2018

Nobel Prize in Physics

Light Learned to Hold Things Still

Arthur Ashkin · Gérard Mourou · Donna Strickland

Arthur Ashkin had spent decades at Bell Labs turning light into a tool, and by the 1980s he had worked out that a tightly focused laser beam could trap a micron-sized particle in the intensity gradient at its centre — not touching it, just holding it in place with radiation pressure, the way a stream of water holds a ball in the air. He called them optical tweezers, and biologists immediately understood that here was a way to grab a single bacterium, or pull on a strand of DNA, without breaking anything. Separately, Gérard Mourou and his then-graduate-student Donna Strickland cracked a different problem: laser pulses of sufficient intensity to be genuinely useful tended to destroy their own amplifiers before they arrived. Their solution — chirped pulse amplification, stretching the pulse in time, amplifying it gently, then compressing it back to a femtosecond — is now inside every LASIK machine and industrial cutting laser on the planet. Strickland became only the third woman to win the Physics prize in the award's entire 117-year history, which says less about the ratio of women to men in laser physics than it does about a committee's rather protracted relationship with the obvious.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Letting Evolution Do the Engineering

Frances H. Arnold · George P. Smith · Sir Gregory P. Winter

The canonical approach to protein engineering in the early 1990s was rational design: figure out the structure, reason about the mechanism, propose a modification, synthesise it, and discover, usually, that proteins do not behave as advertised. Frances Arnold decided this was a losing argument with a very complicated molecule and took a different approach — she would simply run evolution in the lab, introducing random mutations and then selecting whatever worked, iterating until the enzyme did what she wanted. It was a profound shift in attitude: stop trying to understand the system, let the system understand itself. George Smith and Gregory Winter applied the same logic to bacteriophages, displaying enormous libraries of peptides on viral surfaces and fishing out the ones that bound a target — a method called phage display that Winter used to develop therapeutic antibodies, now including drugs for rheumatoid arthritis and cancer. The underlying philosophy of all three, that you can borrow four billion years of engineering experience by mimicking the process rather than the product, has since become the dominant paradigm in the design of biological tools.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Releasing the Brake on the Immune System

James P. Allison · Tasuku Honjo

The immune system has known about tumours for decades before any oncologist arrives; T cells infiltrate them, examine them, and then, in most cases, do nothing useful. James Allison at Berkeley and Tasuku Honjo in Kyoto, working independently through the 1990s, traced this failure to molecular brake systems: CTLA-4 in Allison's case, PD-1 in Honjo's, proteins that told the T cell to stand down precisely at the moment it had reason to act. Allison's insight was that the immune system was not failing to recognise the tumour — it was being actively suppressed by the tumour's environment — and that blocking the brake, rather than trying to accelerate the system, was the way to release it. The drugs that followed, checkpoint inhibitors, produced some of the most dramatic clinical results in modern oncology: patients with metastatic melanoma, previously given months to live, entering long-term remission. Tumours that had been categorical death sentences began, occasionally, to vanish. Without Allison and Honjo, the vast majority of immunotherapy as it currently exists would not.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Prize Delayed, a Committee Silenced

Olga Tokarczuk

The Swedish Academy announced in 2018 that it would not announce a winner: a sexual assault scandal had prompted several members to resign, the quorum had collapsed, and the institution that had been handing out literature's most scrutinised prize for over a century was, for the moment, unable to function. Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish novelist who should have been laureate that year, waited until 2019 to receive both her delayed prize and the knowledge that the ceremony would be shared with Peter Handke, a choice that generated its own controversy. Tokarczuk's novels — in particular Flights and The Books of Jacob — proceed on the assumption that consciousness, time, and geographical boundaries are all considerably more permeable than daily life suggests; she narrates across centuries and species with a fluency that makes omniscience feel not like a literary device but like an entirely reasonable point of view. Her work belongs to a Central European tradition of writing history as something lived in rather than studied, and it carries, underneath its formal ingenuity, an unmistakable moral gravity.

