2010

Nobel Prize in Physics

Peeled With Tape Until It Was One Atom

Andre Geim · Konstantin Novoselov

Carbon, arranged properly, can do most things; the question for decades was whether a single-atom-thick sheet of it — graphene, theorised since the 1940s — could actually be isolated without crumbling. In 2004, working evenings at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov answered that question with Scotch tape, applying it to a block of graphite, peeling it away, and peeling the peel again until the flakes were one atom thick — a method so apparently low-tech that the first journal Geim submitted to rejected it without review. The material that emerged was not just interesting: it proved to be the strongest substance ever measured, vastly more conductive than copper, nearly transparent, and stiff enough that a cat-sized sheet could support the weight of a cat — or rather, could not, because the cat would see through it and be confused. The Nobel committee duly awarded the 2010 prize, making Geim the only scientist in history to hold both an Ig Nobel (2000, for levitating a frog with magnets) and a Nobel — a distinction that suggests the right way to pursue physics is to take nothing quite so seriously that you can't also try the frog.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Carpenter's Plane for Carbon Atoms

Richard F. Heck · Ei-ichi Negishi · Akira Suzuki

Carbon atoms, left to their own devices, are not sociable: getting them to bond to one another in a predictable, selective way without a mess of by-products was one of the central frustrations of organic chemistry through most of the twentieth century. Richard Heck, working in the 1970s, found that palladium — a rare, expensive, and at first seemingly eccentric choice — could coax carbon-carbon bonds into forming with surgical precision; Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki extended the principle in slightly different directions, each developing their own flavour of palladium-catalysed coupling that chemists now reach for the way a carpenter reaches for a good plane. The three men worked largely independently, publishing in relative obscurity while the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries quietly restructured their synthetic pipelines around the reactions. By 2010 the Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki couplings were involved in the synthesis of roughly a quarter of all new pharmaceuticals, which means the odds are better than even that someone you know has swallowed a molecule whose carbon backbone was stitched together by a palladium atom turning a handsome profit.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Twelve Years to a Dish, Then Louise

Robert G. Edwards

Through most of the 1960s, Robert Edwards worked in his Cambridge laboratory trying to understand the conditions under which a human egg could be fertilised outside the body — work that attracted considerable ethical alarm and very little institutional funding, and that required the painstaking development of culture media, timing protocols, and the clinical partnership he eventually formed with gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe. Twelve years after they began working together, on 25 July 1978, Louise Brown was born — the first human being to have been conceived in a dish — and the world responded with roughly equal measures of wonder and moral panic. Edwards lived to receive the 2010 Nobel, by which time more than four million people had entered the world by the route he had opened; Steptoe had died in 1988, and Nobel Prizes being non-posthumous, the chair beside Edwards in Stockholm stayed empty. A world without IVF is one in which millions of families simply do not exist, a fact that tends to settle most of the ethical debates rather abruptly.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Cartographer of How Power Corrodes

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa grew up in mid-century Peru during a period when a novelist who wished to understand his country could scarcely avoid also becoming a political animal, and for a time he was the kind of leftist intellectual that Latin American politics in the 1960s seemed to manufacture by the dozen — until he looked more carefully at Cuba and changed his mind, to the great irritation of those who had preferred the earlier model. What he never abandoned was the ambition to render the full texture of power in fiction: the caudillo's grip, the institution's slow corruption, the individual conscience ground down and occasionally not quite extinguished. The Swedish Academy cited his "cartography of structures of power" — a phrase that could serve as the blurb for a surveillance manual, but that in Vargas Llosa's novels reads as something closer to a sustained autopsy of the political condition, conducted with a novelist's precision and a polemicist's nerve. The literature of Latin American catastrophe, which had found its form in Borges and García Márquez, found in Vargas Llosa its most tenacious anatomist.

