2014

Nobel Prize in Physics

Blue Light, Twenty Years Late

Isamu Akasaki · Hiroshi Amano · Shuji Nakamura

Red LEDs arrived in the 1960s, green followed not long after, and for the next two decades the semiconductor industry chased blue with the particular desperation of someone who knows the prize is enormous and the material refuses to cooperate. Gallium nitride was theoretically capable of it, but growing the crystals cleanly enough proved nearly impossible — most researchers abandoned the effort. Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, working at Nagoya University, persisted through the 1980s, developing a method of coaxing better crystals from sapphire substrates; Shuji Nakamura, working almost alone at a small chemical company called Nichia, followed an independent route and by the early 1990s had bright blue emission and an employer bewildered by what to do with it. Blue matters because blue plus red plus green gives white, and white light from LEDs consumes roughly a tenth the energy of incandescent bulbs. The Nobel committee observed that Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura had done more for lighting efficiency than anyone since Edison — which is the kind of comparison that sounds like hyperbole until you sit with the electricity figures.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Suggestion, Not a Law

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

In 1873 Ernst Abbe worked out, with admirable mathematical precision, that a light microscope could never resolve anything smaller than roughly half the wavelength of the light being used — about 200 nanometres, which happens to be the scale at which the interesting machinery of a living cell operates. For more than a century this was treated not as a challenge but as a law. Stefan Hell, working in Göttingen, decided it was more of a suggestion, and by the late 1990s had developed STED microscopy, which uses a second laser to suppress fluorescence in all but a tiny central spot, effectively sharpening resolution far below Abbe's limit. Eric Betzig and William Moerner, independently, discovered that individual fluorescent molecules could be switched on and off one at a time, and by collecting thousands of such localisation events could reconstruct images with nanometre-scale resolution. Biology responded to these tools the way it always does when given better eyes: it immediately began finding things it had not expected. The inner workings of synapses, the architecture of protein complexes assembling in real time — images that had previously been inference rather than observation.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Graph Paper Draped Over the World

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

In 1971 John O'Keefe, recording from the hippocampi of freely moving rats, noticed that certain neurons fired with a fidelity that seemed almost too neat to be biological: each cell became active only when the animal occupied a specific location in its environment, fell silent everywhere else, and reactivated reliably on return. He called them place cells, and proposed that the hippocampus constructs something like an internal map of space. The idea was not immediately embraced. Three decades later May-Britt and Edvard Moser, working in Trondheim and tracing the circuits that feed into the hippocampus, recorded from the entorhinal cortex and found something stranger still: cells whose firing fields tiled the environment in a repeating triangular lattice, like a sheet of graph paper draped over the world. These grid cells provide the coordinate system on which the hippocampal map is drawn — together, they constitute the neural GPS that every mammal uses to know where it is and to plan a path. A world without this discovery is one in which we still have no satisfying account of why hippocampal damage so devastatingly destroys a person's ability to navigate, or why that is among the first losses of Alzheimer's disease.

Nobel Prize in Literature

One Book, Written Fifty Years Running

Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano has written, over fifty years and roughly thirty novels, essentially one book — which is not a complaint but a description of method. His subject is Paris under the German occupation, and the years immediately after, and the way those years leave traces: a name in an old telephone directory, a photograph with no caption, an address that leads to a building since demolished. His narrators move through a city riddled with absences, looking for people who were erased deliberately or by the indifference of time, and they tend not to find them cleanly. Modiano was born in 1945, the son of a Jewish father who had survived the occupation under circumstances his son has spent a career quietly, obliquely examining. The Swedish Academy compared him to Proust, which is fair as a description of thematic preoccupation if somewhat intimidating as a shelf placement; his books are, mercifully, shorter. What they preserve is the particular texture of a city that collaborated and forgot, and the lives that fell through the cracks of that forgetting.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Hindu and a Muslim, Sharing the Stage

Kailash Satyarthi · Malala Yousafzai

Kailash Satyarthi had been freeing children from bonded labour in India since 1980, running an organisation called Bachpan Bachao Andolan and personally participating in raids on factories and quarries where children were held in conditions their employers preferred not to describe publicly. By 2014 his movement had helped liberate more than 80,000 children, a number that is both enormous and, given the scale of the problem, sobering. Malala Yousafzai had been writing, at fourteen, a BBC Urdu blog about girls' education under Taliban control in Pakistan's Swat Valley — a project she conducted anonymously, then publicly, then in October 2012 under conditions she did not choose when a gunman boarded her school bus and shot her in the head at point-blank range. She survived, relocated to Birmingham, and continued speaking about girls' education with a composure that struck observers as either extraordinary courage or an extremely well-calibrated sense of proportion. At seventeen she became the youngest Nobel laureate in any category; Satyarthi, at sixty, was the older of the two. The joint award to a Hindu and a Muslim from neighbouring countries with a complicated history was not, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, coincidental.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

