2012

Nobel Prize in Physics

Serge Haroche · David J. Wineland

To study a quantum system you must observe it, but observing it changes it — this is the dilemma Haroche and Wineland worked around, from opposite directions. Haroche trapped photons in a microwave cavity and watched them without absorbing them; Wineland trapped individual ions and manipulated them with laser pulses, producing the earliest demonstrations of what would later be called quantum computing.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Robert J. Lefkowitz · Brian K. Kobilka

Your body uses G-protein-coupled receptors — there are about 800 of them — to sense everything from light and smell to adrenaline and pain. Lefkowitz spent decades tracking down how cells detect the hormone; Kobilka caught the receptor at the exact moment of activation, revealing, at atomic resolution, the mechanical handshake between the molecule outside and the signal inside.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sir John B. Gurdon · Shinya Yamanaka

Fifty years separated their key experiments. In 1962 Gurdon took a nucleus from a mature frog cell and coaxed it into producing a whole tadpole, proving that adult cells still contain the full instruction set. In 2006 Yamanaka induced just four genes into adult mouse cells and got stem cells, patient-specific and requiring no embryo at all — a result so simple and unexpected that much of biology initially assumed a mistake.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Mo Yan

Mo Yan draws from rural Shandong the way a borehole draws from deep water: slowly, with great pressure, and bringing things up that would rather have stayed down. The Swedish Academy praised his hallucinatory realism; he became the first Chinese citizen resident in China to receive the prize.

Nobel Peace Prize

European Union

The European Union received the prize for sixty years of keeping France and Germany from fighting each other, which sounds easy until you remember the previous sixty years. The announcement came during a financial crisis testing the project's durability; the committee awarded it anyway, which was either prescient or stubborn.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Alvin E. Roth · Lloyd S. Shapley

Shapley and David Gale proved in 1962 that stable matches — where no two parties would both prefer to swap partners — could always be found by the right algorithm. Roth took that theorem into the real world, redesigning school admissions and medical residency placements so that thousands of pairs who had previously wound up in unstable arrangements no longer had to.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Joseph Keller · Raymond Goldstein · Patrick Warren · Robin Ball

The team derived the Ponytail Shape Equation — a genuine mathematical result describing how gravity, hair elasticity, and the random curliness of individual strands combine to produce the characteristic bounce of a swaying ponytail. It can predict ponytail shape from first principles, which is either a triumph of physics or a comment on how physics chooses its problems.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Johan Pettersson

Residents of certain houses in Anderslöv, Sweden, were finding their hair turning green. Pettersson traced the cause to high copper concentrations in the hot water pipes, which reacted with a compound in shampoo and deposited copper directly onto the hair. The houses were fixed; the residents presumably relieved.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Emmanuel Ben-Soussan · Michel Antonietti

The colon, during certain electrosurgical procedures, contains combustible gases. Ben-Soussan and Antonietti published guidance on how to prepare patients so that ignition does not occur, a precaution that seems obvious once you know it is necessary, and considerably less so before.

Ig Nobel Prize in Neuroscience

Craig Bennett · Abigail Baird · Michael Miller · George Wolford

The researchers placed a dead Atlantic salmon in an fMRI scanner, showed it photographs of humans in social situations, and asked it to identify the emotions being shown. Without correction for multiple comparisons, meaningful-looking brain activity appeared in the dead fish. The paper became a standard cautionary reference in neuroimaging methodology courses, which is a more lasting form of fame than most living salmon achieve.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Anita Eerland · Rolf Zwaan · Tulio Guadalupe

Participants who subtly leaned left while estimating quantities — the Eiffel Tower's height, say — gave consistently lower numbers than those leaning right. The body, it turns out, is quietly doing arithmetic, and it leans in a direction that feels smaller.

Ig Nobel Prize in Acoustics

Kazutaka Kurihara · Koji Tsukada

The SpeechJammer plays a speaker's own voice back to them with a short delay, exploiting the brain's reliance on auditory feedback to disrupt speech — forcing the person to slow, stumble, and eventually stop. The inventors noted applications in controlling excessive talking in public spaces, then presumably stopped talking about it.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

SKN Company

SKN Company developed a process to convert decommissioned Russian artillery shells into industrial nanodiamonds using detonation synthesis — turning ordnance into abrasives, one explosion at a time. The prize for Peace was, in this context, an entirely defensible choice.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Shafi Goldwasser · Silvio Micali

Before Goldwasser and Micali, cryptography relied on intuition about what felt hard to break. They replaced the intuition with definitions — probabilistic encryption, formal notions of computational security — and showed that security could be proven rather than merely hoped for. The padlock icons you trust are built on their foundations.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Michael Sheetz · James Spudich · Ronald Vale

Inside every cell, molecular motors haul cargo along protein tracks — myosin walks along actin, kinesin walks along microtubules, dynein drags things the other way. Sheetz, Spudich, and Vale identified and characterised these machines, discovering the engines that run cell division, muscle contraction, and the logistics of a neuron stretched a metre from brain to toe.

Discovery of the Higgs boson

On 4 July the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced, with justified caution, that they had observed a new boson at around 125 GeV — consistent with the Higgs particle that Peter Higgs and others had proposed in 1964 as the source of mass in the Standard Model. The announcement was made to a standing ovation; Higgs, 83 and in the audience, was seen to cry. He and François Englert received the Nobel the following year.

Denisovan genome sequenced from fossil powder

From a 50,000-year-old finger bone excavated in a Siberian cave, the Max Planck Institute extracted enough DNA to sequence a complete genome, revealing an archaic human population — the Denisovans — who had interbred with both Neanderthals and modern humans. The entire species was discovered from a fingertip.

Curiosity rover lands on Mars

To land a one-tonne rover safely, NASA designed a sky crane: a rocket-powered descent stage that hovered above the surface and lowered the rover on cables before flying away. On 6 August it worked, depositing Curiosity in Gale Crater with an accuracy of a few kilometres. The mission's objective was to determine whether Mars had once been habitable — and it had.