2013

Nobel Prize in Physics

François Englert · Peter Higgs

In 1964 Englert and Higgs — working independently, publishing within weeks of each other — proposed a field permeating all of space that gives particles their mass. For nearly fifty years it was a prediction awaiting confirmation. The year before this prize, it arrived. Higgs, who had wondered aloud in 2012 whether he would live to see it, received the news at 84.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Martin Karplus · Michael Levitt · Arieh Warshel

Chemical reactions inside proteins happen at scales where quantum mechanics governs the electrons but classical physics describes the surrounding atoms — and both layers matter. Karplus, Levitt, and Warshel built methods that run both at once, making it possible to simulate enzymes and drug interactions in computers rather than only in laboratories.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

James E. Rothman · Randy W. Schekman · Thomas C. Südhof

Cells are not open containers — they ship molecules in sealed membrane sacs called vesicles, and everything depends on the right package reaching the right address. Schekman found the genetic postal codes; Rothman discovered the protein complexes that lock vesicle to membrane like a key in a lock; Südhof showed how calcium at a synapse triggers the lock to open in less than a millisecond.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Alice Munro

Munro writes short stories set in rural Ontario, which is a sentence that does not prepare you for what they actually contain. The Swedish Academy called her a master of the contemporary short story; the rest of literature quietly acknowledged she had done more with the form than most novels manage in three hundred pages.

Nobel Peace Prize

Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

The OPCW spent twenty years quietly verifying the destruction of declared chemical weapons stockpiles, mostly without incident. Then, in August 2013, sarin was used in Ghouta, Syria, killing hundreds of civilians, and the organisation was tasked with overseeing the destruction of Syria's declared arsenal while the civil war continued around it.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Eugene F. Fama · Lars Peter Hansen · Robert J. Shiller

Fama showed that in the short run, asset prices move in ways that are essentially unpredictable; Shiller showed that over years and decades, prices are partially predictable from valuation ratios; Hansen built the statistical tools to test both claims rigorously. The three were awarded jointly for empirical work on asset prices, which is perhaps the most diplomatic way the committee has ever handled a genuine disagreement.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology and Astronomy

Marie Dacke · Emily Baird · Marcus Byrne · Clarke Scholtz · Eric Warrant

Dung beetles, when rolling their balls at night, navigate in a straight line by using the Milky Way as a compass — the first animal known to use the galaxy for orientation. The team confirmed this by fitting beetles with tiny cardboard visors that blocked their view of the sky, and watching them lose their way.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Shinsuke Imai · Nobuaki Tsuge · Muneaki Tomotake · Yoshiaki Nagatome · Toshiyuki Nagata

Onions make eyes water via propanethial S-oxide, a volatile compound produced when cutting ruptures the cells. What was not known until this team's work is that a previously unidentified enzyme — lachrymatory-factor synthase — is responsible for making it, via a pathway nobody had suspected. The onion, it turns out, has a more complicated defence system than it lets on.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Masateru Uchiyama · Xiangyuan Jin · Ryota Fujiwara · Teppei Nagata · Hideaki Miyake · Masanori Hirano · Nobutada Tomimatsu

Transplanted mouse hearts kept alive with recordings of La Traviata outlived those kept in silence or exposed to monotonous tones, by a statistically significant margin. The researchers declined to speculate too loudly about why. The mice, regrettably, were not available for comment.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Alexander Lukashenko · Belarus State Police

Lukashenko's government made public applause illegal; the police, following orders with characteristic thoroughness, arrested a one-armed man for clapping. The Ig Nobel committee awarded the Peace Prize to both the law and its enforcement, which is the kind of recognition the Lukashenko government had probably not anticipated.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Laurent Bègue · Brad Bushman · Oulmann Zerhouni · Baptiste Subra · Medhi Ourabah

At a French discotheque, participants who had drunk alcohol — or merely believed they had — rated their own speeches as more attractive and confident than sober participants rated theirs. The finding is consistent with a great deal of anecdotal evidence accumulated over several thousand years of human history.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Alberto Minetti · Yuri Ivanenko · Germana Cappellini · Nadia Dominici · Francesco Lacquaniti

In lunar gravity — roughly one-sixth of Earth's — a human running at a normal pace could generate just enough lift to stay atop a water surface. The researchers demonstrated this with biomechanical modelling: no pond required, no Moon available, but the physics is sound.

Ig Nobel Prize in Probability

Bert Tolkamp · Marie Haskell · Fritha Langford · David Roberts · Colin Morgan

The longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely she is to stand up soon; but once she is standing, the timing of her next lie-down is anyone's guess. The asymmetry is real, reproducible, and so far unexplained — a small mystery in a large field, which is, as these things go, appropriate.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Leslie Lamport

Distributed systems fail in every possible way and several impossible ones, and the question of how multiple computers can agree on anything in the presence of failures is harder than it sounds. Lamport solved it with Paxos, named events in distributed systems with logical clocks, and gave engineers TLA+ to prove their algorithms correct before shipping them. Most of the internet runs on his ideas.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Richard H. Scheller · Thomas C. Südhof

Synaptic transmission — the moment a nerve signal leaps the gap from one neuron to the next — depends on the precisely timed fusion of tiny membrane vesicles. Scheller identified the core proteins of the docking machinery; Südhof showed how calcium ions pull the trigger. Together they mapped what happens in the fraction of a millisecond that makes thought possible.

Cancer immunotherapy named Science's Breakthrough of the Year

Clinical trials showed durable remissions in melanoma, lung cancer, and leukaemia by blocking the molecular brakes — CTLA-4, PD-1 — that tumours had learned to press on the immune system. Science called it the Breakthrough of the Year; what it was, more precisely, was the beginning of the normalisation of a treatment that had seemed too dangerous to use just years before.

CRISPR-Cas9 demonstrated as a programmable genome editor in human cells

In January, Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute and George Church at Harvard published nearly simultaneously: CRISPR-Cas9, a bacterial immune system, could be directed to cut human and mouse DNA at any target sequence chosen by the researcher. The bacterial scissors now worked on mammals. Everything that followed was downstream of this.

Voyager 1 confirmed in interstellar space

On 12 September NASA confirmed, using plasma wave data, that Voyager 1 had crossed the heliopause into interstellar space the previous August — more than 19 billion kilometres from the Sun. Launched in 1977 on a trajectory that engineers had spent years computing by hand, it is the farthest object humanity has ever built, and it is still sending data.

Chelyabinsk meteor airburst over Russia

On 15 February a 20-metre asteroid entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk undetected and exploded at 30 kilometres altitude with the energy of roughly 500 kilotons. The shockwave shattered windows across the city and injured more than 1,500 people — most of them cut by glass while watching the fireball, which arrived without warning on the same day a different asteroid was making a much-publicised close pass at a safe distance.