One Rulebook Does Not Fit Every Market

Jean Tirole

For most of the twentieth century, regulatory thinking about powerful firms operated from a rough toolkit: break them up, cap their prices, and hope. The trouble was that industries differ enormously in their structures — what works for electricity distribution fails for two-sided platforms, and what makes sense for a local cable monopoly can be counterproductive applied to a firm whose pricing strategy involves subsidising one side of a market to attract the other. Jean Tirole, beginning in the 1980s and building a body of work that spanned decades and a substantial fraction of the French intellectual calendar, argued that the right framework had to be industry-specific, sensitive to information asymmetries between regulator and firm, and grounded in mechanism design rather than rule-of-thumb prohibition. His work on platform economics — the economics of firms that serve two or more distinct groups of customers who benefit from each other's presence — now sits at the heart of every serious policy debate about technology markets. Antitrust regulators in Brussels and Washington have been arguing about his conclusions ever since, which is roughly what he would have expected.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

The Banana Peel, Finally Measured

Kiyoshi Mabuchi · Kensei Tanaka · Daichi Uchijima · Rina Sakai

Silent cinema, and then decades of animated cartoons, built an entire comedic vocabulary on the premise that stepping on a banana skin produces a catastrophic loss of traction — but no one, until Kiyoshi Mabuchi and colleagues at Kitasato University, had actually measured why. Their investigation found that the inner surface of a banana peel releases a lubricating gel of polysaccharide follicles when compressed underfoot, reducing the friction coefficient to somewhere between wet ice and a freshly waxed floor. They measured shoe against banana peel, banana peel against linoleum, and found the slip to be real, reproducible, and considerably more pronounced than the peel of any orange or apple they tested. The banana occupies a special position in the taxonomy of pratfalls, and science has now confirmed it deserves the distinction. The research was, in its way, a small act of justice for every clown who ever landed on his back.

Ig Nobel Prize in Neuroscience

Your Brain Wants to Find a Face

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

The phenomenon of seeing a face in a piece of toast, a cloud, or the grain of a wooden door has a name — pareidolia — and a somewhat unearned reputation as a symptom of credulity. Liu, Li, and their colleagues at the University of Toronto and the Chinese Academy of Sciences decided to find out what the brain is actually doing when it performs this trick, and scanned subjects while showing them images laden with ambiguous noise. The frontal cortex, it turned out, does not passively receive what the eyes send; it actively dispatches expectations downward, projecting face-like templates onto incoming signals and flagging near-matches with genuine enthusiasm. The scanner lit up in the same regions whether the face was real or imagined. This is pareidolia not as malfunction but as the inevitable consequence of a face-detection system calibrated for sensitivity rather than precision — because mistaking a shadow for a face is embarrassing, and mistaking a face for a shadow is occasionally fatal. The sacred cheese is, in this light, a reasonable error.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Dogs Prefer to Face Magnetic North

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

Over two years, in a study that required a heroic commitment to fieldwork and an unusual tolerance for its subject matter, Vlastimil Hart and collaborators at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague observed seventy dogs across thirty-seven breeds performing 7,475 outdoor elimination events, noting at each the animal's compass orientation, the time of day, and the state of the local geomagnetic field. Their finding: dogs preferentially align their bodies along the Earth's north-south magnetic axis when defecating, but only when the geomagnetic field is calm — during periods of magnetic disturbance, the preference disappears. The research raises no immediate practical applications, and dogs shown the paper have expressed no particular views. What it does demonstrate is that magnetoreception, long known in birds and fish, operates quietly in domestic mammals as well, even ones that have been living in suburban gardens for thousands of years. Evolution left the compass in; no one told the dogs it was there.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Cured Pork Stopped the Bleeding