Nobel Peace Prize

One Who Repairs, One Who Refuses to Forget

Denis Mukwege · Nadia Murad

Denis Mukwege trained as a gynaecologist in Burundi and France, then returned to the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to practise medicine in a region where armed groups have used sexual violence as a systematic instrument of war for three decades. At Panzi Hospital in Bukavu he and his colleagues have treated tens of thousands of women; he has spoken about what he sees loudly enough to be shot at and driven into exile, and quietly enough to return and continue. Nadia Murad was taken by ISIS in 2014 when the group overran Sinjar in northern Iraq; she was held for months and witnessed the massacre of members of her family and community. She escaped, and rather than build a private life from the rubble of it, she chose to testify — before the UN, before governments, in a memoir — turning her experience into a sustained argument that these crimes have names and perpetrators and that the international community had been looking elsewhere. The prize was given to one person who repairs the damage and another who refuses to let the world forget it exists, which is a reasonable summary of what accountability requires.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Putting Climate and Ideas Inside the Model

William D. Nordhaus · Paul M. Romer

Standard economic growth models of the mid-twentieth century treated both the natural environment and the production of new knowledge as things that happened somewhere off to the side, beyond the model's elegant interior. William Nordhaus at Yale spent four decades arguing that climate change was an economic fact, not an environmental sentiment, and building the integrated assessment models — DICE being the most influential — that attempted to put a dollar figure on warming and its consequences. Paul Romer, meanwhile, was working on the other overlooked variable: he showed formally that ideas, unlike physical capital, are non-rival — my use of a mathematical proof does not diminish yours — and that innovation, properly modelled, could be an endogenous engine of long-run growth rather than manna from outside the system. Between them they addressed the two largest things mainstream economics had been blandly leaving out of its models for fifty years. That the policy worlds failed to act as quickly as their frameworks suggested was, at least, not the frameworks' fault.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Twenty-Four Rides to Pass a Stone

Marc Mitchell · David Wartinger

Kidney stones, which afflict roughly one in ten people and have been described by sufferers in terms that make emergency surgery sound relaxing, are typically managed with either watchful waiting or somewhat less watchful lithotripsy. Marc Mitchell was a urologist whose patients kept reporting, anecdotally, that their stones had passed after roller coaster rides. Rather than dismiss this as a coincidence too pleasant to examine, he and David Wartinger constructed a model kidney loaded with real human stones, mounted it in a backpack, and rode the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Walt Disney World twenty-four times across multiple trips. The rear of the train — lower, slightly more violent in its motion — passed small stones at roughly three times the rate of the front car. The therapy has not yet displaced standard treatment guidelines, though it is the only one that reliably comes with a souvenir photo and a three-hour queue.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

A Fly's Brief Visit, Detected by Taste

Paul Becher · Sebastien Lebreton · Peter Witzgall

The housefly, Musca domestica, is not generally considered an asset in fine dining, but it may have a role yet in quality assurance. Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, and Peter Witzgall discovered that a single housefly, introduced briefly into a glass of wine and then removed, leaves behind a chemical signature — specifically a blend of pheromones — that trained sommelier panellists can detect with an accuracy well above chance. The research was framed as a contribution to food-quality testing, offering a potential basis for a biosensor tuned to fly contamination. It also, less formally, suggests that the palate refined over years in Burgundy cellars is effectively a fly-sniffing instrument, which is perhaps not the professional legacy most sommeliers had in mind.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

A Person Is Worse Eating Than a Horse

James Cole

Prehistoric cannibalism is a well-documented phenomenon, and the reasons proposed for it range from ritual to resource competition to simple hunger. James Cole, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Brighton, approached the question that no one had bothered to answer rigorously: how much nutrition, exactly, does a human body actually provide? He calculated the caloric value tissue by tissue — muscle, fat, liver, heart, brain — using data from forensic and anatomical sources and comparing the results against other Palaeolithic prey species. A human, it turns out, yields considerably less energy than a mammoth and compares poorly even against a horse. His conclusion was that if prehistoric cannibalism was primarily a dietary strategy, it was a remarkably inefficient one, which suggests the food was not usually the point. This finding will be filed differently by different readers.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Restorer's Spit Beats the Solvent

