2017

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Chirp a Fifth of a Second Long

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

Rainer Weiss sketched the essential idea for a laser interferometer that could detect gravitational waves in a 1972 MIT report, written partly to explain to funding agencies why the money would not be wasted; Kip Thorne, meanwhile, was calculating from general relativity what those waves would actually look like when two black holes spiralled into each other across a billion light-years. For two decades this was a niche pursuit, tolerantly regarded by the physics community and perpetually underfunded. Then Barry Barish arrived in 1994 and did something neither theorist was equipped to do: he built a real instrument, transforming a struggling prototype into LIGO, a collaboration of more than a thousand scientists and two L-shaped detectors, each with four-kilometre arms precise enough to register a displacement a thousand times smaller than a proton. On 14 September 2015, the detectors caught a chirp lasting a fifth of a second — the signature of two black holes merging 1.3 billion years ago. The Nobel followed in 2017, a year after the detection, which is unusually prompt for a committee that once waited fifty years. Without LIGO, the universe would still be speaking to us exclusively in light, and we would be missing most of what it says.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Freezing Water Into Glass to See a Protein

Jacques Dubochet · Joachim Frank · Richard Henderson

For most of the twentieth century, if you wanted to image a protein in atomic detail, you had to crystallise it first — which is a request that many proteins simply decline to honour, particularly the membrane proteins lodged in cell walls that govern everything from hormone signalling to drug uptake. Cryo-electron microscopy offered a different path: freeze the protein so fast that water turns to glass rather than ice, then bombard the resulting sample with electrons and photograph it directly. Jacques Dubochet, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, worked out in the 1980s how to achieve that vitrification reliably; Joachim Frank developed the computational methods to average thousands of blurry, individually noisy images into a single sharp one; Richard Henderson proved in 1990 that the resulting resolution could be atomic. For years the technique remained finicky and the images indistinct. Then detector technology caught up, and resolution improved so fast the field called it the resolution revolution. Biology now has a tool for studying what it could not previously crystallise, which turns out to be most of the interesting things.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Gene That Keeps Its Own Time

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

The observation that living things follow daily rhythms is ancient — Aristotle noticed that certain plants open and close at predictable hours — but the mechanism was entirely opaque until Hall, Rosbash, and Young went looking for it in fruit flies during the 1980s. They found, painstakingly, that the period gene encodes a protein that builds up in the nucleus through the night, suppresses its own gene's transcription, then breaks down through the day, creating a self-sustaining molecular oscillation of almost exactly twenty-four hours. Young later found further gears: a second protein that stabilises the first, and a light-sensitive molecule that resets the whole thing each morning. The elegance is that the clock works the same way in flies as in humans — the evolutionary conservation is essentially total. Its disruption underlies jet lag, shift-work disorder, and a widening list of metabolic and psychological conditions. A world without this understanding is one where doctors cannot explain why night-shift workers have elevated cancer rates, or what sleep deprivation is actually doing to a cell.

Nobel Prize in Literature

What a Person Has Been Telling Themselves

Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England at five, which perhaps explains why his narrators are so often people who have left something irrecoverable behind and have not admitted it to themselves yet. Stevens, the repressed butler of The Remains of the Day, reconstructs a career of loyal service to a man who was, it slowly emerges, a Nazi sympathiser; the clones of Never Let Me Go rationalise their fates with a quiet compliance that is more devastating than any rebellion could be. The Swedish Academy awarded him the prize for novels of great emotional force, which is accurate but misses the peculiar texture of how that force arrives — not as drama but as the careful revelation of what a person has been telling themselves, sentence by quiet sentence, so that when the grief surfaces, it has been there all along. Ishiguro never announces the catastrophe. He simply allows his characters to describe their lives until the reader understands what those lives cost.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Catastrophe, Not a Strategic Fact

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was founded in 2007 by a coalition of organisations that had grown impatient with the standard arms-control conversation, which tended to treat nuclear weapons as a strategic fact of life requiring careful management rather than a humanitarian catastrophe requiring elimination. ICAN's argument was simpler: that any use of nuclear weapons would kill vast numbers of civilians, that no targeting precision makes this otherwise, and that this fact should be treated as sufficient reason to prohibit the weapons outright. The campaign played a central role in the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which opened for signature that year and was eventually ratified by enough states to enter into force in 2021. None of the nine nuclear-armed states has signed it, which is either evidence that the treaty is toothless or that it is doing exactly what symbolic legal pressure is supposed to do, depending on your degree of patience with diplomacy conducted across generations.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

