2015

Nobel Prize in Physics

Trillions of Liars Pass Through You Nightly

Takaaki Kajita · Arthur B. McDonald

The Standard Model of particle physics had, for decades, insisted that neutrinos were massless — a claim the particles themselves apparently found unconvincing. Takaaki Kajita, working at the Super-Kamiokande detector buried under a Japanese mountain, and Arthur McDonald at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in a Canadian mine, each caught neutrinos doing something the massless are not supposed to do: switching between their three known varieties, or flavours, mid-flight. A particle can only oscillate between identities if the identities have different masses, and different masses require mass to exist in the first place. The neutrino, forced to confess, turned out to weigh something after all — vanishingly little, but something. This matters because neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe; a slight but nonzero mass reshapes our accounting of everything that exists, and opens a small but genuinely interesting window into physics beyond the Standard Model. Trillions of them pass through you every second, heavier than the textbooks admitted, and entirely unbothered by the distinction.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

An Editorial Department Inside Every Cell

Tomas Lindahl · Paul Modrich · Aziz Sancar

The DNA inside a human cell is under siege from the moment it forms. Radiation, chemical accidents in metabolism, spontaneous decay of the bases themselves — each cell's genome suffers tens of thousands of lesions a day, a figure that, stated plainly, makes it something of a miracle that any of us are coherent at all. Tomas Lindahl, who first appreciated the scale of this catastrophe in the 1970s and refused to believe that any molecule as chemically labile as DNA could simply hold still, mapped the molecular machinery that recognises and cuts out damaged bases. Paul Modrich elucidated mismatch repair, the proofreading process that catches errors introduced during copying. Aziz Sancar worked out nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism cells use after ultraviolet light scrambles whole stretches of sequence. Together they described a full editorial department operating without rest inside every living cell, and in doing so explained why certain inherited mutations in these pathways make some people dramatically more vulnerable to cancer. The practical descendants of their work underpin almost everything we now do with chemotherapy and cancer genetics.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

One Cure From a Garden, One From a Library

William C. Campbell · Satoshi Ōmura · Tu Youyou

The prize was split between two quite different acts of scientific resourcefulness, both directed against parasites that had tormented humanity for most of recorded history. Satoshi Ōmura spent years collecting soil bacteria from across Japan and screening them for biological activity; William Campbell, working with Ōmura's cultures at Merck, isolated the compound ivermectin from one of them and found it devastatingly effective against parasitic roundworms responsible for river blindness and lymphatic filariasis. Hundreds of millions of doses have since been distributed, and the worm burden in some of the most affected regions has been reduced to near nothing. Tu Youyou's path was different: assigned in the 1960s to a secret Chinese military programme seeking a malaria treatment, she worked through traditional pharmacopoeia and focused on Artemisia annua, sweet wormwood, whose use against fever had been recorded in a text from roughly 340 CE. Her key insight was that earlier high-temperature extraction methods destroyed the active compound; using a low-temperature ether extract, she isolated artemisinin and confirmed it worked. It remains the most potent antimalarial medicine available. Two cures, both drawn from the living world, one from a garden and one from a library — and between them responsible for saving more lives than almost anything else medicine has produced in the last fifty years.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Voices That Accumulate Until They Break You

Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich does not quite write history, and she does not quite write journalism, and she has spent her career producing something that neither category properly accommodates. Over decades, she has collected hundreds of hours of testimony from ordinary Soviet and post-Soviet people — soldiers who came home from Afghanistan in zinc coffins, survivors of Chernobyl, wives and mothers and factory workers — and has woven those voices into books that read, somehow, like novels, except that everything in them is true. Her method is to step almost entirely out of the way: she is present as the shape of the listening, not as a narrator imposing meaning. The Swedish Academy's citation, awarding her a prize more often given to writers of fiction, called her work a monument to suffering and courage in our time. What it is, more precisely, is a record of what it felt like to live inside a certain kind of history — not the history that gets into encyclopedias, but the one that gets into bodies and stays there. The books do not argue; they accumulate, and the accumulation is what breaks you.