Ian Humphreys · Sonal Saraiya · Walter Belenky · James Dworkin

A young patient with Glanzmann's thrombasthenia, a rare platelet disorder that severely impairs clotting, presented with nosebleeds that resisted every standard intervention: nasal packing, cauterisation, clotting factors administered intravenously. In some desperation, the physicians — Humphreys, Saraiya, Belenky, and Dworkin at Detroit Medical Center — recalled a remedy described in much older medical literature and packed the nasal cavities with cured, salted pork. The bleeding stopped. The likely mechanism involves the salt drawing fluid and concentrating clotting factors, the tissue factors present in the pork itself, and the physical pressure of the packing, but the authors were careful not to overclaim the mechanism when the evidence was primarily that it worked. The case report was accepted by Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, demonstrating that peer review, at its best, remains open to evidence regardless of its provenance. The remedy is, all things considered, the most mediaeval outcome of a twenty-first-century hospital stay since leeches were formally rehabilitated in the 1990s.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

The Dark Triad Keeps Late Hours

Peter K. Jonason · Amy Jones · Minna Lyons

The 'dark triad' — narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism — is a cluster of personality traits that researchers use when they want to describe a person who is, by most social definitions, disagreeable to be around but often rather good at getting what they want. Peter Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons found, surveying several hundred adults with validated personality measures, that scoring high on the dark triad correlates reliably with preferring the night: late to bed, resistant to early rising, not particularly improved by morning. This may reflect a genuine chronobiological difference, or it may reflect the documented finding that social norms are less rigorously enforced in the small hours, which suits certain temperamental profiles rather well. The authors named the pattern the 'dark triad chronotype,' a label clinical enough to appear in a journal and precise enough that its meaning is immediately clear to anyone who has shared a house with someone who fits it.

Ig Nobel Prize in Arctic Science

A Costume Fooled No Actual Bear

Eigil Reimers · Sindre Eftestøl

Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, researchers at the University of Oslo, approached reindeer herds in Svalbard under a range of conditions: walking upright, walking on all fours, wearing a polar bear costume, and — most productively — walking on all fours while wearing a polar bear costume. The animals, which have never encountered a polar bear and live on an island where polar bears do not venture into reindeer habitat, responded to the quadrupedal approach with significantly more vigorous flight behaviour than to a person walking normally. The reindeer had apparently retained, across generations with no direct contact with ursine predators, an inherited alarm response keyed to the silhouette and gait of something large and low-moving coming toward them through the Arctic snow. Evolution, being parsimonious, keeps templates it paid good money for. The polar bear, for its part, has not been informed of its continued influence on Norwegian ungulates.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

Is Owning a Cat a Health Risk?

Jaroslav Flegr · Jan Havlíček · Jitka Hanušová-Lindová · David Hanauer · Naren Ramakrishnan · Lisa Seyfried

Jaroslav Flegr had spent years studying Toxoplasma gondii, a single-celled parasite that reproduces in cats but can infect almost any warm-blooded animal, and had accumulated evidence that latent infection subtly alters human behaviour — slowing reaction times, shifting personality, even nudging the odds of certain accidents. Working with colleagues in the Czech Republic and the United States, he pursued the uncomfortable corollary: that owning a cat, the parasite's definitive host, might carry a measurable psychological hazard. The data on Toxoplasma are genuinely unsettling and taken seriously by parasitologists, even as the size of the effect on any individual remains debated. The committee awarded the Public Health prize for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat — a question in which a third of the world's population, quietly infected, has a personal stake, whether or not they would prefer not to know.

Ig Nobel Prize in Art

Beauty as a Mild Painkiller

Marina de Tommaso · Michele Sardaro · Paolo Livrea

Marina de Tommaso and colleagues asked volunteers to look at paintings they had rated as beautiful or ugly while being shot in the hand with a laser calibrated to deliver a precise jolt of pain, and then measured how much the experience hurt. Contemplating a beautiful painting, they found, measurably reduced both the perceived pain and the corresponding electrical activity in the brain, while an ugly painting offered no such relief — beauty, it seems, provides a genuine if modest analgesia. The mechanism plausibly involves attention and emotional state modulating the brain's processing of pain signals, the same machinery that lets an engrossing film make a headache recede. The committee awarded the Art prize for establishing, with a laser and a gallery's worth of images, that looking at something lovely helps you bear being hurt — which artists have claimed for centuries and can now cite a controlled trial to support.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Crime, Now Counted Toward GDP

Italy's National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT)

