2017

Nobel Prize in Physics

Rainer Weiss · Barry C. Barish · Kip S. Thorne

Weiss had been thinking about laser interferometry for detecting gravitational waves since the 1970s; Thorne had been working out what the signals would look like; Barish arrived in the 1990s and turned a large physics project into an international instrument capable of measuring, across four kilometres of arm, a displacement smaller than a proton. The three received the prize a year after the detection that justified forty years of effort.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Jacques Dubochet · Joachim Frank · Richard Henderson

To image a protein by X-ray crystallography, you must first crystallise it — which many proteins refuse to do. Cryo-electron microscopy gets around this by freezing molecules in a thin film of vitreous ice and imaging them directly. Dubochet worked out how to vitrify samples without ice crystals; Frank developed computational methods for combining thousands of fuzzy images into one sharp one; Henderson proved the technique could achieve atomic resolution. Biology now has a tool that works on what it could not previously see.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Jeffrey C. Hall · Michael Rosbash · Michael W. Young

Every organism that has ever evolved in sunlight keeps some version of a 24-hour clock. Hall, Rosbash, and Young worked in fruit flies to find its mechanism: the period gene's protein accumulates in the dark, suppresses its own transcription, then degrades in light, creating a self-sustaining oscillation of roughly one day. The clock ticks in your cells right now, and its disruption underlies everything from jet lag to metabolic disease.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's novels are narrated by people who have made catastrophic choices and have not quite admitted it to themselves — a butler in England in 1956, a clone facing early death, a pianist at the end of an imagined Europe. The Swedish Academy praised novels of great emotional force; what they have, more precisely, is a very quiet kind of grief that arrives suddenly and does not announce itself.

Nobel Peace Prize

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

ICAN had spent a decade making the humanitarian case against nuclear weapons — not the strategic or arms-control case, but the simpler one: that any use would kill enormous numbers of people and that this fact should be treated as disqualifying. The organisation played a central role in the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which none of the nine nuclear states has signed.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Richard H. Thaler

Standard economic theory assumes people are rational; Thaler spent forty years documenting, rigorously, the ways they are not. He showed that people account for money differently depending on where it came from; that they overweight losses relative to equivalent gains; that small changes in how choices are presented — 'nudges' — can shift behaviour substantially without restricting options. The work proved that the gap between the model and the human was not noise.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Marc-Antoine Fardin

Fardin applied the Deborah number — a ratio of relaxation time to observation time, used in fluid rheology — to cats, demonstrating that a cat flows into a vase given sufficient time but behaves as a solid when startled. Whether a cat is a fluid or a solid is therefore not a fixed property but a function of your patience.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Jean-Pierre Royet · David Meunier · Nicolas Torquet

A subset of the population finds cheese actively repulsive — not merely unappealing but aversive in a way that persists regardless of the cheese's qualities. Brain imaging showed that in these individuals, the ventral pallidum — a region associated with reward processing — activates distinctively in response to cheese. The aversion, in other words, is neurological, and entirely real.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Kazunori Yoshizawa · Rodrigo Ferreira · Charles Lienhard

In caves in Brazil, the insect genus Neotrogla includes females with a penis-shaped organ and males with a vagina-shaped one — an evolutionary reversal found in no other animal. Mating can last seventy hours, during which the female anchors herself and collects a nutrient-rich capsule. The researchers spent several sentences carefully not implying anything about what this tells us.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Milo Puhan · Alex Suarez · Christian Lo Cascio

Regular didgeridoo playing — which requires sustained control of the muscles lining the upper airway — reduces snoring and the severity of sleep apnoea in people who practise it for several months. The therapy has no side effects, costs nothing beyond the instrument, and is unlikely to be prescribed by most GPs, which is a missed opportunity for everyone involved.

Ig Nobel Prize in Fluid Dynamics

Jiwon Han

Walking backward while carrying a coffee cup reduces spillage compared to walking forward, because the backward gait dampens the resonant sloshing frequencies that align with normal walking cadence. Han calculated the physics and confirmed it experimentally. The findings are applicable immediately and at no cost to anyone who has ever spilled coffee.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

John L. Hennessy · David A. Patterson

Hennessy and Patterson argued, systematically and with data, that processors designed around a small set of simple instructions could outperform complex ones — Reduced Instruction Set Computing, RISC. Their textbooks defined how computer architecture was taught for thirty years. The processors in virtually every smartphone today are RISC descendants.

GW170817: first multi-messenger observation of a neutron-star merger

On 17 August, LIGO and Virgo detected gravitational waves from two merging neutron stars; 1.7 seconds later, the Fermi telescope caught a gamma-ray burst from the same location. Within hours, dozens of observatories had turned toward the galaxy NGC 4993, watching a kilonova — the explosion that forge heavy elements like gold, platinum, and uranium in the neutron-star debris. The merger produced, for about ten days, something brighter than a billion suns and distributed a quantity of gold roughly equivalent to several Earth masses.

Seven Earth-sized planets discovered orbiting TRAPPIST-1

TRAPPIST-1 is a dim red dwarf 40 light-years away, small enough that seven rocky Earth-sized planets fit in orbits closer than Mercury's. Three of them sit in the habitable zone. Whether they have atmospheres — and whether those atmospheres survived the star's active youth — is a question for the James Webb Space Telescope, whose launch was then, unfortunately, still several years away.

ʻOumuamua: first confirmed interstellar object detected

The Pan-STARRS telescope caught ʻOumuamua in October, already outbound, moving too fast to be a solar object. It was the first visitor from another star ever detected: elongated, tumbling, reflecting light like metal, and decelerating in a way that gravity alone could not explain. The debates about its nature — comet, shard of another planet, something stranger — were still unresolved years later.

Cassini mission ends with Grand Finale dive into Saturn

Thirteen years at Saturn, twenty-two final orbits threading the gap between the planet and its rings — and then, on 15 September, Cassini entered Saturn's atmosphere and broke apart. Before the signal died, it was still sending data about the clouds it was falling through. The mission found organic molecules on Enceladus, a subsurface ocean that could support life, and answered enough questions about Saturn to fill a generation of papers, while raising enough new ones to keep the next generation busy.

SpaceX lands and reuses an orbital rocket booster

On 30 March, a Falcon 9 first stage that had launched cargo in April 2016 fired its engines again, lifted off, delivered a communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit, and landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic. It was the first time a liquid-fuelled orbital rocket booster had flown twice — the demonstration that reuse was not just theoretically possible but practically achievable, on a schedule of less than a year.