Paula Romão · Adília Alarcão · César Viana

Museum conservators have known since at least the eighteenth century that a moistened fingertip is surprisingly effective at lifting grime from the surface of old paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts — a technique practised with the quiet confidence of the empirically trained while remaining, for generations, politely unexplained. Paula Romão, Adília Alarcão, and César Viana at the Portuguese Institute for the Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art finally put numbers on the intuition, testing human saliva against distilled water and commercial cleaning solutions across a range of substrates. Saliva won. The enzymes in it — primarily amylase — break down complex organic deposits that water alone cannot touch, and its slightly viscous consistency keeps it from spreading into areas one would prefer to leave undisturbed. Conservation science thus confirmed what the restorers already knew, which is, in a small way, exactly what science is supposed to do.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Stabbing a Doll Made the Grudge Lighter

Lindie Hanyu Liang · Douglas Brown · Huiwen Lian

Workplace injustice — being treated unfairly by a supervisor — produces well-documented psychological effects including reduced motivation, poorer health outcomes, and a generalised desire for retribution that most professional norms are designed to suppress. Lindie Hanyu Liang and colleagues at Wilfrid Laurier University conducted controlled experiments in which participants who felt mistreated were invited to stab a voodoo doll representing their manager, then reported their remaining feelings of grievance. They did, measurably, feel better. The researchers described this as a finding about symbolic catharsis and the psychological function of harmless displaced aggression. It is also, in passing, a finding about the inner life of the modern office worker, which turns out to be considerably more colourful than the org chart implies.

Ig Nobel Prize in Anthropology

Who's Imitating Whom at the Zoo

Tomas Persson · Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc · Elainie Madsen

Imitation is often held up as a cornerstone of human culture, and much research has gone into how well other apes copy us. Persson, Sauciuc, and Madsen turned the mirror around. Observing interactions between chimpanzees and zoo visitors, they recorded not only how the chimps imitated the humans but how the humans imitated the chimps — the gestures, the face-pulling, the slap on the glass — and found the two species matched each other at roughly the same rate and to roughly the same standard. The finding gently punctures the assumption that imitation flows mainly in one direction, from the clever human to the admiring animal. On the evidence of a day at the zoo, the exchange is closer to mutual, and it is not always clear which party regards the other as the more interesting exhibit.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medical Education

The Gastroenterologist Was His Own Patient

Akira Horiuchi

Akira Horiuchi, a Japanese gastroenterologist, performed colonoscopies on himself — several of them, in a sitting position, using a slim paediatric instrument — and wrote up what he learned. The purpose was not endurance but instruction: by serving as his own subject, he could report firsthand on which techniques were tolerable, how position affected the procedure, and what a patient actually experiences, all with a candour no volunteer could match. The resulting paper offered genuinely useful observations on making the examination less uncomfortable, delivered by a man uniquely placed to know. It is a study conducted in the oldest tradition of medical research, in which the investigator declines to ask of others what he has not first asked of himself, and follows that principle to a conclusion most would prefer to leave hypothetical.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Nobody Reads the Manual, Confirmed

Thea Blackler · Rafael Gomez · Vesna Popovic · M. Helen Thompson

Blackler, Gomez, Popovic, and Thompson set out to document a suspicion that manufacturers have long harboured and users have long confirmed by their behaviour: that most people do not read the instructions. Across a series of studies of how people approach complicated products, they found that a majority skip the manual entirely, preferring to work things out by trial and poke, and that this tendency was strongest among the young and the technologically confident — precisely the people most sure they do not need help. The paper, whose informal title borrowed a well-known acronym for the sentiment, treated the phenomenon as a genuine problem in product design, since a feature nobody reads about is a feature nobody uses. It is a rigorous confirmation of something everyone already knew about themselves and assumed was true only of others.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Cataloguing the Sealed-Box War of Cursing Drivers