The Gap Between Rational and Human

Richard H. Thaler

Classical economics rests on the assumption that people are rational maximisers of their own utility — that they process information correctly, weight costs and benefits consistently, and make choices that serve their long-run interests. Richard Thaler spent four decades assembling the evidence that they do not. He demonstrated mental accounting: the tendency to treat money differently depending on where it came from, so that a windfall feels like spending money and a wage feels like saving it even when the sums are identical. He documented the endowment effect: people demand far more to give up something they own than they would pay to acquire the same thing. And with Cass Sunstein he developed the concept of nudges — small, costless changes to the architecture of choice, like making organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in, that shift behaviour substantially without restricting anyone's options. The work's great contribution was not to claim that economics was wrong but to show that the gap between the rational agent and the actual human was not random noise. It was systematic, predictable, and exploitable — by policymakers, ideally, rather than by anyone else.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Is a Cat a Liquid?

Marc-Antoine Fardin

The Deborah number is a ratio used in fluid rheology — relaxation time divided by observation time — to determine whether a material flows like a liquid or holds like a solid. Pitch is a solid at a glance but a fluid over decades; glass, famously and incorrectly, is neither, but the number captures why one might wonder. Marc-Antoine Fardin had the insight to apply it to cats. A cat poured into a round vase and photographed there is, by the measure of the Deborah number, exhibiting fluid behaviour: its relaxation time is shorter than the time available. The same cat, startled, is rigid and decidedly solid. The paper was written with complete formal rigour, which is what makes it work: the joke is not that the physics is wrong but that it is entirely correct, and the cat does not care either way.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

The Brain Region That Recoils From Cheese

Jean-Pierre Royet · David Meunier · Nicolas Torquet

Most food aversions are mild and contextual — you go off something after a bad experience and can usually be talked back into it. The aversion to cheese among a minority of the population is different in character: persistent, generalised across all varieties, and distressing in a way that mere distaste is not. Royet, Meunier, and Torquet used brain imaging to identify what was going on, and found that in cheese-averse individuals, the ventral pallidum — a region normally associated with reward and motivation — activates distinctively and negatively in response to cheese stimuli. The aversion, in other words, is not a quirk of personality or a failure of open-mindedness. It is neurological, it is real, and it makes fondue parties considerably more complicated.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

The Cave Insect With Swapped Anatomy

Kazunori Yoshizawa · Rodrigo Ferreira · Charles Lienhard

The caves of Brazil contain, among other things, the insect genus Neotrogla, which achieved something that evolutionary biology had not previously documented anywhere in the animal kingdom: a complete reversal of the typical sex-specific genitalia. The female possesses an elaborate, anchor-shaped penis-like organ called a gynosome; the male possesses a corresponding vagina-like opening. Mating lasts up to seventy hours, during which the female is anchored to the male and receives a large, nutrient-rich spermatophore — making the arrangement, from the female's perspective, a solid return on the investment. Yoshizawa, Ferreira, and Lienhard described all of this with admirable scientific neutrality, carefully confining themselves to questions of evolutionary ecology and resource scarcity, and noting that the caves these insects inhabit are extremely poor in organic nutrients. The connection between poverty and ingenuity is apparently universal.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Snoring, Cured by Circular Breathing

Milo Puhan · Alex Suarez · Christian Lo Cascio

The didgeridoo is an Australian wind instrument that demands sustained circular breathing and continuous muscular control of the upper airway — the same muscles that, when lax during sleep, cause the throat to collapse and produce snoring or, in more severe cases, obstructive sleep apnoea. Puhan and colleagues conducted a clinical trial in which Swiss patients with moderate sleep apnoea practised the instrument for four months, and found significant reductions in daytime sleepiness and the apnoea-hypopnoea index compared to a control group. The therapy has no side effects beyond a certain social cost, requires no electricity, and is covered by no health insurance plan in the world. That the didgeridoo is an effective treatment for sleep apnoea, and that no one is prescribing it, is one of the minor tragedies of modern medicine.

Ig Nobel Prize in Fluid Dynamics

Walk Backward, Spill Less Coffee

Jiwon Han

Coffee spills when carried forward because the natural cadence of walking excites the sloshing modes of liquid in a cup — the frequencies match, energy builds, and the contents arrive on one's shirt. Jiwon Han analysed the problem and tested an obvious remedy: walking backward. The reversed gait disrupts the resonance; the dominant sloshing frequency no longer couples efficiently to the walking rhythm, and spillage drops substantially. Han confirmed this both analytically and experimentally, with high-speed camera footage. The findings require no new technology, no additional equipment, and no regulatory approval. They are available for use immediately by anyone willing to accept the social consequences of walking backward through a coffee shop.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

A Crocodile Changes How You Gamble

Matthew Rockloff · Nancy Greer

Rockloff and Greer recruited volunteers at a crocodile park in Queensland and, before letting them play a simulated slot machine, had some of them hold a live saltwater crocodile roughly a metre long. The premise was a serious one in gambling psychology: arousal alters risk-taking, and the researchers wanted to know in which direction. The answer proved to depend on the gambler. Those without underlying problems tended to bet more cautiously when stirred up by the reptile, while those already carrying more negative emotion gambled more heavily — the crocodile's charge amplifying whatever disposition the person had brought with them. It is a genuine contribution to understanding how emotional state feeds compulsive betting, arrived at by the direct method of handing people a crocodile first. The crocodile's own view of the arrangement was not solicited.