Nobel Peace Prize

An Empty Chair, a Wife Under Guard

Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo had spent much of his adult life writing and arguing for political reform in China — literary criticism, polemics, participation in the 1989 Tiananmen protests — and was serving eleven years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" when the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced his name in October 2010, the charge having been co-authoring Charter 08, a manifesto that called, in measured and scrupulous prose, for the rule of law, free expression, and democratic governance. The Chinese government's response was immediate and comprehensive: it summoned the Norwegian ambassador to protest, pressured some sixty states to boycott the Oslo ceremony, and placed Liu's wife Liu Xia under house arrest the day of the announcement, despite her never having been charged with any crime. At the ceremony in December, Liu's chair sat empty on the stage beside the gold medal and diploma that no one could receive on his behalf. He remained in prison until 2017, when he was released to die of liver cancer under guard in a hospital. The empty chair said rather more than any speech.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Unemployment as the Time It Takes to Meet

Peter A. Diamond · Dale T. Mortensen · Christopher A. Pissarides

Classical economic models treated labour markets as frictionless auction halls where workers and employers found each other instantaneously, which was convenient for the mathematics and unencumbered by any resemblance to experience. Peter Diamond noticed, in a series of papers beginning in the 1970s, that search takes time — that a worker with skills and a firm with a vacancy might each sit idle for months simply because the process of finding one another is slow and costly — and that this friction is not a bug in the market but a structural feature with measurable consequences for wages, unemployment duration, and policy. Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides built the matching models that turned Diamond's intuition into equations: flows into and out of employment, the rate at which vacancies and jobseekers meet, the negotiation over the resulting surplus. The resulting DMP framework explained why unemployment persists even when the economy is functioning well — not as failure but as the entirely predictable outcome of the time it takes people to find each other. It became the standard toolkit for central banks and labour ministries trying to understand why the jobs are always elsewhere.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Socks Outside the Shoes, Scientifically

Lianne Parkin · Sheila Williams · Patricia Priest

Winter in Dunedin, New Zealand brings ice to the footpaths, falls to the elderly, and, apparently, a certain scientific curiosity to the researchers at Otago Medical School. Parkin, Williams, and Priest conducted a properly randomised trial on an actual icy slope, asking participants to walk down wearing either shoes, ice cleats, or socks pulled over the outside of their shoes — the kind of intervention a grandmother might suggest and a physicist might dismiss, but which the data declined to dismiss at all. Socks on the outside reduced slipping more reliably than the cleats. The study was rigorous, the result reproducible, and the solution possessed of an elegance that no amount of expensive engineering has quite managed to better. It should be noted that the method requires willing shoes, willing socks, and a complete suspension of self-consciousness at the top of the hill.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

BP Supplied the Experimental Conditions

Eric Adams · Scott Socolofsky · Stephen Masutani · BP

The textbook answer to whether oil and water can be mixed is that they cannot, which is the kind of thing that seems settled until a deepwater blowout running for 87 days and releasing nearly five million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico demonstrates, at a rather larger scale than any laboratory, what sufficient mechanical energy and chemical dispersant can accomplish. The Ig Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Chemistry prize to Eric Adams, Scott Socolofsky, Stephen Masutani, and — with a deadpan that any satirist would envy — to BP, who had contributed most substantially to the experimental conditions. The dispersant Corexit was applied in quantities never before used in a marine environment, submerging the oil into an underwater plume rather than letting it surface, which solved the visual problem with considerable efficiency while generating a set of ecological questions that researchers are still working through. The Ig Nobel citation was admired chiefly for its precision.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

A Roller Coaster Loosened Their Lungs

Simon Rietveld · Ilja van Beest

Asthma is characterised by airway inflammation and bronchoconstriction — the airways narrow, the breath tightens, and the body becomes a somewhat less hospitable environment than usual. The stress response, by contrast, releases adrenaline, which among other things is a bronchodilator; and Dutch researchers Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest, reasoning that roller coasters are one of the more reliable ways to induce acute stress in a controlled setting, found that a ride on one temporarily suppressed asthma symptoms in their patients. The effect was real and the mechanism plausible, rooted in the same pharmacology that gives adrenaline its place in emergency medicine. Rietveld and van Beest were careful to stop short of recommending that respiratory clinics install loops and corkscrews, and the Ig Nobel committee was equally careful to award the prize — honouring findings that first make you laugh, then make you think — to work that actually did both.