Francisco Alonso · Cristina Esteban · Andrea Serge · Maria-Luisa Ballestar · Jaime Sanmartín · Constanza Calatayud · Beatriz Alamar

A Spanish research group devoted itself to the systematic study of what drivers say, and how loudly, when things go wrong on the road. Surveying motorists about the frequency, the triggers, and the aftermath of shouting and swearing behind the wheel, Alonso and colleagues assembled a portrait of a near-universal behaviour that road-safety research had largely ignored in favour of speed and alcohol. Cursing at other drivers turns out to be commonplace, socially tolerated, and — the researchers suggest — not entirely harmless, since the emotional escalation it reflects can spill into how a person actually drives. The committee awarded a peace prize, with evident irony, to the careful cataloguing of a small daily war conducted from inside sealed metal boxes, largely inaudible to its intended targets.

Ig Nobel Prize in Reproductive Medicine

A Ring of Stamps Tells Mind From Body

John Barry · Bruce Blank · Michel Boileau

Distinguishing physical from psychological impotence once posed a real diagnostic difficulty, since a man who cannot perform when awake may still be perfectly capable while asleep — healthy men experience erections during REM sleep, whatever their waking troubles. Barry, Blank, and Boileau devised an ingeniously low-cost test: a ring of postage stamps fastened around the organ at bedtime. If the perforations were found torn in the morning, a nocturnal erection had occurred, and the cause was more likely to lie in the mind than the plumbing. The method required no laboratory, no wiring, and no expense beyond a strip of stamps, and it worked. It has since been superseded by more sophisticated monitors, but it remains a small monument to diagnostic thrift, and to the philatelic branch of urology.

Turing Award

The Quiet Years Before Everyone Was Listening

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Yoshua Bengio · Geoffrey Hinton · Yann LeCun

By the early 1990s, artificial neural networks had acquired a reputation as a persistent disappointment — theoretically plausible, practically mediocre, and somewhat embarrassing to their advocates. Geoffrey Hinton at Toronto, Yann LeCun at Bell Labs and later NYU, and Yoshua Bengio at Montréal kept working through the quiet years: Hinton refined backpropagation and belief networks; LeCun built the convolutional architectures that could read handwritten digits with real accuracy; Bengio advanced the theory of deep networks and helped crack the training problems that had stymied everyone else. The AlexNet breakthrough of 2012 — a deep convolutional network crushing the ImageNet benchmark — was the moment the rest of the world began to pay attention, and it paid attention very quickly. By 2018 the Turing Award, computing's highest honour, followed. The three men spent their most productive years being largely ignored by the field they were quietly constructing, which is a pattern in science that never quite stops being instructive.

Fields Medal 2018

Four Medals, One Stolen Within the Hour

Fields Medal

Caucher Birkar · Alessio Figalli · Peter Scholze · Akshay Venkatesh

The International Congress of Mathematicians convened in Rio de Janeiro in August and handed out four medals, which is the Fields' usual allotment — the prize, awarded every four years to mathematicians under forty, is constitutionally modest in its frequency if not in the stature of those who receive it. Caucher Birkar, who had fled Iran as a refugee and made his way to Cambridge, was recognised for fundamental work on the classification of higher-dimensional algebraic varieties, bringing order to some particularly unruly geometry. Alessio Figalli of ETH Zürich was honoured for his work on optimal transport theory, a field with roots in a Napoleonic-era problem about moving earth as efficiently as possible and ramifications now reaching probability, geometry, and meteorology. Peter Scholze, thirty years old and already legendary, had constructed a new geometrical framework called perfectoid spaces that connected distant regions of number theory and algebraic geometry in ways that were previously invisible. Akshay Venkatesh wove together number theory, ergodic theory, and representation theory into a coherent argument that few people had previously seen as a single landscape. Birkar's medal was stolen from his briefcase within an hour of the ceremony. The organisers gave him a second one, which is perhaps the most dignified institutional response to mathematics theft ever recorded.