Nobel Peace Prize

Four Groups Who Stayed in the Room

Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet

The Arab Spring, which had begun with such extraordinary hope in Tunisia in late 2010, had by 2015 produced, across the region, an almost unbroken sequence of authoritarian restoration, civil war, or collapse. Tunisia was the single exception, and the survival of its democratic transition owed a great deal to four civil society organisations that constituted themselves as a National Dialogue Quartet in the summer of 2013, when the country was polarising dangerously after two political assassinations. The Quartet — the Tunisian General Labour Union, the Confederation of Industry, the Human Rights League, and the Order of Lawyers — had neither state power nor formal authority; what they had was legitimacy with different factions and the patience to keep everyone in the same room. They brokered a negotiated handover from the Islamist Ennahda government that allowed elections to proceed without bloodshed. The Nobel Committee, which has given its prize to any number of grand international institutions and charismatic individuals, awarded it here to something rarer and considerably less glamorous: the institutional willingness of people who disagreed deeply to remain in conversation anyway.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

What the Average Household Conceals

Angus Deaton

Angus Deaton began his career in the 1970s with a seemingly dry question about consumer demand: if prices change, how do households rearrange what they buy, and what does the pattern reveal? Most economists had been content to work with aggregate data — national income, average consumption — but Deaton was suspicious of averages, which famously conceal more than they explain. He developed the Almost Ideal Demand System, a framework for measuring how actual households respond to price and income changes, and then turned the same granular attention to poverty itself, building methods for measuring living standards household by household in developing countries. His work on India and on global poverty measurement revealed that the familiar headline figures often obscured enormous variation within countries, and that knowing who was poor, where, and by how much required exactly the kind of painstaking microeconomic detail that aggregate statistics discard. The Nobel citation described it as analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare — categories that sound bloodless until you notice that they describe, in sum, whether people have enough to eat. Deaton's career was a sustained argument that you cannot understand an economy without understanding the people inside it, one household survey at a time.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Every Mammal Empties in Twenty-One Seconds

Patricia Yang · David Hu

The question had presumably bothered no one before Patricia Yang and David Hu applied rigorous fluid-mechanics reasoning to it: does the time a mammal takes to empty its bladder depend on the size of the mammal? It turns out it does not — or rather, it barely does. Across species ranging from rats to elephants, bladder emptying takes approximately twenty-one seconds, because the urethra scales in length and width with body size in a way that keeps flow rate proportional to bladder volume. This is, by any measure, an elegant piece of biological engineering, and the researchers filmed it to confirm, producing a dataset that required a certain dedication to compile and an even greater dedication to explain to funding agencies. The paper was published in a real journal, cited in a real context of bioengineering and medicine, and also awarded an Ig Nobel — which is, for a result of this particular shape, essentially the correct outcome.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Persuading an Egg to Reconsider

Callum Ormonde · Colin Raston

Heat an egg and the proteins inside it unfold, get tangled with each other, and set into a solid — a process chemists call denaturation, and which anyone who has ever overcooked a poached egg regards as a minor tragedy. It has been understood for more than a century that this process is irreversible, a truth so fundamental it passed without comment in most textbooks. Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston at Flinders University found, using a vortex fluidic device that subjects small samples to intense shear forces, that you could in fact uncook a boiled egg white, coaxing the proteins back into something approximating their original, soluble form. The technique was not developed primarily to challenge breakfasts, but to explore protein refolding for pharmaceutical applications — misfolded proteins being implicated in diseases from Alzheimer's to certain cancers. Still, the image of an egg being persuaded to reconsider its choices is too good to bury in a methods section.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Huh? Every Language Says It the Same

Mark Dingemanse · Francisco Torreira · Nick J. Enfield

Languages differ in almost every dimension that has ever been studied: phonology, syntax, the number of tenses, whether colour terms distinguish blue from green. Against this diversity, Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and Nick Enfield noticed something astonishing: every language they examined had a word for "huh?" — a short, low-effort, questioning sound produced when a listener has lost the thread of a conversation and needs the speaker to repeat themselves. More remarkable still, the words converge on the same shape across unrelated languages: typically a short syllable built around an open vowel, often with a rising intonation. This is not borrowing; languages that have had no contact with each other arrived at roughly the same solution independently. The team argued this is because the word is under strong functional pressure — it must be quick to produce, easy to distinguish, and unmistakably interrogative — and the constraints converge on the same small phonetic space regardless of where you start. It is, the researchers admitted, somewhat unclear why this should be so striking. Huh?

Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology and Entomology

Mapping Pain, One Sting at a Time

Justin Schmidt · Michael L. Smith

Justin Schmidt spent much of his career being stung by insects — not accidentally, but systematically, in the service of developing a pain index that rated stings from a mild flicker at the bottom to something he described, for the bullet ant, as "pure, intense, brilliant pain, like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel." The Schmidt Pain Index became a genuine reference in entomology. Michael Smith, a graduate student at Cornell, extended this tradition with characteristic understatement by having honeybees sting him on twenty-five different body locations — repeatedly, over several weeks, always at the same time of day to control for confounding variables — to determine which sites hurt most. (The answer was the nostril, the upper lip, and the penis shaft; the skull, the tip of the middle toe, and the upper arm were, relatively speaking, the recommended options.) The work was real, the methodology was impeccable, and the acknowledgments section of the paper thanked the bees.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

A Chicken Fitted With a Dinosaur's Tail

Bruno Grossi · Omar Larach · Mauricio Canals · Rodrigo A. Vásquez · José Iriarte-Díaz

Birds are dinosaurs — this much modern palaeontology accepts without flinching — but the way a two-legged, long-tailed theropod actually moved across a Cretaceous floodplain is not something anyone can observe directly. Bruno Grossi and his colleagues at the University of Chile approached the gap sideways: they raised chickens with an artificial tail, a weighted stick fixed to the rump from soon after hatching, shifting the birds' centre of mass rearward to approximate the balance of their extinct ancestors. The chickens duly adjusted, walking with a more crouched, hip-driven gait that matched theoretical reconstructions of non-avian dinosaur locomotion rather better than an unmodified chicken does. It was a genuine attempt to turn a living animal into a working model of a dead one, and it worked well enough to be published. The chickens, for their part, adapted to their prosthetic heritage with the equanimity that chickens bring to most things.

Ig Nobel Prize in Diagnostic Medicine

A Speed Bump as Diagnostic Instrument

Diallah Karim · Anthony Harnden · Nigel D'Souza · Andrew Huang · Abdel Kader Allouni · Helen Ashdown · Richard J. Stevens · Simon Kreckler

Diagnosing appendicitis is harder than the textbooks make it sound: the classic signs are unreliable, and a surgeon's worst outcomes come from either operating on a healthy appendix or failing to operate on a diseased one. Helen Ashdown and her colleagues noticed that patients with an inflamed appendix often reported that the drive to the hospital had been agony, particularly the speed bumps — and turned this anecdote into a prospective study, asking arriving patients whether their pain had worsened going over the bumps on the approach road. Rebound pain of that sort proved a surprisingly sensitive indicator of peritoneal inflammation, sensitive enough to warrant a paper in the BMJ. The finding is real, clinically useful, and quietly delightful: a piece of municipal traffic-calming infrastructure, repurposed as a diagnostic instrument. The researchers were careful to note that a smooth ride does not rule the diagnosis out.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Paying Officers Extra to Stay Honest

Bangkok Metropolitan Police

Awarded to the Bangkok Metropolitan Police for a scheme of considerable candour: rather than merely forbidding officers from accepting bribes, the force offered to pay them extra money for refusing to. The logic is not as absurd as it first sounds — if the going rate for corruption is a known quantity, a bonus set above it changes the arithmetic of temptation, converting honesty into the more lucrative option. Whether it worked as intended is the sort of question that resists clean measurement, since the relevant transactions are, by their nature, undocumented. The committee recognised the institutional willingness to treat integrity as a line item with a price, which is either a profound insight into human incentives or a quiet admission of how the previous arrangement had been running.

