2019

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Universe Mapped, a Planet Found

James Peebles · Michel Mayor · Didier Queloz

James Peebles began constructing his theoretical framework for the cosmos in the 1960s, at a moment when cosmology was considered by serious physicists to be a somewhat reckless occupation — too many unknowns, too few constraints, too much temptation to speculate. Over the following decades, working with painstaking care at Princeton, he developed the mathematical underpinning for dark matter, dark energy, and the cosmic microwave background, turning the discipline from an exercise in philosophically informed guesswork into a precision science. Then there was a separate project entirely: in 1995, a year after beginning the search, Michel Mayor and his doctoral student Didier Queloz detected the barely perceptible Doppler wobble of 51 Pegasi, a sun-like star forty-five light-years away, and inferred from its rhythm a planet about half the size of Jupiter — a planet wheeling around its star in just four days, in a position where no theorist expected to find a gas giant, cheerfully indifferent to expectations. The discovery triggered something close to a revision of planetary formation theory. The Nobel committee in 2019 rewarded both tracks — the architect of the theoretical universe and the two men who found the first tenant in someone else's solar system — which is, when you consider it, a tidy summary of how cosmology actually works: the theory tells you what should be there, and then observation corrects it.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Thirty Years to a Pocket-Sized Battery

John B. Goodenough · M. Stanley Whittingham · Akira Yoshino

In the early 1970s, with the oil crisis sharpening interest in anything that might store electricity without burning something, M. Stanley Whittingham at Exxon built the first functional lithium battery — elegant in principle, alarming in practice, since metallic lithium has a disconcerting tendency to catch fire. John Goodenough, working at Oxford in the late 1970s, replaced the cathode material with lithium cobalt oxide, which more than doubled the voltage and made the device considerably more useful; he was sixty years old when he did this, and he was just getting started. Akira Yoshino completed the architecture in 1985 by replacing the metallic lithium anode with carbon, removing the main flammability problem and producing something that could, at last, safely live in a pocket. The thing that emerged from this thirty-year relay — lightweight, rechargeable, dense with energy — now powers several billion telephones, laptops, hearing aids, and electric vehicles, and is quietly rearranging the economics of grid-scale electricity storage. Goodenough collected his prize at ninety-seven, becoming the oldest Nobel laureate in history, a fact that is at minimum consistent with his name.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Cell's Own Oxygen Gauge

William G. Kaelin Jr · Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe · Gregg L. Semenza

Every cell in the body needs oxygen, and yet oxygen levels across tissues are neither uniform nor constant — they vary with altitude, with exertion, with disease, with the particular geography of a tumour's interior. For decades, the molecular machinery that sensed this variation and issued instructions accordingly was essentially unknown. Gregg Semenza, working in the early 1990s, identified a protein complex he named HIF-1 — hypoxia-inducible factor — that acts as a kind of molecular oxygen gauge, switching hundreds of downstream genes on or off depending on whether the cell is flush or starving for air. Peter Ratcliffe at Oxford mapped how oxygen levels controlled HIF's stability; William Kaelin, an oncologist by training, was studying a rare hereditary cancer syndrome and found that the tumour-suppressor gene at its centre was the same switch that tagged HIF for destruction when oxygen was plentiful. Cancer, it turned out, had learned to disrupt this system to grow its own blood supply — which is one of the less reassuring things about cancer, though useful to know. Without this understanding, we would lack current and near-term therapies for anaemia, tumours, and a range of conditions in which tissues are quietly suffocating.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Prize the Academy Also Argued Over

Peter Handke

The 2019 Literature prize arrived in an atmosphere already thick with institutional difficulty. The Swedish Academy had suffered a wave of resignations in 2018, deferred that year's prize entirely, and then issued two awards in October 2019 — one for the delayed 2018 prize, one for 2019 — in what amounted to a controlled attempt to restore composure. Handke's selection promptly supplied the opposite. The Austrian writer is a figure of genuine formal importance, known for plays and novels that probe language itself with an almost surgical scepticism, and his 1966 piece Offending the Audience managed to do exactly what its title promised while saying almost nothing. But his public statements during and after the Yugoslav Wars — defending Serbia, attending Slobodan Milošević's funeral, delivering a speech that drew international condemnation — had made him a figure whose reputation outside literary circles was substantially darker than within. Several Nobel committee members resigned over the choice; writers and diplomats from Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania withdrew from other prize juries in protest. The work remains what it is. The controversy did too.

