2013

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Field No One Could See Yet

François Englert · Peter Higgs

In the summer of 1964, two teams working independently on either side of the Atlantic — Englert with Robert Brout in Brussels, and Higgs alone in Edinburgh — published papers within weeks of each other proposing that space itself is threaded with a field, and that particles acquire mass by moving through it, as if wading through an invisible medium that resists them in proportion to their eventual weight. The idea was elegant, mathematically necessary, and entirely unverifiable for nearly half a century; the particle it predicted, the Higgs boson, required a collider so large that serious people doubted it would ever be built. CERN's Large Hadron Collider was built anyway, seventeen miles of tunnel beneath the Franco-Swiss border, and on 4 July 2012 the signal emerged from the data: a bump at 125 GeV, unmistakably the thing Higgs and Englert had described. Peter Higgs, who had wondered aloud whether he would live to see it, received the Nobel call at 84. The Standard Model's last missing piece had been found — and with it, confirmation that we have been describing the fundamental architecture of matter correctly for decades.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Quantum and Classical, Working Together

Martin Karplus · Michael Levitt · Arieh Warshel

The problem with simulating a chemical reaction inside a living cell is that the electrons doing the interesting work obey quantum mechanics, while the thousands of surrounding atoms jostling around them are well described by the cheaper, faster equations of classical physics — and you cannot simply pick one and ignore the other without getting the answer wrong. In the 1970s, Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel developed methods for running both layers simultaneously: a small quantum-mechanical core embedded in a classical shell, each responding to the other in real time. It sounds like a compromise, and it is, but it is a compromise that works — and the consequences were immense. Enzymes that had resisted understanding for decades could be modelled on a computer; drug molecules could be docked against protein targets before a single gram of compound was synthesised; protein folding, the long nightmare of structural biology, became tractable. Without the multiscale simulation methods this trio built, modern drug discovery would be a slower, more expensive, and considerably more experimental affair.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Cell's Postal System, Decoded

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

A cell is not a bucket of proteins; it is a city with a postal system, and the postal system is exquisitely precise. Molecules destined for delivery — hormones, neurotransmitters, enzymes — travel sealed inside membrane-bound sacs called vesicles, and every package must find its correct address among thousands of possible destinations. Randy Schekman, working in yeast, identified the genes that encode the sorting machinery, the cellular equivalent of postal codes. James Rothman discovered the SNARE proteins, a complementary lock-and-key system that allows a vesicle to fuse with exactly the right membrane and nowhere else. Thomas Südhof then asked what controls the timing: at a synapse, neurotransmitter release must happen in under a millisecond after an electrical signal arrives, and he showed that calcium ions are the trigger that snaps the SNARE complex shut. Together they described a system so reliable that it operates in nearly every cell in every tissue of every complex organism — and so precise that when it fails, the consequences range from botulism to certain neurological diseases.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Sixty and Sixteen, at Once

Alice Munro

Alice Munro writes short stories about women in rural Ontario — about marriages made too young, secrets nursed for decades, the particular geography of small-town Canada — and a sentence like that tells you almost nothing about the experience of reading her. The Swedish Academy called her a master of the contemporary short story; what they meant, and could not quite say in a press release, is that her stories do what novels take three hundred pages to attempt and often fail. Time folds in on itself in a Munro story, so that a woman at sixty is simultaneously the girl she was at sixteen, and the gap between who people believe themselves to be and who they actually are is measured in small, terrible details: a glance, a letter kept, a lie that was never quite told. She was the first Canadian woman to receive the Nobel in Literature, and she had given up writing by the time the call came, having decided she had said what she needed to say. The work remains — patient, undeceived, thoroughly alive.

Nobel Peace Prize

Unglamorous Work, Done Anyway

Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was founded in 1997 to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty that by 2013 had been signed by nearly every nation on earth and under which declared stockpiles — hundreds of thousands of tonnes of mustard gas, nerve agents, and precursors — were being methodically verified and destroyed. The OPCW did this work without much public attention, which is roughly what success looks like in arms control. Then, in August 2013, rockets filled with sarin landed in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, killing between hundreds and over a thousand civilians in one of the worst chemical weapons attacks since Halabja in 1988. The Nobel Committee awarded the prize that October, tasking the OPCW with the added burden of overseeing the destruction of Syria's declared chemical arsenal while the civil war that had deployed it continued on every side. The prize was awarded to an institution doing necessary, unglamorous work under extraordinary pressure — which is, in a sense, a more honest definition of what peace actually requires.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Markets Are Hard to Beat, and Sometimes Wrong

