2010

Nobel Prize in Physics

Andre Geim · Konstantin Novoselov

Geim and Novoselov isolated single-atom-thick carbon sheets from graphite using ordinary adhesive tape in 2004 — a method so unglamorous that colleagues had considered it unpublishable. The material, graphene, turned out to be the strongest substance ever measured, nearly transparent, and a superb conductor. Geim became the only person in history to hold both an Ig Nobel (2000, for levitating a frog with magnets) and a Nobel Prize.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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

Building complex carbon frameworks — the skeletons of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and electronic materials — requires coupling carbon atoms together selectively. Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki each developed palladium-catalysed reactions, independently, that do this with the precision the job demands. Their methods are now used in the synthesis of roughly a quarter of all new pharmaceuticals.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Robert G. Edwards

Edwards worked with gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe for over a decade developing in vitro fertilisation before Louise Brown — the world's first IVF baby — was born on 25 July 1978. By the time of the award, more than four million people had been born through IVF. Steptoe had died in 1989; Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa

Vargas Llosa's novels map power in Latin America with the attention a naturalist might bring to a particularly complex ecosystem — the caudillo, the military, the church, the party, and the individual caught among them. The committee cited his "cartography of structures of power" and the literature of the continent's political catastrophes came with him to Stockholm.

Nobel Peace Prize

Liu Xiaobo

Liu had co-authored Charter 08, a manifesto calling for political reform in China, and was serving eleven years in prison for it when the prize was announced. At the Oslo ceremony his chair sat empty; China had blocked him from attending and had pressured other governments to boycott the event. His wife Liu Xia, who had never been charged with any crime, was placed under house arrest the day the announcement was made.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

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

Finding a job and filling a vacancy both take time — and during that search, workers and employers each give up something. Diamond, Mortensen, and Pissarides built models of this matching process that explain persistent unemployment even in healthy economies, and that guided a generation of labour market policy.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Lianne Parkin · Sheila Williams · Patricia Priest

Parkin, Williams, and Priest demonstrated, on a genuinely icy footpath in Dunedin, New Zealand, that wearing socks on the outside of shoes reduces slipping significantly compared to shoes alone or shoes with ice cleats. The study was rigorous; the solution is not for everyone.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Eric Adams · Scott Socolofsky · Stephen Masutani · BP

The award went to the researchers — and to BP — for demonstrating that oil and water can be thoroughly mixed by applying sufficient mechanical energy and chemical dispersant, as was shown at scale in the Gulf of Mexico during the spring and summer. The Ig Nobel committee's choice of recipient was admired for its precision.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Simon Rietveld · Ilja van Beest

Rietveld and van Beest found that mild physical stress from a roller-coaster ride suppressed asthma symptoms in patients, apparently by triggering a stress response that temporarily reduces airway inflammation. Clinical application is not currently recommended, but the finding was real.

Ig Nobel Prize in Engineering

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

To study the health of wild whales, Acevedo-Whitehouse and colleagues devised a remote-controlled helicopter with Petri dishes mounted underneath, which they flew through the spray of whale exhalations to collect respiratory mucus samples. The image of a miniature helicopter chasing a blue whale for its snot is, on reflection, one of the more dignified moments in field biology.

Ig Nobel Prize in Management

Alessandro Pluchino · Andrea Rapisarda · Cesare Garofalo

Using agent-based simulations of corporate hierarchies, Pluchino, Rapisarda, and Garofalo showed mathematically that organisations perform better when they promote people at random rather than by merit or by inverse merit. The finding echoes the Peter Principle but is somewhat more defeatist about the alternatives.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Richard Stephens · John Atkins · Andrew Kingston

Stub your toe and you will, if you are honest, swear; the winners ran the experiment properly, with volunteers holding their hands in ice water, and found that the cursing genuinely raised pain tolerance. There is a catch they noted with some glee: the trick works far less well on people who swear all day anyway.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Leslie G. Valiant

Valiant's PAC learning framework asked: what does it mean for a system to learn from examples, and when is that provably possible? The answer, developed in 1984, became the theoretical foundation of machine learning. He also introduced counting complexity classes and algebraic approaches to circuit complexity — work whose influence widened well beyond the fields that first received it.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Douglas L. Coleman · Jeffrey M. Friedman

Coleman's parabiosis experiments in obese mice in the 1970s pointed to a circulating signal telling the brain when enough fat had been stored. Friedman's lab identified it in 1994: leptin, a hormone secreted by fat cells that travels to the hypothalamus and suppresses appetite. The discovery founded the molecular study of obesity and revealed that body weight is a regulated, not simply an undisciplined, variable.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Napoleone Ferrara

Ferrara identified VEGF — vascular endothelial growth factor — as the primary signal that tumours use to recruit new blood vessels, then helped develop drugs to block it. The anti-VEGF antibody bevacizumab became the first approved anti-angiogenic cancer drug; a related molecule halted vision loss in age-related macular degeneration, saving the sight of millions.

First synthetic bacterial cell created

On 20 May, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that a bacterium was now running under the control of a genome that had been chemically synthesised from scratch — 1.08 million base pairs assembled from bottles of reagent and installed into an emptied recipient cell. The cell divided normally under its new instructions. Life, or at least this version of it, had been written as well as read.

Neanderthal genome sequenced

Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute published a draft of the Neanderthal nuclear genome in May, extracted from bones of three females from a Croatian cave. Comparing it to modern human genomes revealed that people of non-African ancestry carry one to four percent Neanderthal DNA, the relic of interbreeding somewhere in the Middle East or central Asia after modern humans left Africa.

Hayabusa returns asteroid samples to Earth

On 13 June, JAXA's Hayabusa capsule landed in the Australian outback carrying grains of dust from the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa — the first material ever returned from an asteroid. The primary sampling mechanism had malfunctioned; the dust was found adhering to the inside of the container. The particles were confirmed as extraterrestrial and provided the first direct surface chemistry of an S-type asteroid.

Deepwater Horizon oil spill — largest accidental marine oil spill

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on 20 April, killing eleven workers and beginning a leak that ran for 87 days and released an estimated 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico — the largest accidental marine spill in history. The disaster generated substantial research into deepwater wellhead engineering, dispersant chemistry, and the long-term fate of petroleum in marine sediments.