Nobel Peace Prize

An Embrace at Asmara, Before the Reckoning

Abiy Ahmed Ali

When Abiy Ahmed became Ethiopia's prime minister in April 2018, the country had been technically at war with Eritrea for two decades — frozen along a border whose precise line nobody could agree on, and whose disagreement had cost roughly one hundred thousand lives between 1998 and 2000. Abiy, within weeks of taking office, announced that Ethiopia would accept the border ruling it had been quietly ignoring since 2002, and flew to Asmara to embrace Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki in a meeting that left journalists scrambling for analogies. The peace that followed seemed, for a moment, improbably swift and whole. The Nobel committee awarded the prize in October 2019 with a speed that itself suggested something like excitement. What followed was more complicated: a civil war in the Tigray region beginning in late 2020, with humanitarian consequences that no one who had read the citation would have anticipated. The prize went to the Abiy who made peace with a neighbour; history has since introduced several other versions of the man.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Testing Poverty the Way Medicine Tests Drugs

Abhijit Banerjee · Esther Duflo · Michael Kremer

Development economics spent much of the twentieth century generating confident prescriptions about how poor countries could become less poor, and the prescriptions — structural adjustment, microfinance, aid conditionality — did not have a uniformly proud record. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo at MIT, working with Michael Kremer at Harvard, began importing from medicine the instrument that had made clinical research honest: the randomised controlled trial. Rather than modelling poverty from theory, they ran controlled experiments in Kenya, India, and elsewhere — testing whether school meals improved attendance, whether deworming tablets increased earnings, whether information campaigns changed vaccination rates — and published the results regardless of which way they came out. It sounds obvious in retrospect, which is the hallmark of a genuinely important methodological contribution. The field had been measuring the wrong things for a long time; they built the instruments to measure the right ones. Duflo, at forty-six, became the youngest recipient in the history of the economics prize and only the second woman, a set of facts that says something about development economics and perhaps also about its history.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

How the Wombat Squares Its Droppings

Patricia Yang · Alexander Lee · Miles Chan

The wombat, a stocky burrowing marsupial native to Australia and not previously noted for its contributions to manufacturing science, produces droppings in the shape of cubes — approximately two cubic centimetres each, deposited at a rate of up to one hundred per night, and used for territorial marking on flat surfaces where a spherical pellet would simply roll away. The geometry is extraordinary; no other known animal manages it. For a long time the assumption was that some exotic sphincter architecture must be responsible, but Patricia Yang and colleagues, examining preserved intestinal tissue with rather more care than the subject perhaps warranted, discovered that the final section of the wombat's intestine has a distinctly non-uniform elasticity: two stiffer regions alternating with two more pliable ones, which groove and compress the material asymmetrically as it passes through. The cube emerges not from a cubic orifice but from differential squeezing — a lesson in how complex shapes can emerge from simple mechanical variation that soft-matter physicists found genuinely interesting, and that everyone else found something else.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Pizza, Studied for Its Own Defence

Silvano Gallus

Silvano Gallus and colleagues at the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan spent considerable professional energy establishing what Italians, broadly speaking, had already suspected: regular pizza consumption was associated in epidemiological studies with a meaningfully reduced risk of several cancers, including colorectal, oesophageal, and oral cancers. The effect appeared specific to pizza rather than to tomato products generally, which the researchers took as encouragement rather than proof, and which left open the delightful interpretive problem of whether the benefit derived from lycopene in cooked tomatoes, oleic acid in the olive oil, the particular matrix of a slow-fermented dough, or simply the fact that someone sitting down to a proper pizza at a table in company is probably not eating many other things the oncology literature frowns upon. The study was conducted with methodological care. The conclusion was also the most pleasant sentence the authors had occasion to write in their careers.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

