2008

Nobel Prize in Physics

Yoichiro Nambu · Makoto Kobayashi · Toshihide Maskawa

Nambu showed how spontaneous symmetry breaking — the mechanism by which a symmetric system settles into an asymmetric state — works in particle physics, a concept that later became central to the Higgs mechanism. Kobayashi and Maskawa extended the quark model to six flavors to explain why matter slightly outnumbered antimatter in the early universe; by 2008, all six quarks had been found.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Osamu Shimomura · Martin Chalfie · Roger Y. Tsien

Shimomura isolated a protein from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria in 1962 that glowed green under ultraviolet light; Chalfie showed it could be used as a genetic tag, making any cell or process you cared to attach it to visible under a microscope; Tsien engineered variants in blue, yellow, and red. Between them they gave biologists a full palette for watching life happen in real time.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Harald zur Hausen · Françoise Barré-Sinoussi · Luc Montagnier

Zur Hausen spent years arguing, against the prevailing view, that cervical cancer was caused by a virus — specifically, human papillomavirus — and the HPV vaccine that his work made possible now prevents most cases. Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier identified the retrovirus causing AIDS in 1983, giving medicine both a target and, eventually, drugs that made the disease liveable.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

Le Clézio, French-Mauritian and internationally published for decades, was a surprise to English-speaking readers who had largely missed him. His work centres on peoples at the margins of the dominant civilisation — indigenous Americans, island communities, refugees — observed with what the academy called "sensual ecstasy" and a steady refusal of the centre's assumptions.

Nobel Peace Prize

Martti Ahtisaari

Ahtisaari mediated peace agreements in Namibia, Kosovo, and Aceh over more than three decades, after the manner of someone who believes that if you put enough patient work into a thing it will eventually come right. The committee cited his efforts on "several continents" with characteristic Finnish understatement.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Paul Krugman

Krugman's "new trade theory" explained why similar countries trade with each other — economies of scale and consumer preference for variety, not comparative advantage alone — and his new economic geography explained why manufacturing concentrates in particular places rather than spreading uniformly. The work was done in the 1970s and 1980s; the Nobel came as the global financial system collapsed around it.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Sheree Umpierre · Joseph Hill · Deborah Anderson · C. Richter · G. Brendler · B. Lankenau

Two published studies reached opposite conclusions about whether Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide. Both studies appeared in peer-reviewed journals; both received the award. The committee left the practical implications to the reader.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Marie-Christine Cadiergues · Christel Joubert · Michel Franc

Dog fleas jump higher than cat fleas, the researchers established through careful comparative measurement. The difference is consistent and reproducible. What it implies about the evolutionary history of cats and dogs, or about the flea's experience of its host, was not explored.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

Massimiliano Zampini · Charles Spence

By amplifying the crunch of potato chips through headphones while subjects ate them, Zampini and Spence made the chips taste crisper and fresher than they actually were. The sound of food, it turns out, is not a side effect of eating but part of the flavour itself.

Ig Nobel Prize in Cognitive Science

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

Physarum polycephalum — slime mould — will, when food is placed at the exits of a maze, rearrange its network to find the shortest path between them. It has no nervous system, no neurons, and no brain. It solves the maze anyway.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Barbara Liskov

Liskov's substitution principle states that objects of a subtype should be replaceable by objects of their parent type without altering the behaviour of the program — a rule that sounds obvious once stated and is violated constantly when not. Her work on CLU pioneered abstract data types and iterators, and her contributions to distributed systems and fault tolerance shape software design to this day.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

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

Ambros and Ruvkun found small RNA molecules regulating genes in the nematode; Baulcombe found related small RNAs doing the same in plants. These microRNAs and small interfering RNAs turned out to be a pervasive layer of gene regulation present across the kingdoms of life — a system that had been operating undetected until these three looked.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Akira Endo

Endo isolated mevastatin from a Penicillium mould in 1973 after reasoning that fungi competing with bacteria would need to block their cholesterol synthesis. He was right; the compound led directly to the statin drug class, now taken by tens of millions of people to prevent heart attacks. The pharmaceutical industry developed the drugs; Endo was not enriched by them.

LHC circulates first proton beam

On 10 September, CERN's 27-kilometre circular accelerator circulated its first proton beam, watched live by an estimated billion people. Nine days later a faulty electrical connection caused a helium leak and explosion that put the machine out of action for over a year. The machine was fine eventually; physics could wait.

Phoenix Mars Lander confirms water ice on Mars

Phoenix landed at the Martian arctic on 25 May and on 31 July confirmed water ice by excavating a shallow trench and watching white material exposed to sunlight sublimate — the first time water was physically touched on another planet. The mission ended in November when polar winter blocked the solar panels and the lander went silent.

First images of exoplanets directly imaged

Two teams published direct photographs of planets orbiting other stars in the same November issue of Science: three planets orbiting HR 8799 and one orbiting Fomalhaut. For all the exoplanets detected by the transit and radial velocity methods, these were the first you could actually see — faint dots, but real.