Ig Nobel Prize in Engineering

Catching a Whale's Sneeze by Helicopter

Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse · Agnes Rocha-Gosselin · Diane Gendron

Monitoring the health of wild whales presents logistical challenges that most medical disciplines do not encounter — the patient is enormous, it lives underwater, it is not coming to the surgery — and the standard approaches of the 1990s, mostly relying on biopsy darts fired from inflatable boats, were invasive and stressful to the animals. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and her colleagues reasoned that respiratory mucus, rich with bacteria, hormones, and DNA, would tell them much of what they needed to know, and that whales, unlike most patients, exhale with considerable enthusiasm and at regular intervals. The solution was a remote-controlled helicopter fitted with Petri dishes on the underside, flown into the exhalation plume of passing whales to catch the spray before it dispersed. It worked. The image of a small rotorcraft hovering attentively over a blue whale, collecting its sneezes for science, occupies a particular and deserved place in the annals of fieldwork.

Ig Nobel Prize in Management

Promote at Random, the Models Said

Alessandro Pluchino · Andrea Rapisarda · Cesare Garofalo

The Peter Principle — that people in hierarchies rise to their level of incompetence — was articulated by Laurence Peter in 1969 partly as a joke and partly as a grimly accurate observation about how organisations actually function. Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, three physicists at the University of Catania, decided in 2010 to take the principle seriously enough to model it, constructing agent-based simulations of corporate hierarchies and testing various promotion strategies against organisational performance. Their conclusion was that promoting people by merit made things worse — because the skills that make someone good at one job are largely uncorrelated with the skills that make them good at the job above it — and that the strategy that consistently optimised overall performance was to promote people at random. The finding was mathematically sound, intuitively disquieting, and explains a great deal about the organisations most of us have worked in.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Cursing Makes the Ice Water Bearable

Richard Stephens · John Atkins · Andrew Kingston

Everyone who has ever hit a thumb with a hammer knows the instinct, and Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston at Keele University decided to study it properly: they asked volunteers to submerge their hands in ice water and report how long they could tolerate it, once while repeating a neutral word and once while swearing freely of their own choosing. The swearers lasted significantly longer and rated their pain as less intense — an effect the researchers termed the hypoalgesic effect of swearing, and which has a plausible physiological basis in the activation of the sympathetic nervous system and a corresponding rise in heart rate. The catch, noted in the paper with the care such findings deserve, is that the analgesic effect was substantially weaker in habitual swearers, who had, through daily enthusiasm, exhausted the mechanism. The study won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, the committee presumably reasoning that anything that helps people endure pain without resorting to violence is, in the broadest sense, a contribution to human harmony.

Ig Nobel Prize in Transportation Planning

A Brainless Slime Mould Rebuilt Tokyo's Rails

Toshiyuki Nakagaki · Atsushi Tero · Seiji Takagi · Tetsu Saigusa · Kentaro Ito · Kenji Yumiki · Ryo Kobayashi · Dan Bebber · Mark Fricker

Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled slime mould with no brain, no nervous system, and no obvious business solving optimisation problems, and yet Toshiyuki Nakagaki and his collaborators found it to be rather good at them. They laid oat flakes on a wet surface in the pattern of the cities surrounding Tokyo and allowed the slime mould, placed at the location of Tokyo itself, to grow toward the food; over roughly a day it extended tendrils, reinforced the efficient ones, pruned the redundant ones, and settled into a network strikingly similar to the actual Tokyo rail system that human engineers had spent decades designing. The organism was minimising the cost of transport while maintaining resilience — the same problem the railway solves — using nothing but local chemistry and a preference for the shortest route to breakfast. The committee awarded the Transportation Planning prize to a creature that has never ridden a train.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

What a Beard Holds Onto After Washing

Manuel Barbeito · Charles Mathews · Larry Taylor

In the 1960s, working at a United States Army biological laboratory, Manuel Barbeito and colleagues set out to determine whether a bearded scientist posed a hygiene risk — specifically, whether facial hair could harbour dangerous microbes even after washing, and carry them home to an unsuspecting family. They contaminated beards, both real and artificial, with bacteria and viruses, subjected them to washing, and swabbed the results, concluding that beards do indeed retain microbes more stubbornly than clean-shaven skin, and that a determined pathogen could survive the ablutions. The work was conducted with wartime seriousness and considerable methodological care. The committee awarded the Public Health prize decades later, honouring research that gave scientific weight to a suspicion clean-shaven laboratory directors had presumably always harboured about their bearded colleagues, and which the bearded, in turn, have always been at liberty to ignore.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Risk, Minimised Right Up Until It Wasn't