The European Union, seeking comparable economic figures across its member states, directed national statistical agencies to include the revenue from illegal activities — prostitution, the drug trade, smuggling, and the sale of contraband — in their calculations of gross domestic product. Italy's National Institute of Statistics, ISTAT, complied with particular diligence, folding the estimated proceeds of the black economy into the official national accounts and thereby increasing the measured size of the Italian economy by a stroke of methodology rather than any change in what Italians actually produced. The committee awarded the Economics prize for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the EU mandate to boost the official size of national economies by counting these revenues. It is a rare policy that grows a country's GDP without anyone lifting a finger, and a rarer one still that does so by formally tallying the crime.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

Sausage Cultured From Baby Stool

Raquel Rubio · Anna Jofré · Belén Martín · Teresa Aymerich · Margarita Garriga

Raquel Rubio and colleagues at a Catalan food research institute went looking for new starter cultures for fermented sausage and found a promising source in an unexpected place: the faeces of human infants, which are rich in lactic acid bacteria of exactly the sort used to cure and sour meat. They isolated strains from baby stool, screened them for the right properties, and used them to produce fermented sausages that were, by the assessment of a tasting panel, perfectly acceptable — the bacteria performing their souring work regardless of their provenance. The rationale was sound: infant gut bacteria are robust, well adapted to fermentation, and potentially able to lend the finished sausage a probiotic benefit. The committee awarded the Nutrition prize for the work, which is entirely respectable microbiology and which most consumers would nonetheless prefer to encounter after dinner rather than before, and ideally not at all on the label.

Turing Award

One Lab, Every Database Since

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Michael Stonebraker

The history of database systems is, in unusual proportion, the history of one man's research group. Michael Stonebraker began at Berkeley in the early 1970s with a project called Ingres, which demonstrated that a relational database could be built and run efficiently — a thing that IBM's researchers had described in theory but not delivered in software. He followed it with Postgres, which added object-relational features and a type system flexible enough to be useful for scientific data; then with C-Store, which stored data by column rather than row and proved dramatically faster for analytical queries; then with several more systems targeting different corners of the problem. What distinguished Stonebraker was not just theoretical insight but a commitment to building things that ran, so that the papers could report what actually happened rather than what the models predicted. The modern database landscape — PostgreSQL serving millions of applications, columnar stores processing petabytes for analytics — descends with considerable directness from systems he built and released for others to use and criticise.

Fields Medal

Eighty Years, Then a Woman Won

Fields Medal

Artur Avila · Manjul Bhargava · Martin Hairer · Maryam Mirzakhani

The 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians convened in Seoul and awarded four medals to four mathematicians whose work had almost nothing in common except difficulty. Artur Avila, the first Latin American recipient, had spent years mapping the chaotic behaviour of dynamical systems, bringing order — or at least intelligible disorder — to phenomena that had resisted analysis. Manjul Bhargava, whose compositions of numbers recall techniques from Sanskrit poetry he had also studied, applied the geometry of numbers to questions about elliptic curves and proved results on how often they have rational solutions. Martin Hairer, Austrian and working at the University of Warwick, had constructed a theory of regularity structures to give rigorous mathematical meaning to stochastic partial differential equations that had previously been used freely by physicists despite nobody being quite sure they made sense. And Maryam Mirzakhani, Iranian and working at Stanford, received her medal for work on the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces — moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, and the counting of closed geodesics — becoming the first woman to win the Fields Medal in its eighty-year history, a fact that provoked the obvious question about the preceding eighty years rather more loudly than the committees involved seemed to have anticipated.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

The Cell's Quality-Control Alarm

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Kazutoshi Mori · Peter Walter

The endoplasmic reticulum is the cell's main protein-folding factory, and like any factory it occasionally produces defective goods — misfolded proteins that cannot do their jobs and, if they accumulate, begin to cause damage. The cell needs a way to detect this accumulation and respond: dialling down production of new proteins, ramping up the machinery that fixes or disposes of misfolded ones, and, if things get badly out of hand, triggering apoptosis before the damage spreads. Kazutoshi Mori at Kyoto University and Peter Walter at UCSF mapped this pathway — the unfolded protein response — independently in the early 1990s, identifying the sensor molecules that detect stress in the ER lumen and the signalling cascade they trigger across the membrane. What followed was the gradual recognition that this pathway is not a curiosity but a central player in a remarkable range of diseases: type 2 diabetes involves ER stress in pancreatic beta cells; Parkinson's, ALS, and other neurodegenerative conditions involve the accumulation of misfolded proteins that overwhelm the response Mori and Walter had described; cancer cells, producing proteins at extraordinary rates, often live or die by how well they manage it. The consequences of protein misbehaviour, it turns out, extend rather far.