Ig Nobel Prize in Management

A Childhood Earthquake, A Bolder Boardroom

Gennaro Bernile · Vineet Bhagwat · P. Raghavendra Rau

Bernile, Bhagwat, and Rau assembled data on the early lives of corporate chief executives and cross-referenced it with the natural disasters — earthquakes, eruptions, tsunamis, wildfires — that had struck the regions where those executives grew up. The pattern they found was oddly specific: leaders who had lived through a disaster that caused no serious personal harm tended, decades later, to run their companies with a markedly greater appetite for risk, while those whose childhood catastrophes had brought real death and destruction became correspondingly cautious. The proposed mechanism is a kind of calibration of danger set early and carried into the boardroom: a brush with disaster that ends well teaches that disasters end well. It is a serious finding in behavioural finance, published in a serious journal, and it implies that a corporation's tolerance for risk may have been decided by the weather some fifty years before its quarterly report.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics

Defending a Sultan's 888 Children by Spreadsheet

Elisabeth Oberzaucher · Karl Grammer

Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, is credited by the historical record with fathering 888 children over the span of his reign — a figure that has long invited scepticism, on the grounds that it sounds less like biography than boast. Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer approached the claim with the tools of reproductive mathematics, building a model of how many couplings per day, sustained over how many years, with how large a harem, would be required to reach the total. Their conclusion was that 888 was, if demanding, entirely achievable — the emperor would have needed the cooperation of a comparatively modest number of women and a schedule of impressive but not impossible regularity. It is a rare case of a computer simulation being enlisted to defend the plausibility of a seventeenth-century tyrant's stamina, and it settled a question that had, admittedly, been troubling very few people.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

What a Kiss Leaves Behind, Twice Over

Hajime Kimata · Jaroslava Durdiaková · Peter Celec · Natália Kamodyová · Tatiana Sedláčková · Gabriela Repiská · Barbara Sviežená · Gabriel Minárik

Two teams shared this prize for examining, from complementary angles, what intense kissing does to the body. Hajime Kimata found that prolonged kissing measurably reduced the allergic skin response in patients with eczema and hay fever, apparently by damping the immune signalling that drives the reaction — a rare instance of romance producing a quantifiable clinical benefit. The Slovak group, led by Natália Kamodyová and colleagues, pursued the more forensic question of what is exchanged in the process, and demonstrated that a man's DNA remains detectable in a woman's saliva for a surprising interval after a thorough kiss. Between the two, the act was shown to soothe the immune system and to leave a genetic trace admissible, in principle, to a laboratory. The committee honoured the study of intimacy conducted with pipettes and questionnaires, which is a form of romance all its own.

Turing Award

A Secret Agreed to in Plain View

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Whitfield Diffie · Martin Hellman

The central problem of cryptography, through essentially all of human history, had been the key exchange: if you want to send a secret message, you and your recipient must first agree on the cipher, and agreeing on the cipher requires a secure channel, which is the very thing you are trying to create. In 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published a paper that dissolved this apparent paradox by showing that two parties could agree on a shared secret in plain view of anyone listening, using the mathematical properties of modular arithmetic in a way that made eavesdropping computationally intractable. The concept of public-key cryptography — one key to encrypt, a different but mathematically related key to decrypt — is the basis of essentially all secure communication on the internet, from banking to messaging to the padlock icon that appears when a website loads. The Turing Award, computing's closest equivalent to a Nobel, was awarded forty years after the paper, by which point there was barely a digital transaction on earth that did not rest, somewhere in its foundations, on the architecture Diffie and Hellman had sketched on a theoretical chalkboard.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Cells Learn to Recognise Their Own Damage

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Evelyn M. Witkin · Stephen J. Elledge

In the late 1940s, Evelyn Witkin noticed that bacteria exposed to ultraviolet radiation sometimes survived in ways they should not have, and spent the following decades working out why — discovering that bacteria mount an organised, regulated response to DNA damage, switching on repair mechanisms rather than simply dying or persevering blindly. Stephen Elledge, working decades later in mammalian cells, mapped the broader signalling network that human cells use to detect DNA damage and decide what to do about it: pause division, attempt repair, or, if the damage is too great, trigger programmed death. This DNA damage response pathway is now understood to be among the most important in all of cell biology. When it works correctly it suppresses cancer; when key components are mutated, the cell loses its ability to recognise how badly broken it is and carries on dividing regardless, which is essentially a capsule definition of malignancy. The work that Witkin began in the age of penicillin and that Elledge extended into the molecular era now informs how we design drugs, predict cancer risk, and understand why some tumours respond to chemotherapy while others shrug it off.