A Magnetic Signature, Lost at Death

Ling-Jun Kong · Herbert Crepaz · Agnieszka Górecka · Aleksandra Urbanek · Rainer Dumke · Tomasz Paterek

The researchers began with a reasonable premise: magnetotactic bacteria absorb magnetic particles and align with the Earth's field, and animals that consume enough of such bacteria might themselves become weakly magnetised. Cockroaches, being omnivorous and disinclined to refuse a meal, were duly fed a diet enriched in magnetotactic bacteria, and did indeed become magnetised — aligning measurably with an applied magnetic field, which is already a strange thing to have established. The stranger finding was what happened after death. A live magnetised cockroach and a dead magnetised cockroach align differently with the Earth's magnetic field, for reasons that involve the difference between an organism actively orienting itself and one that has become, in the most straightforward sense, inert matter. The distinction is real, reproducible, and not immediately useful. It does, however, suggest that the line between animate and inanimate carries a magnetic signature, which is either profound or merely peculiar, and the paper is careful not to say which.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Half a Litre a Day, Precisely Measured

Shigeru Watanabe · Mineko Ohnishi

The saliva produced by a five-year-old child is, it turns out, a quantifiable thing. Watanabe and Ohnishi approached the question with the diligence it deserved, measuring salivary output across age groups with enough rigour to establish that a typical five-year-old generates roughly half a litre of saliva per day — somewhat more than younger children, somewhat less than adults, and distributed across the day in patterns that track feeding, speech, and the general business of being five. The figure has legitimate implications for paediatric oral health, hydration modelling, and the epidemiology of contact transmission. It also has implications for library books, shared pencils, and the upholstery of vehicles used to transport young children, though the paper left these as an exercise for the reader.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

What Seventeen Currencies Were Carrying

Habip Gedik · Timothy A. Voss · Andreas Voss

Paper money changes hands thousands of times over its circulating life, passing between fingers that have been engaged in activities the banking system has not, in general, been designed to track. Gedik and his colleagues collected banknotes from seventeen countries and subjected them to microbiological analysis, finding pathogenic bacteria — Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and a supporting cast of organisms equally unwilling to be ignored — present in quantities and varieties that varied considerably by denomination, by country, and presumably by whatever the notes had most recently purchased. The country whose currency emerged in the least flattering light is, as a matter of scientific record, documented in the paper, and the summary will extend to readers the small courtesy of making them find it themselves. The broader takeaway — that contactless payment has hygienic advantages that go somewhat beyond convenience — the researchers stated plainly.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medical Education

Surgeons Trained Like Sea Lions

Karen Pryor · Theresa McKeon

Clicker training is a staple of animal behaviour work: a click marks the instant a dog or dolphin does the right thing, and the precision of the timing accelerates learning far beyond what verbal praise can manage. Karen Pryor, a pioneer of the method, and Theresa McKeon wondered whether the same technique could teach surgical skills to medical trainees, and ran a trial pitting clicker-based instruction against conventional teaching. The clicker group learned certain basic manual tasks faster and more cleanly, the immediate audible feedback doing for aspiring surgeons what it does for sea lions. There is no condescension in the finding — the human motor system responds to well-timed reinforcement much as any other animal's does — but there is a certain humbling symmetry in discovering that the future surgeon and the performing dolphin learn best by the same click.

Ig Nobel Prize in Anatomy

One Side Runs Warmer Than the Other

Roger Mieusset · Bourras Bengoudifa

Mieusset and Bengoudifa measured the temperature of the left and right sides of the scrotum, in French postmen, both clothed and unclothed, and established that the two sides are reliably not the same temperature — the left typically running warmer than the right. This is less trivial than it sounds: sperm production is exquisitely sensitive to heat, which is why the anatomy is external in the first place, and temperature asymmetry has real implications for fertility research. The choice of postmen as subjects reflects an interest in how a working day spent standing and walking affects the thermal regime below. The committee honoured a study that measured, with genuine care, a bodily asymmetry most people go their whole lives without suspecting, in a profession chosen for reasons that were presumably logistical.