Ig Nobel Prize in Anatomy

Ears That Never Stop Growing

James Heathcote

James Heathcote, a British general practitioner, was prompted by a colleague's idle question — do older men really have bigger ears, or does it just seem that way? — to do what few people do with such questions, which is to actually measure. He and several fellow doctors recorded the ear length of hundreds of patients across a wide range of ages, and found that ears do indeed keep growing throughout adult life, by roughly a fifth of a millimetre a year. The cartilage, unlike bone, does not stop lengthening, so a long-lived man ends up quite literally larger of ear than his younger self. The study answered its title's question honestly and completely, which is more than most titles manage. It is a small, sound piece of work about the parts of us that never quite finish.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

A Bird-Eating Bat Tries Human Blood

Fernanda Ito · Enrico Bernard · Rodrigo Torres

The hairy-legged vampire bat was thought to be a specialist, feeding on the blood of birds and generally uninterested in mammals. Fernanda Ito and her colleagues, analysing the droppings of a colony in north-eastern Brazil, found something the species was not supposed to be doing: DNA from human blood. The likely explanation is habitat loss — as the birds the bats prefer grow scarcer, the animals appear to be improvising, and human settlements nearby offer an alternative supply. It is the first documented case of the species feeding on people, and rather than a horror-film flourish it is a quiet indicator of ecological disruption, the sort of dietary change that signals a food web under strain. The committee recognised a finding that is unsettling and informative in roughly equal measure.

Ig Nobel Prize in Cognition

A Twin Can't Always Spot Herself

Matteo Martini · Ilaria Bufalari · Maria Antonietta Stazi · Salvatore Maria Aglioti

Most people show a small but reliable advantage at recognising their own face — we process it faster than the faces of others. Martini and colleagues wondered what happens to this advantage in identical twins, whose faces are, to the outside world, nearly interchangeable. Testing pairs of twins with photographs, they found that many twins could not reliably distinguish images of themselves from images of their sibling, hesitating or guessing wrong in a way that singletons rarely do. The self-recognition advantage, it seems, depends on the face being distinctive, and a twin's face is not distinctive even to the twin. It is a small window into how the brain builds a sense of self from the mirror outward, and a reminder that the person you are most confident of recognising can, under the right conditions, be someone else entirely.

Ig Nobel Prize in Obstetrics

Where to Put the Speaker for a Fetus

Marisa López-Teijón · Álex García-Faura · Alberto Prats-Galino · Luis Pallarés Aniorte

A team in Barcelona set out to test how well a developing fetus can actually hear music from outside the womb, and found the answer discouraging: sound played through the mother's abdomen is muffled by tissue before it reaches the child. Their proposed remedy was direct. Playing music through a small speaker placed inside the vagina, closer to the fetus, produced far stronger responses — measured as mouth and tongue movements on ultrasound — suggesting the fetus was registering the sound in a way it did not register the belly-mounted version. The researchers went on to patent a device for the purpose. Whether the unborn have musical preferences remains open, but the study established, with a certain literalism, that if you want a fetus to hear Mozart, placement matters. The committee honoured a solution that took the acoustics of the problem seriously.

Turing Award

Fewer Instructions, Faster Chips

ACM A.M. Turing Award

John L. Hennessy · David A. Patterson

In the early 1980s, the dominant trend in processor design was addition: more instructions, more addressing modes, more complexity baked into hardware on the theory that rich instruction sets would make programs faster. John Hennessy at Stanford and David Patterson at Berkeley pushed in the opposite direction, arguing with data — and some inconvenient measurements of what software actually executed — that a small, clean instruction set whose operations could be pipelined efficiently would outperform the baroque alternatives. The RISC processors that emerged from their labs in the early 1980s proved the point. Their collaborative textbook, Computer Organization and Design, has been the field's standard introduction for three decades. More concretely: the ARM architecture, which descends directly from the RISC principles they developed, runs inside virtually every smartphone on earth. Hennessy subsequently became president of Stanford; Patterson went to Google; their ideas went everywhere.