The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar

Where the 2009 Economics prize had gone to the Icelandic banks for demonstrating how a small financial system can be inflated and then catastrophically deflated, the 2010 prize widened the scope considerably. The committee honoured the executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new methods of investment that promised to maximise financial gain and minimise financial risk for the world economy — or that were, at any rate, marketed on those terms until the autumn of 2008 revealed the risk to have been neither minimised nor, in many cases, precisely located. The instruments in question, elaborate derivatives built atop mortgages of questionable provenance, had performed exactly as designed right up until they did the opposite. The committee's citation was, as ever, scrupulously polite about an achievement whose consequences were still being tallied across the global economy.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Fellatio, Timed, in the Fruit Bat

Libiao Zhang · Min Tan · Guangjian Zhu · Jianping Ye · Tiyu Hong · Shanyi Zhou · Shuyi Zhang · Gareth Jones

Libiao Zhang and a large team of colleagues observed the mating behaviour of the short-nosed fruit bat and documented something that had gone curiously unremarked in the literature: the females routinely perform oral sex on their partners during copulation, and doing so measurably prolongs the act. The researchers, having recorded the behaviour with the patience such fieldwork demands, proposed that the extended contact might increase the likelihood of fertilisation, or reduce the transmission of infection, or simply hold the male's attention — hypotheses that are, at present, difficult to test without asking the bats. The committee awarded the Biology prize for a contribution that expanded the known repertoire of the animal kingdom in a direction few had thought to investigate. The paper is properly cited, carefully argued, and entirely straight-faced, which is the only sensible way to write it.

Turing Award

How Many Examples Before a Machine Knows

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Leslie G. Valiant

Machine learning, in the mid-1980s, was a collection of heuristics and enthusiasms — systems that seemed to learn in some sense, but for which there was no principled account of what learning actually meant or when it could reliably occur. Leslie Valiant, a Harvard computer scientist, supplied that account in a 1984 paper introducing Probably Approximately Correct learning: a framework that asked, with mathematical precision, how many examples a system needs to see before it can generalise correctly with high probability, and under what computational constraints that generalisation is tractable. PAC learning gave the field a vocabulary and a standard of rigour that it had lacked, turning machine learning from a collection of engineering intuitions into something resembling a science. Valiant also made substantial contributions to counting complexity and the algebraic study of circuits, and his 2010 Turing Award — computing's Nobel — recognised a career in which the question was always less "does this work?" than "when, provably, must it?" The neural networks that now classify your photographs are operating, several abstractions removed, on ground he surveyed first.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

The Hormone That Told the Brain Enough

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Douglas L. Coleman · Jeffrey M. Friedman

Through most of the twentieth century, obesity was understood as a moral and behavioural failure — a simple matter of eating too much and exercising too little, requiring discipline rather than science. Douglas Coleman, working at the Jackson Laboratory in the 1970s, joined two strains of obese mice together by a shared circulatory system and noticed that one type stopped eating and lost weight while the other ate itself to death, a result that could only mean one thing: something in the blood of the thin mouse was telling the brain it had stored enough fat, and the obese mouse was either not producing that signal or not hearing it. Jeffrey Friedman's laboratory spent more than a decade hunting the signal, and in 1994 identified it: leptin, a hormone secreted by fat cells in proportion to their mass, which travels to the hypothalamus and suppresses appetite when reserves are adequate. The discovery reframed obesity as a disorder of physiology rather than character, established that body weight is a regulated variable with feedback mechanisms as intricate as those governing blood pressure, and founded an entire field of metabolic research. Coleman and Friedman received the 2010 Lasker; the bathroom scale has not been quite the same moral instrument since.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Starving a Tumour of Its Own Blood Supply

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Napoleone Ferrara

Tumours need blood, and to get it they secrete signals that induce surrounding tissue to grow new vessels toward them — a process called angiogenesis, recognised as a therapeutic target by Judah Folkman in the early 1970s but considered, by most of oncology, a speculative curiosity for another two decades. Napoleone Ferrara, at Genentech, isolated and characterised vascular endothelial growth factor — VEGF — in 1989, demonstrating that it was the primary molecule tumours used to requisition their blood supply, and then spent the next decade helping develop bevacizumab, an antibody that blocks it. Bevacizumab became the first approved anti-angiogenic cancer drug, used in combination with chemotherapy for colorectal, lung, and other cancers; a closely related anti-VEGF molecule, ranibizumab, halted and sometimes reversed vision loss in age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. The clinical reach of a single molecular identification is rarely so concrete: Ferrara's work on one growth factor now underpins treatment decisions made in oncology and ophthalmology clinics every day.