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

Eugene Fama had spent the 1960s and 1970s demonstrating, with remarkable rigour, that financial markets process available information so efficiently that no investor can consistently beat them; Robert Shiller had spent the 1980s and 1990s demonstrating, with equal rigour, that prices deviate from fundamental values over years and decades in ways that are partially predictable. They were awarded the prize together in 2013, which caused a certain amount of quiet amusement among economists who had spent years watching the two frameworks argue with each other in the literature. Lars Peter Hansen, the third laureate, provided the statistical machinery — the Generalized Method of Moments — that allowed both camps to test their models against real data, so at least they could disagree with precision. The committee's citation praised their empirical work on asset prices; the subtler achievement was demonstrating that markets can be simultaneously very hard to beat in the short run and occasionally, dramatically, wrong over the long run — a finding that is less paradoxical than it sounds, and considerably more useful than either extreme alone.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology and Astronomy

A Beetle Steers by the Galaxy

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

The dung beetle's career is unglamorous but logistically demanding: roll your ball of dung in a straight line away from the pile, so that competing beetles cannot steal it, and do so at night when visual landmarks are largely useless. Marie Dacke and colleagues discovered, by bringing beetles to a planetarium and systematically switching the night sky on and off, that the beetles navigate by the Milky Way — the luminous band of the galaxy itself, not individual stars — making them the first animal known to use the galactic centre for orientation. The confirmation came, with characteristic scientific economy, by fitting the beetles with tiny cardboard visors that blocked their view of the sky; blindfolded, they circled. The Ig Nobel in Biology and Astronomy followed, which is surely the only prize that could be jointly awarded to a field of dung, a scarab, and the galaxy.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Onion's Dedicated Weeping Department

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

It had been understood for some decades that cutting an onion releases propanethial S-oxide, a volatile sulphur compound that reacts with the moisture in the eye to form sulphuric acid in concentrations low enough not to cause real damage but high enough to generate tears — which is, considered from the onion's perspective, a remarkably targeted defence strategy. What Shinsuke Imai and colleagues discovered was that the onion had been hiding an additional enzyme, lachrymatory-factor synthase, whose entire purpose is to shunt the metabolic pathway toward making this tear-inducing compound rather than flavour compounds, via a route no one had suspected. The onion, in other words, maintains a dedicated weeping-enforcement department. The Ig Nobel was awarded in Chemistry, though a case could be made for passive aggression.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Verdi Outperforms Silence in Mouse Hearts

Masateru Uchiyama · Xiangyuan Jin · Qi Zhang · Toshihito Hirai · Atsushi Amano · Hisashi Bashuda · Masanori Niimi

Transplanted mouse hearts are not, by any standard account, an audience for opera, and yet Masateru Uchiyama and colleagues found that those kept with recordings of Verdi's La Traviata playing continuously survived significantly longer than hearts kept in silence or exposed to monotonous tones. The effect was real, statistically significant, and sufficiently reproducible to publish. Mozart also prolonged survival, though less dramatically; Enya did not appear to be tested. The researchers declined to speculate too forcefully about mechanism — it may involve the rhythmic pattern of the music interacting with cardiac tissue in ways that are genuinely interesting, or it may be that Verdi is simply very good. The mice, for their part, left no critical notices.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

A Prosthetic Arm, Arrested for Clapping

Alexander Lukashenko · Belarus State Police

The Republic of Belarus, under Alexander Lukashenko, made public applause illegal on the grounds that organised clapping constituted a form of protest, which it sometimes did and sometimes did not; the law made no effort at that distinction. The police, instructed to enforce it, duly arrested a one-armed man at a demonstration for the act of clapping — which, in his case, he could only manage by slapping his prosthetic against his remaining hand, a detail the arresting officers apparently considered irrelevant. The Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Lukashenko and the state police, for this contribution to human dignity. It is the rare Ig Nobel that the recipients probably did not find amusing.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Feeling Attractive Required No Actual Drink

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

At a discotheque in Grenoble, participants were invited to drink — some receiving real alcohol, some a convincing placebo — and then to deliver a short speech into a recording device, which they were asked to evaluate. Those who had actually drunk, and those who merely believed they had, rated their own performances as substantially more attractive and confident than sober assessors rated those same recordings. The effect held even for the placebo drinkers, suggesting that the confidence is less about chemistry than about expectation — a finding consistent with several thousand years of accumulated anecdote but rather less tested at the bar for statistical significance. Laurent Bègue and colleagues managed it, which is arguably more rigorous than most of what happens in a French discotheque.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Running on Water, Given Lunar Gravity

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

On Earth, a human running across the surface of water is not a physics problem — it is an impossibility, since we do not generate enough upward force at any achievable stride rate to keep ourselves aloft. On the Moon, where gravity is roughly one-sixth as strong, the biomechanics work out rather differently. Alberto Minetti and colleagues showed through careful modelling of human gait that in lunar gravity, running at a normal pace could in principle generate enough lift, briefly, to run atop water — provided the water was calm and the runner committed fully to the exercise. No pond was transported to the Moon for experimental verification; no Moon was transported to a pond. The physics, however, is sound, which is a sentence that one does not often write about miracles.