Philae lander touches down on Comet 67P

A Rubber Duck, Ten Years Away

The Rosetta mission had been in flight for ten years when, on the morning of 12 November 2014, the European Space Agency guided it into position above Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and released the lander Philae toward a nucleus the size of a small mountain and the shape, as it turned out, of a rubber duck. What followed was not the clean touchdown the engineers had planned. Philae's anchoring harpoons failed to fire, and the lander bounced — twice — before coming to rest in the shadow of a cliff, its solar panels receiving perhaps ninety minutes of light per day instead of the seven hours they needed. In the sixty hours that remained before the batteries died, Philae worked through its science checklist with admirable efficiency, drilling into the surface, sniffing the atmosphere, and detecting organic molecules — carbon-bearing compounds of the kind that are interesting if you are thinking about the origins of life on Earth, which the mission scientists conspicuously were. The signal went quiet on 15 November. Rosetta, orbiting overhead for another two years, eventually confirmed the lander's precise location: wedged in its shadowed hollow, having done rather more science than its landing suggested it would.

First patient partially recovers from paraplegia using transplanted olfactory cells

A Bridge Built From His Own Nose

Darek Fidyka, a Polish firefighter, suffered a knife attack in 2010 that completely severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralysed from the chest down. The standard prognosis for complete spinal cord severance is unambiguous and grim: the fibres do not regenerate, the gap does not close, and recovery of function does not occur. Geoffrey Raisman, a neuroscientist at University College London who had spent decades studying olfactory ensheathing cells — the glial cells that accompany olfactory nerve fibres from nose to brain and possess an unusual ability to support axon regrowth — believed those cells might provide a bridge across exactly such a gap. Working with Polish neurosurgeons led by Pawel Tabakow, the team harvested olfactory ensheathing cells from Fidyka's own nasal tissue, expanded them in culture, and transplanted them into the lesion site along with strips of peripheral nerve to provide structural scaffolding. Over two years of intense rehabilitation, Fidyka began to recover sensation and muscle function below the injury; by the end of that period he could walk short distances with a frame. The mechanism remained a subject of scientific debate, and the result was one patient — carefully, necessarily emphasised by everyone involved — but it was the first documented case of clinically meaningful recovery from complete spinal cord severance, which is not a category of event that previously existed.

West Africa Ebola epidemic declared international public health emergency

The Outbreak the Cities Could Not Contain

Ebola had appeared before, in outbreaks that were frightening and deadly but contained — remote villages, limited road networks, swift action by local and international health workers, and then silence. The 2014 outbreak began in Guinea in late 2013 and moved differently, crossing into Liberia and Sierra Leone, reaching capital cities, and spreading through the ordinary contact of communities that had no experience of the disease and no reason to modify the funeral practices that proved so efficient at transmitting it. By August the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern, a designation that is both the organisation's strongest alarm and, it emerged, insufficiently loud to produce the response the situation warranted. The outbreak ultimately killed more than 11,300 people before it was controlled in 2016, making it the largest Ebola epidemic in recorded history. What it also killed, more quietly, was the assumption that the global health architecture assembled after SARS was adequate for a fast-moving outbreak in fragile health systems with overwhelmed contact-tracing capacity. The lessons were written down carefully. They were not, as subsequent events would demonstrate, retained.

BICEP2 claims primordial gravitational wave signal, later withdrawn

Cosmic Dust, Mistaken for Creation

In March 2014 the BICEP2 collaboration gathered journalists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and announced a detection of B-mode polarisation in the cosmic microwave background — a specific spiral pattern in the ancient light that, if genuine, would be the imprint left by gravitational waves produced during cosmic inflation in the first fraction of a second of existence. The evidence for inflation had been mounting for decades; this would be the first direct confirmation. The press conference was, by the standards of cosmology announcements, emotional. Within months, however, other researchers noted that the BICEP2 team had not fully accounted for the contribution of polarised dust in the Milky Way, which can produce similar patterns without any primordial gravitational waves at all. A joint analysis with the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, published the following year, found that the signal was entirely consistent with dust; no primordial interpretation could be supported. The episode was not quite a straightforward error and not quite a scandal — it was science operating at the edge of what its instruments could measure, in a field where the temptation to have found something remarkable is, understandably, considerable. The universe continued not to be caught easily.