First synthetic bacterial cell created

A Genome Written, Then It Started Dividing

The question of whether life is, in principle, a text that can be composed as well as read had been asked philosophically for centuries; in 2010 researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute gave it an experimental answer. Working from a digital sequence, they chemically synthesised the entire 1.08-million base-pair genome of Mycoplasma mycoides from scratch — four bottles of the same four DNA bases, assembled in sequence by machines — and transplanted it into a recipient bacterial cell from which the original genome had been removed. On 20 May the synthetic cell divided. It went on dividing, following instructions that had existed only as a computer file a few weeks before, expressing proteins, reproducing, behaving in every measurable way like a living organism. Critics noted, correctly, that the cell's protein machinery was borrowed from the recipient; the distinction between "first synthetic cell" and "first cell running on a synthetic genome" was contested at the time and remains so. What was not contested was that a genome of this size and complexity had been written, copied, and executed — and that the boundary between chemistry and biology had moved.

Neanderthal genome sequenced

We Also Married Into the Family

Svante Pääbo had spent much of his career developing techniques to recover ancient DNA from bone, working through the contamination problems and degradation that make fifty-thousand-year-old genetic material a uniquely uncooperative subject, and in May 2010 his team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published the payoff: a draft of the Neanderthal nuclear genome, assembled from the bones of three females from Vindija Cave in Croatia. The sequence was itself remarkable; what the analysis revealed was more so. Comparing the Neanderthal genome to modern human populations, the team found that people of non-African ancestry carry between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA — not contamination, not coincidence, but the relic of interbreeding that occurred somewhere in the Middle East or western Asia after modern humans left Africa and encountered their archaic cousins, somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. The tidy story in which Homo sapiens replaced Neanderthals without mixing collapsed rather neatly. We did not simply outcompete them; we also married into the family, and a fragment of the arrangement persists in most people alive today.

Hayabusa returns asteroid samples to Earth

1,500 Grains, Stuck to the Walls by Accident

JAXA's Hayabusa spacecraft had endured a mission that would have ended lesser machines: thruster failures, fuel leaks, a botched landing on the asteroid Itokawa in 2005 that left it tumbling, a communications blackout lasting seven weeks, and a sample-collection mechanism that almost certainly did not fire as intended. Engineers nursed it home anyway, across seven years and roughly six billion kilometres, and on 13 June 2010 its re-entry capsule landed in the Australian outback — the first object ever returned from an asteroid. Inside, the collection horn was empty, which was the expected outcome given the malfunction. But when scientists examined the sealed container more carefully they found approximately 1,500 grains of dust, each smaller than a tenth of a millimetre, adhering to the inner walls — material that had drifted in during the landing. The grains were confirmed as extraterrestrial and matched the spectral profile of S-type asteroids, providing the first direct surface chemistry from a class of body that constitutes most of the inner asteroid belt. The mission had failed in almost every planned respect and succeeded in the one that mattered.

Deepwater Horizon oil spill — largest accidental marine oil spill

Eighty-Seven Days Before the Well Went Quiet

The Macondo well, in the Mississippi Canyon block of the Gulf of Mexico, was being drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig in water more than a mile deep when, on 20 April 2010, a blowout sent hydrocarbons up the drill column, overwhelmed the rig's safety systems, and triggered the explosion that killed eleven workers and sank the rig two days later. What followed was 87 days during which no engineering solution, rushed from every available quarter, could stop the well — not the blowout preventer, not the containment domes, not the "top kill" attempt, not the mud — until a relief well intercepted the bore in September and it was sealed. By then an estimated 4.9 million barrels of crude oil had entered the Gulf, making Deepwater Horizon the largest accidental marine spill in recorded history. The disaster drove substantial research into deepwater wellhead engineering, dispersant chemistry at scale, and the behaviour of petroleum plumes in cold, high-pressure water; it also prompted a wholesale reassessment of offshore safety regulation, conducted with the urgency that tends to arrive only after the fact.