Ig Nobel Prize in Probability

A Standing Cow Tells You Nothing

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

Bert Tolkamp and colleagues spent a considerable amount of time watching cows — specifically, watching them stand up and lie down — and found a genuine asymmetry in the probabilities involved. The longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely she is to stand up in the next few minutes; the relationship is orderly and predictable, a kind of bovine actuarial table. Once she is standing, however, the timing of her next lie-down follows no such pattern: she may stand for minutes or hours, and no amount of prior observation helps you forecast when she will descend. The asymmetry is reproducible, statistically robust, and entirely unexplained. It is a small mystery in a large field, which is, as these things go, appropriately pastoral.

Ig Nobel Prize in Safety Engineering

Gift-Wrap the Hijacker, Airmail Him Down

Gustano Pizzo

In 1972, at the height of an era in which commercial aircraft were being hijacked with dispiriting regularity, Gustano Pizzo patented a solution of magnificent and total impracticality: a system by which a hijacker, once identified, would be dropped through a trap door in the aircraft floor, sealed into a package, and ejected through a hatch beneath the plane to parachute gently to earth, where police, alerted by radio, would be waiting to collect him. The mechanism was drawn up in careful patent diagrams, each stage of the hijacker's involuntary descent rendered with an engineer's precision. It was never built, for reasons that become apparent on roughly a moment's reflection. The committee awarded the Safety Engineering prize, posthumously, for a design that solved the problem of air piracy by the direct method of removing the pirate from the aircraft altogether, gift-wrapped and airmailed to the authorities below.

Ig Nobel Prize in Archaeology

He Swallowed a Shrew for Science

Brian Crandall · Peter Stahl

Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl wished to know which bones of a small mammal would survive passage through the human digestive tract — a question of genuine relevance to archaeologists trying to reconstruct ancient diets from the fragments found in old latrines and middens. To find out, one of them parboiled a shrew, swallowed it whole without chewing, and then carefully recovered and examined everything that emerged over the following days. Many of the shrew's bones, they found, simply dissolved: certain teeth and jaw fragments vanished entirely, meaning archaeologists sifting ancient faeces have been systematically undercounting the small creatures our ancestors ate. The study is properly cited in the archaeological literature and its conclusion is genuinely useful. The committee awarded the Archaeology prize for a piece of experimental science whose methods section is not for the squeamish, and whose author demonstrated a commitment to first-hand data that few disciplines would ask of anyone.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

Reattachment Surgery, Duck Complications Included

Kasian Bhanganada · Tu Chayavatana · Chumporn Pongnumkul · Anunt Tonmukayakul · Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn · Krit Komaratal · Henry Wilde

During the 1970s, Thai hospitals encountered an unusual surgical problem with sufficient frequency to demand a systematic response: a wave of cases in which jealous wives had amputated their husbands' penises, sometimes feeding the severed part to a duck or other household animal, thereby complicating any hope of reattachment. Kasian Bhanganada and colleagues at a Bangkok hospital developed and documented the techniques for reattaching them, publishing a detailed clinical guide covering the microsurgery involved and the varying outcomes, including the specific difficulties introduced when the recovered part had spent time in a farmyard. The paper is entirely serious, written to restore function and dignity in a genuinely distressing category of injury. The committee awarded the Public Health prize with a citation that noted, among its complicating factors, the unlucky few whose amputated part had been eaten by a duck — a clause that is, regrettably, medically accurate.

Turing Award

Getting Machines to Agree on the Truth

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Leslie Lamport

Distributed computing — the project of getting multiple computers to agree on things in a world where messages are delayed, machines crash without warning, and no clock is perfectly synchronised — turns out to be a deeply uncooperative problem. Leslie Lamport spent decades making it tractable. His 1978 paper on logical clocks gave engineers a way to order events across a network without relying on synchronised physical time, introducing the concept that now bears his name. His Byzantine Generals Problem framed the theoretical limits of consensus under adversarial failure. Paxos, his consensus algorithm published in 1989 after a famously circuitous path to print, is the protocol on which much of the internet's infrastructure quietly depends. TLA+, his formal specification language, allows engineers to prove their distributed algorithms correct before those algorithms encounter the hostile conditions of production. The Turing Award arrived in 2013; the work had been running the world's largest systems for years.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