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

The Gold in Your Ring Came From This

On 17 August 2017, LIGO and Virgo detected gravitational waves from two neutron stars spiralling into each other some 130 million light-years away, in the galaxy NGC 4993. Exactly 1.7 seconds after the merger, the Fermi space telescope caught a short gamma-ray burst from the same direction — the first time a gravitational wave and an electromagnetic signal had been unambiguously matched to a single astrophysical event. Within hours, more than seventy observatories worldwide had turned their instruments toward NGC 4993 and were watching the kilonova: the glowing, rapidly evolving debris cloud that followed. The spectrum of that cloud confirmed something theorists had long suspected but never directly observed — that colliding neutron stars are the primary forge of the heaviest elements, including gold, platinum, and uranium. The merger produced, in the space of a few days, an estimated quantity of gold roughly equivalent to several Earth masses. Every gold ring, every dental crown, every gold reserve held by every central bank on earth was forged in an event of this kind, then scattered across a galaxy, and eventually incorporated into a solar system and a planet. That is not a poetic licence; that is where the gold is from.

Seven Earth-sized planets discovered orbiting TRAPPIST-1

Seven Worlds Around a Dim Little Star

TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool red dwarf about forty light-years from Earth — so dim that it produces roughly two thousand times less light than the Sun, and so small that it is barely larger than Jupiter. In February 2017, an international team announced that it hosts seven rocky, Earth-sized planets, all of them packed into orbits closer than Mercury's, and three of them within the star's habitable zone where liquid water could, in principle, persist. The announcement was extraordinary not just for the count but for the proximity: at forty light-years, TRAPPIST-1 is practically next door by cosmic standards, close enough for future telescopes to characterise atmospheric spectra. Whether any of these worlds retained their atmospheres through the star's early, violently active youth is unknown. The James Webb Space Telescope, which began scientific operations in 2022, is among the instruments now probing that question — and finding, so far, answers that are honest about the difficulty.

ʻOumuamua: first confirmed interstellar object detected

A First Distant Messenger, Already Leaving

Robert Weryk spotted it in October 2017 using the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii, and within days the orbital calculations were unambiguous: the object was moving far too fast and on far too hyperbolic a trajectory to have originated in our solar system. It was the first interstellar visitor ever positively identified — something that had travelled between the stars and was now, having swung around the Sun, already leaving. ʻOumuamua, the Hawaiian name meaning something like 'first distant messenger,' turned out to be confusing in almost every particular. It was elongated and highly reflective, it tumbled end over end, and as it receded it accelerated slightly more than gravity alone could explain — a deviation that could mean outgassing, like a comet, except that no one could detect the gases. Astrophysicist Avi Loeb suggested it might be a fragment of alien technology; most of his colleagues preferred less dramatic explanations involving hydrogen ice or pressure from sunlight, none of which are entirely satisfying either. It was gone before anyone could look long enough, which is either the universe's sense of humour or simply how interstellar visitors work.

Cassini mission ends with Grand Finale dive into Saturn

It Went Working, Not Gently

Cassini launched in 1997, reached Saturn in 2004, and spent the next thirteen years conducting what may be the most productive single planetary mission in history. It discovered geysers of water ice erupting from Enceladus — along with evidence of a subsurface ocean, hydrothermal vents, and organic molecules that made Enceladus one of the most compelling candidate sites for extraterrestrial life in the solar system. It mapped Titan's methane lakes. It revealed the structure of Saturn's rings in a detail that resolved decades of argument. Then, in 2017, running low on propellant and under instructions not to risk contaminating Enceladus with earthly microbes, Cassini executed twenty-two increasingly tight orbits threading the gap between Saturn and its rings — the Grand Finale — collecting data no spacecraft had gathered from that region before. On 15 September, it entered the planet's upper atmosphere. The signal died in seconds as the spacecraft broke apart. Its final telemetry, arriving at Earth at the speed of light, showed it still transmitting science data as it fell. Cassini did not go gently; it went working.

SpaceX lands and reuses an orbital rocket booster

The Same Booster, Twice to Orbit

For as long as rockets had put payloads into orbit, the boosters that did the lifting had been either discarded into the ocean or, in the case of the Space Shuttle, expensively refurbished over months. The assumption was structural: a rocket that survived the violence of launch was still a used rocket, and used rockets were not trusted. SpaceX had been landing Falcon 9 first stages since December 2015, but landing and relaunching are different claims. On 30 March 2017, a Falcon 9 booster that had first flown in April 2016 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, delivered the SES-10 communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit, and landed, for the second time, on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic Ocean. The refurbishment had taken less than a year. The demonstration shifted the economics of spaceflight more thoroughly than any single vehicle since the Saturn V — not by doing something new in space but by proving that the most expensive part of getting there could be used again.