First direct detection of gravitational waves

The Universe, Overheard Ringing

Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves in 1916, a consequence of general relativity so extreme that he later doubted they could ever be observed — the distortions in spacetime would be so minute, he reasoned, that no instrument could possibly register them. He was nearly right. On 14 September 2015, the two LIGO detectors — one in Louisiana, one in Washington state, four kilometres of laser interferometry each — shuddered simultaneously in a transient that lasted less than half a second. The signal had been generated 1.3 billion years earlier, when two black holes of roughly twenty-nine and thirty-six solar masses spiralled into each other and merged, converting three solar masses of material directly into gravitational radiation in a fraction of a second. The wave that arrived at Earth displaced each LIGO mirror by less than one-thousandth the width of a proton. Thousands of physicists had spent decades and roughly a billion dollars building an instrument sensitive enough to feel something that size. The announcement, made in February 2016, was greeted with something rarely heard in physics: straightforward elation. A century after the prediction, the universe had been overheard ringing — and we had finally built the ear to catch it.

CRISPR gene editing named Breakthrough of the Year

Bacterial Scissors, Reprogrammed for Anything

The underlying mechanism was noticed in bacteria in the late 1980s and not understood for another two decades: a primitive immune system, later named CRISPR-Cas9, by which bacteria store snippets of viral DNA and use them to recognise and destroy returning invaders. Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and colleagues recognised, around 2012, that this bacterial scissors-and-guide system could be reprogrammed to cut any DNA sequence a researcher chose, in any organism, with a precision and cheapness that previous gene-editing methods could not approach. By 2015 the technique had spread so rapidly through molecular biology that Science magazine named it Breakthrough of the Year — not because it was new, but because the full scope of what it enabled was suddenly, and somewhat alarmingly, apparent. Genetic diseases that had resisted treatment for decades seemed newly tractable; crops could be modified without the cumbersome apparatus of earlier genetic engineering; the treatment of cancer was being reconceived. And then, at the end of 2015, a Chinese scientist announced he had used CRISPR to edit human embryos, at which point the scientific community set down its pipettes and had a prolonged, uncomfortable argument about what the technique should and should not be allowed to do — a conversation it has not quite finished.

Discovery of Homo naledi

Fifteen Bodies Down a Thirty-Centimetre Chute

Rising Star Cave in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind had been known to cavers, but the passage leading to the chamber designated Dinaledi — roughly thirty centimetres wide at one point, utterly lightless, requiring the excavators to be both slender and entirely without claustrophobia — had not been explored systematically. When Lee Berger's team sent a small group of researchers through it in 2013, they found bones: not a skeleton but an accumulation of at least fifteen individuals, skulls and hands and feet, belonging to a species not previously described. Homo naledi had a brain roughly the size of an orange, a body plan that mixed ancient and surprisingly modern features, and was present in such numbers in such an inaccessible place that deliberate deposition of the dead — something previously considered a uniquely complex behaviour — seemed the most plausible explanation. The formal description was published in 2015, and the response from paleoanthropology was the kind of respectful, mildly panicked recalibration that greets a find that does not fit existing narratives. When the bones were eventually dated, they proved younger than expected — meaning that a small-brained hominin with potentially complex funerary behaviour was alive at the same time as anatomically modern humans. The human story, already complicated, became somewhat more so.