Ig Nobel Prize in Engineering

A Machine to Change the Nappy

Iman Farahbakhsh

Iman Farahbakhsh patented a machine to change an infant's nappy — a device that would, in principle, clean the child, dispose of the soiled article, and fit a fresh one, with a minimum of parental involvement. The apparatus is elaborate, the diagrams are earnest, and the underlying impulse is one that any exhausted new parent will recognise instantly and sympathetically. Whether the world's infants would submit to mechanised changing with good grace is a question the patent does not fully resolve, and one suspects the answer would be delivered loudly. The committee honoured an act of engineering aimed squarely at one of the least glamorous and most relentless tasks of early parenthood, undertaken in the sincere belief that no chore is beneath the dignity of automation.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

The Ankle Is the Itchiest Place to Scratch

Ghada A. bin Saif · Alexandru Papoiu · Liliana Banari · Francis McGlone · Shawn G. Kwatra · Yiong-Huak Chan · Gil Yosipovitch

Scratching an itch is one of the reliable small pleasures of being an animal with skin, and bin Saif and colleagues set out to measure it — where on the body the relief is greatest, and how the pleasure tracks the intensity of the itch. Inducing itches on the ankle, the forearm, and the back, and having volunteers rate both the itch and the satisfaction of scratching it, they found the ankle both the itchiest site and the most gratifying to scratch, the back somewhat less so. The work maps, in careful detail, a sensation everyone knows and no one thinks to study, and it has genuine bearing on chronic itch conditions, where the scratch-relief cycle becomes a torment rather than a comfort. The committee recognised the quantification of one of the body's more accessible joys.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

A Smile That Stopped Being Funny

Fritz Strack

In 1988 Fritz Strack and colleagues reported one of psychology's most charming findings: hold a pen crosswise between your teeth, forcing the face into something like a smile, and cartoons seem funnier — apparently because the expression feeds back into the emotion, a small confirmation that the body shapes the mind. The result entered textbooks and lecture halls for a generation. Then, in the era of large-scale replication, seventeen laboratories tried to reproduce it and largely could not, and Strack, to his considerable credit, was among those who reported the failure rather than defending the original. The committee honoured him for both halves of the story — for discovering the effect, and for then discovering that it does not hold. It is an unusually honest prize, awarded for the complete scientific arc: a beautiful idea, and the willingness to watch it not survive contact with the evidence.

Turing Award

Light, Rendered From Pure Mathematics

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Edwin Catmull · Pat Hanrahan

In 1974, Edwin Catmull submitted a doctoral thesis at the University of Utah that introduced texture mapping and a technique for subdividing curved surfaces into manageable polygons — foundational tools for rendering anything that isn't a flat, featureless plane, which is to say, for rendering almost anything. Pat Hanrahan, later at Stanford, developed RenderMan in the 1980s: a shading language that allowed artists to specify not what an imaginary object looked like but how light should behave when it encountered the imaginary object's surface — a question that turned out to be both practically essential and conceptually deep. Together, as key figures at Pixar, their work made it possible to produce a film in which every surface, every reflection, every strand of hair and drop of water existed only as mathematics, and to make the results more emotionally affecting than many films of things that were actually there. The Toy Story franchise alone has grossed several billion dollars on the strength of photons that were never generated by any physical light source, which is one way of measuring the distance between a 1974 doctoral thesis and the world it made.

First image of a black hole released by the Event Horizon Telescope

A Planet-Sized Dish, One Orange Ring

The Event Horizon Telescope is not a telescope in any sense that would be recognisable to Galileo: it is eight radio observatories spread across four continents — Hawaii, Arizona, Chile, Mexico, Spain, and the South Pole — networked together by atomic clocks so precise that their data could be combined after the fact, transforming the entire planet into a single dish 12,700 kilometres across. The target was the supermassive black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a giant elliptical galaxy in the Virgo cluster some 55 million light-years away, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. What emerged, after months of computational processing by a team including Katie Bouman, was an orange ring — superheated gas spiralling inward at relativistic speeds, glowing as it falls, silhouetted against the darkness of the event horizon itself. That boundary is not a surface but an absence: the location beyond which the mathematics of general relativity indicates that nothing, not even light, returns. Einstein's equations had predicted this in 1915; it took a century and a planet-sized radio array to see it. The image confirmed what physicists had long suspected and answered, in a single blurred orange circle, a question that had seemed permanently beyond the reach of observation.

