle, which she articulated in 1987, states that objects of a subclass should be replaceable by objects of the parent class without changing the correctness of the program — a rule that sounds self-evident and is violated routinely. Her contributions to distributed systems and Byzantine fault tolerance further shaped how software handles the fact that, in any sufficiently large system, some part of it will always be wrong.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

A Shadow System of Gene Control

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Victor R. Ambros · David C. Baulcombe · Gary B. Ruvkun

In 1993, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, working independently on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, discovered that a tiny RNA molecule — too short to encode a protein, too specific to be waste — was binding to messenger RNA and silencing a key developmental gene. This was lin-4, the first known microRNA, and its existence implied an entirely unsuspected layer of gene regulation operating through small RNA molecules rather than through the proteins that molecular biologists had spent decades studying. David Baulcombe found the same mechanism at work in plants, where small interfering RNAs were directing a defence against viral infection — a process that, once named RNA silencing or RNA interference, turned out to be operating across virtually every domain of life. The three had collectively revealed a shadow regulatory system, conserved through a billion years of evolution, that had simply been too small to notice before the right experiment caught it. MicroRNAs alone are now known to regulate perhaps a third of all human genes.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Six Thousand Moulds Screened for One

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Akira Endo

Akira Endo was a biochemist at Sankyo in Tokyo who, in 1971, set out from an almost perversely elegant hypothesis: fungi and bacteria compete for the same niches, so fungi must have evolved compounds to inhibit bacterial cholesterol synthesis, and those compounds might work in humans too. He screened more than six thousand fungal cultures over two years, and found what he was looking for in a Penicillium mould in 1973 — mevastatin, the first statin. Clinical trials in the late 1970s showed dramatic reductions in LDL cholesterol and, eventually, in heart attacks. The pharmaceutical companies developed the drugs further; Endo, who had done the central intellectual and experimental work, was not personally enriched by the result, and the irony was noted at the time with characteristic Japanese restraint. Statins are now among the most prescribed drugs in history, taken by tens of millions of people worldwide. A world without Endo's hypothesis is one with substantially more cardiovascular disease and no particular reason to expect otherwise.

LHC circulates first proton beam

A Billion People Watch a Ring Switch On

On 10 September 2008, CERN switched on the Large Hadron Collider — a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets buried beneath the French-Swiss border, twenty-seven years and roughly ten billion dollars in the making — and circulated its first proton beam to an estimated global audience of around a billion people, which is an unusual viewing figure for a particle accelerator. Nine days later, a faulty electrical connection between two dipole magnets caused a helium leak, which caused a quench, which caused an explosion that vented several tonnes of liquid helium into the tunnel and put the machine out of commission for over a year of repairs and upgrades. It was, in the dry CERN post-mortem, described as "an incident." The machine was eventually fixed, returned to operation in 2009, and in 2012 discovered the Higgs boson. The nine-day delay is now a minor footnote; the Higgs is not.

Phoenix Mars Lander confirms water ice on Mars

Ice Vanishes Under a Martian Sun

Phoenix touched down in the Martian arctic on 25 May 2008 — a region chosen precisely because orbital observations had hinted at shallow water ice just beneath the surface — and on 31 July its robotic arm delivered definitive proof: white material scraped from a trench and left exposed to the Martian sun disappeared over four Martian days in a way that only sublimating water ice could explain. (Dry ice, the alternative, would vanish far more quickly.) It was the first time water had been physically touched on another planet. The lander also analysed soil chemistry and detected perchlorates, a finding that complicated subsequent thinking about Martian habitability. Operations ended in November when the Martian polar winter reduced sunlight to the point where the solar panels could no longer sustain the spacecraft, and Phoenix fell silent without ceremony. The ice, for its part, remains.

First images of exoplanets directly imaged

After the Wobble, Finally a Photograph

By 2008, astronomers had confirmed over three hundred exoplanets — none of them seen. They were inferred from the wobble they induced in their stars, or the tiny dimming as they crossed in front, but they were in no meaningful sense visible. That changed in November 2008, when two independent teams published photographs. The Marois et al. team captured three planets orbiting HR 8799, a young star about 130 light-years away, in near-infrared light using adaptive optics on the Keck and Gemini telescopes; separately, Kalas et al. imaged a planet orbiting Fomalhaut using the Hubble Space Telescope, picking it out as a faint dot in reflected starlight. The images required extraordinary technical effort to suppress the overwhelming glare of the host stars and were, by astronomical standards, quite modest: small bright spots in carefully processed pictures. They were also, unambiguously, planets. After a decade and a half of detection, here at last was seeing.