A Trigger Held in Hair-Trigger Readiness

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Richard H. Scheller · Thomas C. Südhof

At a chemical synapse — the gap across which a nerve signal must leap from one neuron to the next — the timing is everything: the delay between electrical impulse and neurotransmitter release is under a millisecond, a speed that requires not just speed but precision machinery held in a hair-trigger state. Richard Scheller, working at Stanford, identified and characterised the synaptic vesicle proteins that form the core of the docking and fusion apparatus, establishing the molecular cast of characters involved in a process that had been poorly understood despite being fundamental to all neural communication. Thomas Südhof then asked what controls the trigger: by showing that calcium ions bind to synaptotagmin and catalyse the final fusion event, he explained not just how neurotransmitters are released but how the brain manages to do it at the right moment in the right quantity. Together they described the mechanism that underlies every thought, sensation, and reflex a nervous system has ever produced — which is, even allowing for the usual scientific understatement, a considerable amount of ground.

Cancer immunotherapy named Science's Breakthrough of the Year

The Immune System Learns to Look Again

The immune system is, in principle, capable of recognising and destroying cancer cells, and had been known to do so occasionally for well over a century. The obstacle was that tumours had learned to suppress the response by engaging molecular checkpoints — CTLA-4 and PD-1 — that function as off-switches for immune attack, exploiting mechanisms the body evolved to prevent autoimmunity. By 2013, clinical trials blocking these checkpoints with antibodies were reporting something that oncologists had rarely felt entitled to use: the word durable. Patients with metastatic melanoma, previously untreatable, were achieving remissions lasting years. Lung cancer and leukaemia responded. Science named it Breakthrough of the Year, noting with characteristic sobriety that the results represented not just a new drug class but a new category of treatment — one that harnesses biology rather than attacking it, and one that James Allison and Tasuku Honjo would share a Nobel Prize for in 2018.

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

Bacterial Scissors, Reprogrammed for Us

Bacteria have immune systems — they capture snippets of viral DNA and file them in a genetic library called CRISPR, so that if the same virus returns, a protein called Cas9 can match the sequence and cut the invader's DNA with molecular precision. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed in June 2012 that this machinery could be reprogrammed to cut any DNA sequence a researcher specified; then, in January 2013, Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute and George Church at Harvard published nearly simultaneously that it worked inside living human and mouse cells. The bacterial scissors cut mammalian genomes cleanly, at the site chosen, and the cell's own repair machinery could be harnessed to insert, delete, or replace any sequence. The speed with which the technique spread through molecular biology had no real precedent: within two years it had been used in organisms from zebrafish to pig, had produced the first models of human genetic disease that were both accurate and cheap to generate, and had begun the long, contested conversation about germline editing that continues still.

Voyager 1 confirmed in interstellar space

Nineteen Billion Kilometres and Still Talking

Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977 on a trajectory that had been worked out by a JPL mathematician who noticed, in 1965, that a rare planetary alignment would occur in 1977 — a once-in-176-year arrangement that would allow a single spacecraft to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune using each planet's gravity as a slingshot. The mission was approved, redesigned, and launched, and Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Saturn in 1980 and then simply kept going. By 12 September 2013, when NASA confirmed using plasma wave data that the probe had crossed the heliopause — the boundary where the Sun's solar wind yields to the interstellar medium — Voyager 1 was more than 19 billion kilometres from Earth, still transmitting on 23 watts of power, its signal taking over seventeen hours to arrive. It is the farthest object humanity has ever placed anywhere. The scientists who designed its instruments have retired and their successors have retired; a few of the original team are still alive to read the data. It crosses into silence eventually, but not yet.

Chelyabinsk meteor airburst over Russia

Brighter Than the Sun, With No Warning

On the morning of 15 February 2013, thousands of people in Chelyabinsk and the surrounding Ural region were going about their day when a streak of light brighter than the Sun appeared in the sky — bright enough to cast moving shadows, to warm faces turned toward it — and then, roughly thirty seconds later, the shockwave arrived. The asteroid, roughly 20 metres across and weighing half a million tonnes, had entered the atmosphere at 19 kilometres per second and exploded at an altitude of around 30 kilometres, releasing energy equivalent to approximately 500 kilotons of TNT. More than 1,500 people were injured, almost all of them by shattered glass from windows blown in or out by the blast wave; many had gone to their windows to look at the fireball and were still standing there when the wave hit. What made the event additionally demoralising for planetary scientists was that it occurred on the same day that asteroid 2012 DA14, a larger object, was making a much-publicised close approach at a safe distance — tracked, announced, and entirely unrelated. Chelyabinsk had gone entirely undetected. The sky is larger than any survey yet managed.