2018

Nobel Prize in Physics

Arthur Ashkin · Gérard Mourou · Donna Strickland

Ashkin built tweezers from light itself — a beam so precisely focused that it could grip a single bacterium without touching it. Mourou and Strickland found a way to stretch a laser pulse, amplify it enormously, then compress it back to an instant, producing intensities that had no business existing outside of a star. Strickland became only the third woman in the prize's history to receive it, which says rather more about the prize's history than about the scarcity of women in optics.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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

Arnold took evolution — four billion years of trial and error — and ran it in a flask over weeks, coaxing enzymes into forms nature had never bothered to produce. Smith and Winter did something similar with viruses, displaying billions of peptide variants on the surface of bacteriophages until the useful ones revealed themselves. The result, eventually, was a new category of medicine: antibodies grown rather than designed.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

James P. Allison · Tasuku Honjo

Your immune system already knows how to kill tumours. What Allison and Honjo discovered, working separately on opposite sides of the Pacific, is that the system had been taught to stop itself just as it was about to succeed. Block the right brake — CTLA-4 or PD-1 — and T cells resume what they had been doing perfectly well before oncology politely intervened. Tumours that had been death sentences began, occasionally, to vanish.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Olga Tokarczuk

The Swedish Academy, consumed by an internal crisis that resulted in several resignations and one criminal conviction, postponed the 2018 prize entirely and gave it to Tokarczuk a year late alongside the 2019 laureate. Her novels roam freely across borders, centuries, and species, narrating the world as though omniscience were a reasonable literary stance — which, in her hands, it rather is.

Nobel Peace Prize

Denis Mukwege · Nadia Murad

Mukwege has spent decades in the eastern DRC doing, with exquisite surgical care, the repair work that armed groups leave behind; he has been shot at and driven into exile for it, and returned. Murad, who survived captivity by ISIS, chose to describe publicly what had happened to her and to thousands of other Yazidi women, which is a different kind of courage from the kind that keeps its mouth shut.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

William D. Nordhaus · Paul M. Romer

Nordhaus spent forty years insisting that the climate was an economic variable, not merely an externality to be apologised for after the model had run. Romer showed that ideas — unlike coal — do not get used up, and that the engine of long-run growth was knowledge accumulating on itself. Both demonstrated that what economists choose to leave out of their equations has consequences at civilisational scale.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Marc Mitchell · David Wartinger

The winners rode a roller coaster at Walt Disney World repeatedly with a model kidney loaded with real kidney stones, finding that the rear car passed small stones at roughly three times the rate of the front. The therapy is not covered by most insurers, but the queues are shorter than at a urology clinic and the experience is, by some accounts, more enjoyable.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Paul Becher · Sebastien Lebreton · Peter Witzgall

A single housefly, placed in a glass of wine and then removed, leaves behind a detectable chemical signature that trained sommeliers can identify with startling reliability. The study was intended to improve food quality testing. It does also raise certain questions about restaurant hygiene that the authors declined to pursue.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

James Cole

Cole calculated the caloric content of a human body — broken down by tissue type, with appropriate care — and found it substantially lower than that of most other large mammals. The implication is that prehistoric cannibalism, where it occurred, was probably not primarily about the food. This conclusion will comfort some readers more than others.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Paula Romão · Adília Alarcão · César Viana

Museum conservators have known for generations that a moistened fingertip is oddly good at removing surface grime from old paintings and sculptures. This team measured exactly how good, confirming that human saliva outperforms distilled water on a range of substrates — the enzymes in it, apparently, are doing serious work.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Lindie Hanyu Liang · Douglas Brown · Huiwen Lian

Participants asked to stab a voodoo doll representing their supervisor did, in controlled trials, report measurably reduced feelings of workplace injustice afterwards. The researchers noted this as a finding about symbolic action and emotional regulation. It is also, arguably, a finding about what some people get up to when left alone with a needle.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Yoshua Bengio · Geoffrey Hinton · Yann LeCun

Through the 1980s and 1990s, when the field had largely given up on them, Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio kept working on artificial neural networks. Hinton refined backpropagation; LeCun built convolutional networks that could read handwriting; Bengio pushed deep architectures and unsupervised learning. The world eventually noticed, in a rather large way, and the ACM noticed too.

Fields Medal 2018

Fields Medal

Caucher Birkar · Alessio Figalli · Peter Scholze · Akshay Venkatesh

Rio hosted four medals: Birkar, who fled Iran as a refugee and ended up at Cambridge, tamed the wild geometry of Fano varieties; Figalli illuminated how shapes can be transported into one another at minimum cost; Scholze, at thirty, had already built an entirely new country in p-adic geometry called perfectoid spaces; Venkatesh wove number theory, dynamics, and representation theory into a single argument. Birkar's medal was stolen from his briefcase at the congress within an hour of its presentation, which the organisers addressed by giving him a second one.

Subglacial liquid water lake detected beneath Mars south polar ice cap

Radar pulses from ESA's Mars Express, bounced through 1.5 kilometres of polar ice, returned a reflection unlike any surrounding material — bright, flat, 20 kilometres across, with the electromagnetic signature of liquid water. Mars is cold and its surface is desiccated, but beneath its southern ice cap something appears to be staying wet, presumably with the help of dissolved salts and geothermal warmth.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy makes maiden flight

The two side boosters landed simultaneously at Cape Canaveral — a synchronised return that was, purely as spectacle, difficult to argue with. The core did not make it, but the payload did: a red Tesla Roadster, carrying a spacesuited mannequin named Starman, was placed in a solar orbit reaching to the distance of Mars, which is one way to dispose of a car.

NASA InSight lander touches down on Mars

InSight's assignment was not to rove or photograph but to listen: a seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface, measuring the planet's interior tremors with extraordinary sensitivity. Elysium Planitia was chosen precisely because it was flat and geologically dull — the ideal place, in other words, if what you want is quiet.

Death of Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking

Hawking was given two years to live at twenty-one, which he converted into fifty-five more years of work on black holes, the origin of the universe, and the nature of time. He died on 14 March 2018, in Cambridge, aged 76. The date happened to be Pi Day and Einstein's birthday, which he would probably have considered a coincidence, but would have acknowledged was a rather good one.