Subglacial liquid water lake detected beneath Mars south polar ice cap

Something Wet Under the Martian Ice

The MARSIS radar aboard ESA's Mars Express had been bouncing radio pulses off the Martian south polar layered deposits for over a decade, and the data had been accumulating quietly. In 2018, a team led by Roberto Orosei published their analysis of 29 radar observations collected between 2012 and 2015 and identified something striking: a bright, flat reflection at the base of the ice, roughly 20 kilometres across and 1.5 kilometres beneath the surface, with an electromagnetic signature consistent with liquid water. Mars at the poles is cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide, and bulk water has no business being liquid there — unless, as the researchers proposed, it is kept from freezing by a high concentration of dissolved perchlorate salts, which are common in Martian soil and dramatically depress the freezing point, possibly with assistance from geothermal heat. Whether the lake is habitable is a question that cannot yet be answered; whether it is even a lake in the terrestrial sense remains contested. But the signal was real, and its most parsimonious explanation is something wet — which is not a sentence that would have made it into many Mars papers a generation ago.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy makes maiden flight

Two Boosters Land Together, a Car Heads to Mars

The Falcon Heavy had been announced in 2011 and the announcement had aged badly, with first-flight predictions sliding year by year while the engineering problems accumulated. When it finally lifted off on 6 February 2018 from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center — the same pad that had sent Apollo 11 to the Moon — it was the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of more than two. The two side boosters separated at altitude and returned to land simultaneously at Cape Canaveral, touching down in a synchronised descent so geometrically satisfying that the webcast audience broke into something close to disbelief. The central core, which was meant to land on a drone ship in the Atlantic, missed and impacted at roughly 480 kilometres per hour, taking out two of the ship's engines in the process — a detail the commentary glossed over cheerfully. The payload was Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster, carrying a spacesuited mannequin named Starman, a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the glovebox, and a circuit board reading 'Made on Earth by humans.' It was placed in a heliocentric orbit reaching to the vicinity of Mars. The car is still out there.

NASA InSight lander touches down on Mars

Listening for Marsquakes on Purpose-Built Boredom

Most Mars missions go looking for something interesting — a feature, a slope, a patch of ancient chemistry worth examining. InSight, which touched down on Elysium Planitia on 26 November 2018 after a six-month cruise from Earth, was sent to the least interesting place on Mars that could safely receive it. Elysium Planitia is flat, tectonically quiet, and almost entirely featureless, which made it ideal for a lander whose purpose was not to explore terrain but to listen to the planet's interior. The mission carried a seismometer — the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, enclosed in a vacuum-sealed titanium sphere and placed directly on the Martian surface — sensitive enough to detect ground motion smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. By listening to marsquakes, and to the way their waves travel through the planet's interior, scientists hoped to reconstruct Mars's internal structure: the thickness and composition of its crust, mantle, and core, information that bore on how rocky planets form and why Mars, unlike Earth, lost its magnetic field and much of its atmosphere. It detected hundreds of marsquakes before the solar panels were finally silenced by dust in December 2022.

Death of Stephen Hawking

Fifty-Three Extra Years, Then Pi Day

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at Cambridge in 1963, when he was twenty-one, and given a prognosis that turned out to be conservative by approximately fifty-three years. The disease progressed until it left him entirely paralysed, communicating through a speech synthesiser via a single twitching cheek muscle, and for a large part of the scientific community this became simply how Hawking looked — the man and the machinery inseparable. His scientific work, conducted mostly in his head and then transcribed by collaborators and students, concerned the largest possible questions: the origin of the universe in imaginary time, the thermodynamics of black holes, the radiation that bears his name, the information paradox that still agitates theoretical physicists. He died on 14 March 2018 at his home in Cambridge, at seventy-six. That date was Pi Day and also Albert Einstein's birthday — a coincidence he would almost certainly have regarded as precisely that, while privately acknowledging it was a rather elegant exit.