2011

Nobel Prize in Physics

Saul Perlmutter · Brian P. Schmidt · Adam G. Riess

Two independent teams set out in the late 1990s to measure how fast the universe was slowing down, and found instead that it was speeding up. Whatever is pushing it — dark energy, for now — fills roughly 68% of everything, and we have no idea what it is.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Dan Shechtman

In 1982 Shechtman looked at an aluminium-manganese alloy and saw a crystal with fivefold symmetry — a pattern crystallography had declared impossible, since you cannot tile a floor with pentagons. It took him a decade of ridicule to be proved right.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Bruce A. Beutler · Jules A. Hoffmann · Ralph M. Steinman

Beutler and Hoffmann found the molecular sentinels that raise the first alarm when bacteria arrive; Steinman discovered the dendritic cells that teach the slower, lasting immune response how to recognise a threat. Steinman died of pancreatic cancer three days before the announcement — the prize was kept, a rare exception to a rule written for simpler circumstances.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Tomas Tranströmer

Tranströmer wrote poems so compressed they feel like photographs taken with a very slow shutter, the visible and invisible blurring into a single exposure. The Swedish poet had been writing for fifty years; recognition, as with the best things, arrived in its own time.

Nobel Peace Prize

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf · Leymah Gbowee · Tawakkol Karman

Sirleaf became Africa's first elected female head of state; Gbowee organized women across ethnic lines to end Liberia's civil war using the oldest diplomatic tool available — the refusal to go away; Karman was at the forefront of Yemen's Arab Spring. Three different countries, three different methods, one prize.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Thomas J. Sargent · Christopher A. Sims

Economies do not sit still while economists study them — policies change, oil prices spike, central banks intervene. Sargent and Sims each developed methods for drawing conclusions from this moving target, tracing cause and effect through the noise of a world that will not hold still for its own analysis.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Darryl Gwynne · David Rentz

Male Julodimorpha bakewelli beetles, it turns out, find discarded Australian beer bottles deeply attractive — the dimpled brown glass apparently triggering the same instincts as a very large, very promising mate. The Australian government eventually changed bottle designs, which resolved the matter to everyone's satisfaction except perhaps the beetles'.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Makoto Imai · Naoki Urushihata · Hideki Tanemura · Yukinobu Tajima · Hideaki Goto · Koichiro Mizoguchi · Junichi Murakami

The team determined the minimum concentration of airborne wasabi needed to wake a sleeping person in an emergency, and then built a fire alarm that delivers exactly that concentration. It works. The patent exists. The smell has not been described as pleasant.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

John Perry

Perry's theory of Structured Procrastination observes that people who avoid their most important task will industriously complete many lesser ones, and that this tendency can be harnessed deliberately. He wrote an essay explaining it, and eventually a book — both, one suspects, while avoiding something else entirely.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics

Dorothy Martin · Pat Robertson · Elizabeth Clare Prophet · Lee Jang Rim · Credonia Mwerinde · Harold Camping

The prize went collectively to those who had publicly predicted the end of the world and been, each time, arithmetically incorrect. Harold Camping's 2011 campaign set two dates — 21 May, then 21 October — and achieved a sort of completeness by being wrong twice in a single year.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Philippe Perrin · Cyril Perrot · Dominique Deviterne · Bruno Ragaru

Discus throwers become dizzy; hammer throwers, spinning at least as fast, do not. The reason is that a discus athlete rotates in the same direction as the throw, creating a sensory conflict in the inner ear, while hammer throwers rotate the other way. Sport has accidentally been solving a vestibular puzzle for centuries.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Mirjam Tuk · Debra Trampe · Luk Warlop · Matthew Lewis · Peter Snyder · Robert Feldman · Kameko Bhatt · Robert Lue

The need to urinate, it emerges, sharpens some decisions and degrades others — apparently because the self-control required to suppress one impulse bleeds into the cognitive resources available for everything else. The practical implications were left, thoughtfully, as an exercise for the reader.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Judea Pearl

Pearl gave machines a language for uncertainty — Bayesian networks that could represent what a system knows, what it does not, and how new evidence should update the difference. Then he went further: a formal calculus for causation, distinguishing what correlates with what from what actually causes what, a distinction statistics had long preferred to sidestep.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Franz-Ulrich Hartl · Arthur L. Horwich

Proteins emerge from the ribosome as long disordered chains and must fold into precise three-dimensional shapes to work. Hartl and Horwich discovered that the cell employs dedicated molecular chaperones — the GroEL/GroES complex — to catch newly made proteins before they tangle, and coax them, in a small barrel of controlled space, into their correct forms.

OPERA experiment claims faster-than-light neutrinos

Over 730 kilometres from CERN to Gran Sasso, the OPERA team's neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds early — enough, if real, to rewrite the physics of the twentieth century. It was not real: a loose fibre-optic cable in the timing system turned out to be the culprit, and the anomaly vanished once it was found. Special relativity survived the year unscathed.

Kepler discovers first Earth-sized exoplanets and circumbinary world

Kepler-22b arrived in the habitable zone of its star, the most Earth-like address found to that point; Kepler-20e and 20f became the first confirmed Earth-sized planets beyond the solar system. Separately, Kepler-16b turned out to orbit not one but two stars — a world with two suns, at which point a certain type of person began feeling vindicated by a film they had seen in 1977.

HPTN 052 trial shows antiretroviral treatment prevents HIV transmission

The HPTN 052 trial found that starting antiretroviral therapy early reduced sexual transmission of HIV to uninfected partners by 96%. Science named it the year's Breakthrough, and it was: treatment became prevention, a reframing with consequences for every HIV policy written since.

Space Shuttle program ends

On 21 July, Atlantis touched down at Kennedy Space Center, ending STS-135 and thirty years of shuttle operations across 135 missions. The program had carried 355 people to space and had done what it said it would do, which is rarer than it sounds.

MESSENGER enters Mercury orbit

On 18 March, after a journey that required six gravitational assists and nearly seven years, MESSENGER fired its engine and became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. The innermost planet had waited a long time for a proper look, and it turned out to have ice at its poles, which the Sun, burning less than 60 million kilometres away, had left tactfully in permanent shadow.