New Horizons flyby of Pluto

A Dot for Eighty-Five Years, Then a Heart

New Horizons launched in January 2006, while Pluto was still a planet; by the time it arrived, nine and a half years and roughly three billion miles later, the target had been reclassified as a dwarf planet, which did nothing to diminish the engineering achievement or the anticipation. The spacecraft crossed the distance at roughly fifty thousand kilometres per hour, making its closest approach on 14 July 2015 in a single, unrepeatable afternoon — it could not slow down to orbit, because no fuel or time existed for that, so everything had to be measured and photographed in the hours around closest approach. What came back confounded people who had expected a cold, featureless rock: a vast heart-shaped plain of frozen nitrogen named informally after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930; mountains of water ice three thousand metres high; evidence of an active geology on a body far from any obvious heat source; and an atmosphere with layers of haze. The object that had been, for eighty-five years, nothing but a dot at the edge of a telescope image turned out to have moods, weather, and a surface that was still, in some sense, alive. The images arrived pixel by pixel over the following months, and each one was better than the last.

Evidence of liquid water on present-day Mars

Dark Streaks That Come Back Every Summer

Mars had water once — this much had been established by decades of orbital imagery showing ancient riverbeds, delta fans, and mineral deposits that only form in the presence of liquid. The question was whether all of this was strictly past tense. In September 2015 NASA announced that spectral analysis of dark streaks observed on Martian crater slopes — narrow, recurring features that appeared in warm seasons and faded in cold ones — was consistent with briny perchlorate-laden water, flowing intermittently on the surface today. The streaks, called recurring slope lineae, had been observed since 2010, but the chemical signature reported in 2015 was the first suggestion of what might be causing them. The announcement came with the considerable caveat that the signal was difficult to interpret and that other explanations could not be ruled out — and in subsequent years, further analysis has made the liquid-water interpretation more contested, with some researchers preferring dry flows of granular material. Still, the observation forced the question seriously: if liquid water exists on Mars now, even episodically, even salty enough to unsettle a chemist, the implications for habitability and planetary protection policy are not small.

Death of John Nash

An Equilibrium Sketched at Twenty-One

John Forbes Nash Jr.

John Forbes Nash Jr. published the paper containing what would become the Nash equilibrium in 1950, when he was twenty-one years old; it ran to twenty-seven pages and would eventually earn him, forty-four years later, a Nobel in Economic Sciences. The equilibrium concept — a state in any strategic interaction where no player can improve their outcome by changing their strategy unilaterally, assuming everyone else holds steady — had seemed almost too clean to be true, and it was applied to everything from arms control to auction design to evolutionary biology. Nash spent much of the intervening decades in the grip of severe paranoid schizophrenia, seeing patterns that were not there, communicating in cryptic messages, haunting the corridors of Princeton; his slow return to functioning life became the subject of a biography, and then a film, that somewhat oversimplified the mathematics in favour of the drama. In May 2015, at eighty-six, he received the Abel Prize in Oslo — the highest honour in mathematics — and died four days later in a taxi with his wife Alicia, returning from the airport. He had spent sixty-five years attached to the same university, and the idea he sketched there at the start still organises how economics thinks about strategic behaviour.

Death of Oliver Sacks

A Neurologist Who Asked Who You Still Were

Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks trained as a neurologist at a time when the specialty had little interest in what it felt like to have a neurological condition, and spent his career rectifying that omission. His clinical cases were extraordinary — a man who could not recognise his wife's face, patients with encephalitis lethargica who had been frozen for decades and were briefly, agonisingly woken by L-DOPA, a musician who lost the concept of left — but the method that set him apart was a refusal to let the case stop at the diagnosis. He wanted to know who the person was, what they had lost, what they had preserved, what strange territory their condition had opened onto. His books — Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars — landed on the shelves of people who had never read a word of neuroscience, because they were not, primarily, science: they were portraits of minds navigating themselves with the usual human mixture of ingenuity and bewilderment. In February 2015 he announced, in a New York Times essay of characteristic clarity, that he had terminal cancer; in the months that followed he wrote a series of essays about memory, mortality, and gratitude that read less like the work of a dying man than of someone who had finally found the right frame for everything he had been thinking. He died on 30 August, at eighty-two, with his pen more or less still in his hand.