2014

Nobel Prize in Physics

Isamu Akasaki · Hiroshi Amano · Shuji Nakamura

Red and green LEDs existed for decades; blue had resisted everyone who tried. Without blue, white light was impossible, and without white light, LEDs stayed a curiosity. Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura — working separately, failing often — coaxed bright blue emission from gallium nitride in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and changed how the world makes light.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Eric Betzig · Stefan W. Hell · William E. Moerner

Light microscopes cannot, in principle, resolve features smaller than about half the wavelength of light — a limit stated by Ernst Abbe in 1873. Betzig, Hell, and Moerner each found a different way around it, using fluorescent molecules whose switching behaviour could be exploited to image structures ten times smaller than the diffraction limit. Biology now has windows into things it previously had to infer.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

John O'Keefe · May-Britt Moser · Edvard I. Moser

O'Keefe found, in 1971, that specific hippocampal neurons fire only when a rat is in a specific location — place cells, the brain's map. Three decades later the Mosers found grid cells in the entorhinal cortex: neurons that fire in a repeating triangular pattern across the environment, providing the coordinate system the map is drawn on. Together they describe a GPS that every mammal runs internally.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Patrick Modiano

Modiano writes novels of recovered identity — people searching for traces of lives that have been deliberately or accidentally erased, always against the fog of the Nazi occupation of Paris. The Swedish Academy described him as the Marcel Proust of our time; his books are shorter than Proust, which is perhaps the highest praise available.

Nobel Peace Prize

Kailash Satyarthi · Malala Yousafzai

Satyarthi spent decades freeing children from bonded labour in South Asia; Yousafzai, shot in the head by Taliban gunmen in 2012 for speaking about girls' education, continued speaking about girls' education. At seventeen she became the youngest Nobel laureate; Satyarthi, at sixty, the oldest that day.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Jean Tirole

Tirole built a unified theory of how firms with market power should be regulated — not with a single rule, which tends to go wrong, but with frameworks specific to the industry's structure: how concentrated it is, how information is distributed, whether it tends toward natural monopoly. Antitrust regulators have been arguing about his conclusions ever since.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Kiyoshi Mabuchi · Kensei Tanaka · Daichi Uchijima · Rina Sakai

Mabuchi and colleagues measured the friction coefficient between shoe and banana skin, and between banana skin and floor. The skin acts as a lubricating layer of polysaccharide follicular gel, reducing grip far more than most fruit peels. The banana slip is, apparently, a real and reproducible physical phenomenon, which will mean something different to fans of silent comedy.

Ig Nobel Prize in Neuroscience

Jiangang Liu · Jun Li · Lu Feng · Ling Li · Jie Tian · Kang Lee

People who see Jesus in toast are not imagining the capacity — the frontal cortex actively projects face-like templates onto ambiguous images, and the scanner confirms it firing. Pareidolia, studied here in neuroimaging, turns out to be a feature rather than a bug: a face-detection system so sensitive it fires on noise, which is the safer error of the two available.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Vlastimil Hart · Petra Nováková · Erich Pascal Malkemper · Sabine Begall · Vladimír Hanzal · Miloš Ježek · Tomáš Kušta · Jaroslav Červený

Two years, seventy dogs, thirty-seven breeds, and 7,475 recorded outdoor visits later: dogs relieving themselves preferentially align with the Earth's north-south magnetic axis, but only when the geomagnetic field is calm. The study raises no immediate practical applications but does transform a mundane scene into a small act of navigation.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Ian Humphreys · Sonal Saraiya · Walter Belenky · James Dworkin

A child with a rare platelet disorder suffered nosebleeds that would not stop. The physicians packed the nasal cavities with cured, salted pork — and it worked. The salt, the tissue factors, and possibly the pressure combined to succeed where other measures had failed. The paper was accepted for publication, which suggests peer reviewers have a broader definition of evidence than sometimes supposed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Peter K. Jonason · Amy Jones · Minna Lyons

People who habitually stay up late score higher, on average, on narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism than those who rise early. The research is careful not to claim causation, but the correlation is robust enough that the authors named it the 'dark triad chronotype' — a label that will delight late-night readers and irritate everyone else.

Ig Nobel Prize in Arctic Science

Eigil Reimers · Sindre Eftestøl

Norwegian reindeer, which have never encountered a polar bear, flee significantly more urgently from a researcher walking on all fours than from an upright human. The animals have apparently not been told that polar bears do not live in Norway; evolution, being cautious, has left the template in place.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Michael Stonebraker

Most databases in production today descend, architecturally, from ideas that Stonebraker built and released as research prototypes over forty years: Ingres, Postgres, C-Store, and others. He did not merely theorise about query optimisation and storage — he shipped working systems, then published the papers, in an order that proved more useful to the field than the usual sequence.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Artur Avila · Manjul Bhargava · Martin Hairer · Maryam Mirzakhani

Four medals in Seoul. Avila worked on dynamical systems; Bhargava applied the geometry of numbers to elliptic curves; Hairer constructed an entire theory to make sense of stochastic PDEs that had previously resisted rigorous treatment. Mirzakhani received her medal for the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces, becoming both the first woman and the first Iranian to win it — after which the question of why it had taken until 2014 became rather unavoidable.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Kazutoshi Mori · Peter Walter

When misfolded proteins pile up in the endoplasmic reticulum, the cell needs to know — and it does, via the unfolded protein response, a signalling pathway Mori and Walter mapped independently. The UPR is now understood to play a role in diabetes, neurodegeneration, cancer, and inflammatory disease: the consequences of protein misbehaviour, it turns out, are considerable.

Philae lander touches down on Comet 67P

On 12 November, after ten years of travel and one extraordinary targeting manoeuvre, the Rosetta spacecraft released Philae toward the nucleus of Comet 67P. Philae landed, bounced, and came to rest in a shadowed hollow. It had sixty hours of battery life and used most of them, detecting organic molecules on the comet's surface before going dark — exactly as heroic as it sounds.

First patient partially recovers from paraplegia using transplanted olfactory cells

Darek Fidyka had a completely severed spinal cord. Surgeons led by Geoffrey Raisman transplanted olfactory ensheathing cells from his own nasal lining into the gap, providing a scaffold across which nerve fibres grew. After two years of rehabilitation, Fidyka walked with a frame — the first documented recovery of this kind from complete spinal cord severance.

West Africa Ebola epidemic declared international public health emergency

In August the WHO declared the West African Ebola outbreak — by then spreading through Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone — a public health emergency of international concern. The epidemic ultimately killed more than 11,300 people, the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, and exposed with some discomfort how unprepared international institutions were for a fast-moving haemorrhagic fever that spread through contact with the dead.

BICEP2 claims primordial gravitational wave signal, later withdrawn

In March the BICEP2 team announced what looked like the imprint of inflationary gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background — the most direct evidence yet of cosmic inflation. The press conference was jubilant. A year later, a joint analysis with the Planck satellite showed the signal was consistent with dust in our own galaxy; the primordial interpretation was not supported. The universe, declining to be caught that easily, remained its usual patient self.