Chang'e 4 lands on the lunar far side

First Footprint on the Moon's Hidden Face

The Moon's far side has always faced away from Earth — tidally locked since the early Solar System, permanently invisible from the surface, and for that reason never visited by any soft lander before 2019. The radio problem alone made it seem prohibitive: a spacecraft on the far side is behind a 3,476-kilometre ball of rock with no line of sight to Earth, which is not a configuration from which you can receive commands or transmit data. China's solution was methodical: launch the Queqiao relay satellite to a halo orbit around the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point, from which it maintains simultaneous line of sight to both Earth and the lunar far side, then send the lander. Chang'e 4 touched down in the Von Kármán crater — a 186-kilometre basin within the South Pole–Aitken Basin, one of the largest and oldest impact structures in the Solar System — on 3 January 2019, and the Yutu-2 rover began traversing terrain that no machine had ever touched. The far side differs geologically from the near side in ways that are not yet fully understood; having a rover there at all is the prerequisite for beginning to understand them.

First Ebola vaccine licensed (rVSV-ZEBOV, Ervebo)

Forty-Three Years for an Answer

Ebola haemorrhagic fever was first identified in 1976 near the Ebola River in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and for the four decades that followed, every outbreak — and there were more than twenty — ran its course without a licensed vaccine. The 2013–2016 epidemic in West Africa killed more than eleven thousand people and made urgency impossible to ignore. Work on rVSV-ZEBOV, a recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus engineered to carry an Ebola surface protein, accelerated; the 2018–2020 outbreak in the DRC, the second largest in recorded history, became the unwilling trial ground for ring vaccination campaigns in which contacts and contacts-of-contacts of confirmed cases were vaccinated in expanding circles around each diagnosis. The efficacy was 97.5 percent. The European Medicines Agency granted approval in November 2019; the FDA followed within weeks. Forty-three years is a long time for a pathogen with a case fatality rate that can exceed 90 percent in uncontrolled outbreaks to have no answer — but it now has one, and the methodology of ring vaccination that proved it had been sitting in the public health toolkit, waiting for this particular application, since the eradication of smallpox.

Mars Opportunity rover mission declared over after 15 years

A Song Sent to a Rover That Couldn't Answer

Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004 as the second of the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, alongside Spirit, with a primary mission planned for ninety Martian sols — roughly three months. It outlasted that estimate by a factor of about sixty, traversing 45 kilometres across the Meridiani Planum, descending into craters, grinding rock samples, and returning more than 217,000 images before a planet-wide dust storm in June 2018 blotted out the sun for weeks and silenced its solar panels. NASA sent over a thousand recovery commands in the months that followed, waiting for wind to sweep the panels clean as it had after previous storms, but the silence held. The mission was formally declared ended on 13 February 2019. The final signal attempt played Billie Holiday's "I'll Be Seeing You" over the radio dish, which is either the most sentimental thing NASA has ever done or simply the most accurate — the rover had last been seen in a photograph taken from orbit, a small white speck sitting exactly where it stopped.

Death of Murray Gell-Mann

Three Quarks, Named From Finnegans Wake

Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann arrived at Caltech in 1955 with a facility for languages, an impatience with lesser intellects that he made little effort to conceal, and a set of ideas about hadron physics that would eventually reorder the subject entirely. In 1964, independently of George Zweig, he proposed that protons, neutrons, and the growing menagerie of newly discovered particles were each composed of smaller, fractionally charged constituents — a proposal so counterintuitive, given that no such particle had ever been observed in isolation, that he named them quarks and sourced the word from a line in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark." The naming was characteristic: exact enough to be permanent, learned enough to annoy people, and slightly absurd in a way that felt appropriate to the subject. He received the Nobel Prize in 1969. He spent his later decades at the Santa Fe Institute, which he helped found, working on complexity science — the study of how simple rules produce elaborate systems — which is what physicists sometimes turn to when the fundamental equations have been written down and the work of understanding what they mean has only just begun. He died on 24 May 2019 in Santa Fe, aged eighty-nine.