2016

Nobel Prize in Physics

David J. Thouless · F. Duncan M. Haldane · J. Michael Kosterlitz

Thouless, Haldane, and Kosterlitz used topology — the mathematics of shapes that survive continuous deformation — to explain why thin conducting layers undergo sudden transitions rather than gradual ones, and what quantum states can exist at their edges. The work opened what is now one of the most active areas of condensed-matter physics, and earned its prize about thirty years after it deserved one.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Jean-Pierre Sauvage · Sir J. Fraser Stoddart · Bernard L. Feringa

Sauvage threaded molecular rings onto axles; Stoddart built rotaxanes and catenanes whose mechanical parts could be switched; Feringa made the first molecule that rotated continuously in a single direction when driven by light. Taken together, they built the first machines whose moving parts are individual atoms — a concept that had seemed like science fiction for most of the twentieth century.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Yoshinori Ohsumi

Autophagy — the process by which cells dismantle and eat their own damaged components — had been observed for decades without anyone understanding how it worked. Ohsumi starved yeast, watched the process speed up, found mutants in which it broke, and so identified the genes. The cellular machinery for self-digestion turns out to be conserved in everything from yeast to neurons, and its failure contributes to neurodegeneration, cancer, and ageing.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Bob Dylan

Dylan became the first musician to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, was unreachable by the committee for days, eventually acknowledged the prize and then did not appear at the ceremony — sending instead a speech read by the US Ambassador, which said that he had always considered his songs literature and was therefore not entirely surprised. The Swedish Academy, for its part, seemed slightly surprised.

Nobel Peace Prize

Juan Manuel Santos

Santos negotiated a peace agreement with the FARC after more than fifty years of armed conflict — and then watched Colombian voters reject it in a referendum by the narrowest possible margin. He received the prize anyway, in recognition of the effort and the genuine achievement, while renegotiating the agreement that had just been voted down.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Oliver Hart · Bengt Holmström

Hart and Holmström developed the theory of contracts under incomplete information — how to write agreements that align incentives when one party knows more than the other, or when some outcomes cannot be specified in advance. The work explains, among other things, why CEO pay is structured the way it is, and why that structure is so difficult to reform.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Charles Foster · Thomas Thwaites

Foster lived in the wild as five different animals — badger, otter, fox, deer, swift — spending nights in burrows and eating what he found. Thwaites built prosthetic goat legs and lived with a herd in the Swiss Alps. Both conducted their experiments with enough seriousness that the results were publishable, which raises certain questions about what 'seriousness' means.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Volkswagen

Volkswagen received the Chemistry prize for solving the problem of automotive pollution by installing software that detected when the car was being tested and reduced emissions accordingly. Outside the testing environment, the cars emitted up to forty times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides. The committee noted this was technically a solution to the problem as stated.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Gábor Horváth · Miklós Blahó · György Kriska

White-coated horses attract far fewer horseflies than dark horses — the polarised light reflected from a white coat is weaker and less horizontally polarised, matching water surfaces less closely. Separately, dragonflies are fatally attracted to dark, shiny gravestones because horizontally polarised light from a dark stone mimics water. The same physics that governs insect navigation is quietly arranging tragedies in graveyards.

Ig Nobel Prize in Perception

Atsuki Higashiyama · Kohei Adachi

Looking at the world through your own legs, bent at the waist, systematically distorts how you perceive distances and sizes. Higashiyama and Adachi measured these distortions carefully and found they are not random — the bending posture introduces a consistent bias across subjects. What one does with this finding is a matter for the individual.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Christoph Helmchen · Carina Palzer · Thomas Münte

An itch on the left arm can be partially relieved by looking in a mirror and scratching the right arm in the corresponding location. The visual feedback from the mirror — convincing the brain it is watching the correct side — is enough to produce measurable itch reduction. The sensory system, it turns out, is more trusting of eyes than of skin.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee proposed his system in 1989 at CERN — a network of hyperlinked documents, navigable by any computer that could speak his new protocols. By 1991 the first browser existed. By 2016 roughly half the human population was using the result. The ACM took twenty-seven years to give him the prize, which is perhaps understandable: they were busy using the web.

LIGO announces first direct detection of gravitational waves

On 11 February, the LIGO collaboration announced that on 14 September 2015 its two detectors had flinched in unison — each stretched by a fraction of the width of a proton as a ripple in spacetime passed through, produced by two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light-years away. Einstein had predicted the effect in 1916 and later concluded it could never be measured. He was wrong about that part.

Proxima Centauri b: Earth-sized planet at the nearest star

Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years away — the closest star to the Sun by a considerable margin. On 24 August the European Southern Observatory announced that it hosts a planet: Proxima Centauri b, approximately Earth's mass, orbiting in the habitable zone. Whether it has an atmosphere, liquid water, or a magnetic field strong enough to retain one is a question the current generation of telescopes cannot yet answer.

Ideonella sakaiensis: bacterium that breaks down PET plastic

Japanese researchers found a bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis, living on PET plastic debris and using it as a primary food source, deploying two enzymes to break the polymer into monomers it could metabolise. PET plastic had been treated as essentially indestructible in the biosphere; this bacterium had not received that information.

Juno spacecraft enters Jupiter orbit

On 4 July, five years after launch, Juno fired its main engine for thirty-five minutes and settled into a polar orbit around Jupiter — the second spacecraft ever to orbit the largest planet, and the first designed to map its gravitational and magnetic fields and peer beneath the cloud layers. The choice of Independence Day was, the mission team acknowledged, deliberate.

China completes FAST, the world's largest radio telescope

The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope — FAST — fills a natural depression in the karst landscape of Guizhou Province, its 500-metre dish making the retired Arecibo Observatory look modestly proportioned. It began listening for pulsars and signals of any other kind, in an area from which the local human population had been relocated to reduce radio interference.

Rosetta mission ends with controlled impact on comet 67P

On 30 September, having studied Comet 67P for two years and run out of solar power, ESA's Rosetta descended slowly onto the comet's surface and went silent. The mission had deployed the first lander on a comet, mapped it in detail, and sampled its gas, dust, and plasma environment through perihelion. It ended the way good science often ends: having answered the questions it set out to answer, and produced several dozen new ones.