2015

Nobel Prize in Physics

Takaaki Kajita · Arthur B. McDonald

Neutrinos pour through your body by the trillion as you read this, barely deigning to notice you are there. Kajita and McDonald caught them changing identity in mid-flight, and a particle that can change its mind must, however grudgingly, weigh something.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Tomas Lindahl · Paul Modrich · Aziz Sancar

Every day, in every cell, the text of your genome is proofread and its typos quietly corrected. Lindahl, Modrich and Sancar mapped how that tireless editorial department actually does its work.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

William C. Campbell · Satoshi Ōmura · Tu Youyou

Two cures, both coaxed out of the living world. Campbell and Ōmura turned the chemistry of a single soil microbe against parasitic worms; Tu Youyou, reading a 1,600-year-old Chinese text, drew from sweet wormwood the sharpest weapon medicine has yet aimed at malaria.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Svetlana Alexievich

She does not invent characters; she listens. Out of thousands of ordinary voices she assembles a chorus, and the result is a record of suffering and nerve that no single narrator could have managed.

Nobel Peace Prize

Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet

After the revolution of 2011, with Tunisia tilting toward the usual grim outcomes, four civic groups sat the country's factions down and talked a fragile democracy back from the brink. It is far harder than it sounds, and far rarer than it ought to be.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Angus Deaton

Deaton spent decades on a deceptively simple question — what do people actually buy, and what does it tell us about who is poor and who is not — and answered it household by household, until the small numbers added up to something the size of welfare itself.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Patricia Yang · David Hu

By patient observation of animals attending to private business, the winners established that nearly every mammal heavier than a few kilograms empties its bladder in about twenty-one seconds, give or take. Bladder size scales enormously; dignity, it turns out, does not.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Callum Ormonde · Colin Raston

Boiling an egg is, chemically speaking, a one-way street. Ormonde and Raston found the reverse gear — a way to coax cooked egg-white proteins to untangle and behave as if nothing had happened.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Mark Dingemanse · Francisco Torreira · Nick J. Enfield

In every human language so far examined, there is some small noise meaning roughly "huh?" — the universal sound of a person who has stopped following. The winners documented it across the planet, and freely admitted they were not entirely sure why it should be so.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology and Entomology

Justin Schmidt · Michael L. Smith

Schmidt ranked the agony of insect stings on a scale built from rich personal experience. Smith, not to be outdone, had bees sting him in twenty-five different places to learn which hurt most. Science occasionally asks a great deal of its volunteers, especially when they are also the investigators.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Whitfield Diffie · Martin Hellman

In 1976 Diffie and Hellman solved a problem as old as secrets: how two strangers can agree on a password in full public hearing without ever whispering it. Nearly every padlock icon you have ever trusted is descended from that idea.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Evelyn M. Witkin · Stephen J. Elledge

When DNA is damaged, a cell does not simply soldier on; it sounds an alarm, pauses, and decides whether to repair the wound or give up entirely. Witkin and Elledge worked out the wiring of that alarm, which guards the genome of very nearly everything alive.

First direct detection of gravitational waves

On 14 September the two LIGO detectors flinched in unison, each stretched by less than the width of a proton. The cause was a tremor in spacetime set off when two black holes collided 1.3 billion years ago. Einstein had predicted the ripple a century earlier and rather doubted anyone would ever feel it.

CRISPR gene editing named Breakthrough of the Year

A defence system bacteria use against viruses became, in human hands, a pair of molecular scissors cheap and precise enough to rewrite genes almost casually. The casualness was the worry: by year's end the world was arguing, not idly, about whether we should be editing human embryos at all.

Discovery of Homo naledi

Deep in a South African cave, down a squeeze so tight the excavators had to be slight enough to fit, lay the bones of a previously unknown human cousin: Homo naledi, small-brained, oddly modern of hand and foot, and present in numbers that hinted, awkwardly, at deliberate burial.

New Horizons flyby of Pluto

After nine and a half years and three billion miles, on 14 July a spacecraft launched before Pluto was even demoted from planethood swept past it in a single afternoon. The photographs showed a heart of frozen nitrogen and mountains of water ice, and an object long dismissed as a distant dot turned out to have weather, and moods.

Evidence of liquid water on present-day Mars

Dark streaks that come and go with the Martian seasons were read as the fingerprints of briny water, trickling down crater slopes here and now rather than billions of years ago. On a planet famous for being bone-dry, even a damp patch is news.

Death of John Nash

John Forbes Nash Jr.

He gave game theory the equilibrium that bears his name, lost decades to schizophrenia, and won both the Nobel and, finally, the Abel Prize. He died in a car on the way home from Oslo with that last medal barely cold, on 23 May, his wife Alicia beside him.

Death of Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks

A neurologist who treated his patients as people first and case studies a distant second, Sacks wrote "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and, in doing so, smuggled the strangeness of the brain into ordinary bookshops. He died on 30 August, writing almost to the end.