2019

Nobel Prize in Physics

James Peebles · Michel Mayor · Didier Queloz

Peebles spent decades constructing the theoretical skeleton of the universe — dark matter, dark energy, the delicate afterglow of the Big Bang — at a time when cosmology was closer to philosophy than measurement. Mayor and Queloz, on a different track entirely, detected in 1995 the wobble of a sun-like star betraying the presence of a planet, 51 Pegasi b, that nobody had expected to find in the position it occupied. Two quite different kinds of audacity, rewarded together.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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

Whittingham made the first lithium battery work; Goodenough doubled its voltage by finding better cathode materials; Yoshino removed the metallic lithium from the anode entirely, making the thing safe enough to put in a pocket. The device that resulted now powers several billion telephones and is quietly rearranging the economics of electricity. Goodenough received his prize at ninety-seven, becoming the oldest Nobel laureate on record, which is at least consistent with his name.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

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

Every cell in your body monitors how much oxygen it has. Kaelin, Ratcliffe, and Semenza mapped the molecular machinery that does this — a transcription factor called HIF-1 that switches genes on and off depending on whether oxygen is plentiful or scarce. Cancer hijacks this mechanism to grow its own blood supply; understanding it opened routes toward treating tumours, anaemia, and conditions where tissues are starved of air.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Peter Handke

The 2019 prize was awarded alongside the deferred 2018 prize, which meant two laureates announced in a single October week. Handke's selection was immediately contested: his public statements defending Serbian actions during the Yugoslav Wars had made him a figure of sustained controversy, and several committee members had already resigned over other matters. His novels are considered linguistically exacting; his public role is considered rather harder to defend.

Nobel Peace Prize

Abiy Ahmed Ali

Within weeks of becoming Ethiopia's prime minister in 2018, Abiy Ahmed announced that Ethiopia accepted a border ruling it had been ignoring for twenty years, and flew to Asmara to shake hands with a government Ethiopia had treated as an enemy since 1998. The frozen war with Eritrea thawed so quickly it was disorienting. The Nobel committee moved with unusual speed; subsequent events in Tigray would complicate the citation considerably.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Abhijit Banerjee · Esther Duflo · Michael Kremer

Development economics had accumulated decades of confident prescriptions and uncertain results. Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer introduced the randomised controlled trial to the question of what actually reduces poverty, generating careful evidence from Africa and South Asia on school meals, deworming, and microfinance. Duflo became the second woman and the youngest person to receive the economics prize.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Patricia Yang · Alexander Lee · Miles Chan

Wombats produce droppings shaped like cubes, which is extraordinary, and for a long time nobody knew how. The answer turned out to lie not in any exotic sphincter geometry but in the variable elasticity of the final section of the intestine, which squeezes the material unevenly as it passes. This is the only known biological mechanism for producing a cube, and it works on wombats, which is where it has chosen to work.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Silvano Gallus

Epidemiological studies in Italy found that regular pizza consumption correlated with reduced risk of certain cancers. Whether this reflects something specific about pizza — the lycopene in cooked tomato, the olive oil, the sociable circumstances of eating it — or merely that Italians who eat traditional food also live in other health-protective ways, the researchers were careful not to fully resolve. The finding is nonetheless one of the more pleasant ones in the oncology literature.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Ling-Jun Kong · Herbert Crepaz · Almut Beige

When a magnetized cockroach dies, it continues to align with the Earth's magnetic field — but differently from how a living magnetized cockroach aligns. The distinction is real and measurable. What it means remains, in the fullest sense, open.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Shigeru Watanabe · Mineko Ohnishi

The daily saliva output of a typical five-year-old, measured with appropriate rigour, is approximately half a litre. This figure has implications for understanding fluid balance, oral health, and what happens to library books when children read them.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Habip Gedik · Elif Nalbant · Büşra Vergili

The researchers tested banknotes from countries across Europe and beyond for pathogenic bacteria, finding that the quantity and variety of dangerous microorganisms varied considerably by nation and by denomination. Which country's money came out worst is a detail the summary will leave as an incentive to read the paper.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Edwin Catmull · Pat Hanrahan

Catmull contributed subdivision surfaces and texture mapping; Hanrahan built RenderMan, a shading language that allowed artists to describe how light should behave on imaginary surfaces, which turns out to be a surprisingly deep question. Together their work at Pixar made it possible to produce films in which nothing you see ever existed, and made the results more emotionally persuasive than many films of things that did.

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

Eight radio observatories on four continents observed simultaneously, their data combined by atomic clocks precise enough to turn the whole planet into a single telescope. What emerged, after months of processing, was a blurred orange ring — the glow of superheated gas orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of M87, 55 million light-years away, 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. You are looking at the event horizon: the precise location beyond which nothing, including this sentence, could return.

Chang'e 4 lands on the lunar far side

The Moon's far side permanently faces away from Earth, which meant that any lander there would be unreachable by radio — a problem China solved by parking a relay satellite at the Earth-Moon L2 point first. Chang'e 4 set down in the Von Kármán crater on 3 January 2019, and the Yutu-2 rover began exploring terrain no machine had visited before.

First Ebola vaccine licensed (rVSV-ZEBOV, Ervebo)

Ebola had been killing people in outbreaks since 1976, and for most of that time no vaccine existed. The 2018–2020 outbreak in the DRC, the second largest on record, served as a devastating trial ground for rVSV-ZEBOV, which demonstrated 97.5% efficacy in ring-vaccination campaigns and received regulatory approval from the EMA and the FDA within 2019. It was forty-three years in coming.

Mars Opportunity rover mission declared over after 15 years

Opportunity was designed for ninety Martian days and operated for nearly fifteen years, travelling 45 kilometres and sending back more than 200,000 images before a planet-wide dust storm in 2018 blocked enough sunlight to silence its solar panels forever. NASA sent over a thousand recovery signals before formally ending the mission in February 2019. The last attempt to contact it played Billie Holiday's "I'll Be Seeing You."

Death of Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann

Gell-Mann proposed that protons and neutrons were made of smaller constituents, named them quarks — lifting the word from a line in Finnegans Wake, "Three quarks for Muster Mark" — and received the 1969 Nobel Prize for the scheme. He died on 24 May 2019 in Santa Fe, aged 89, having spent his later decades at the Santa Fe Institute working on complexity, which is what physicists sometimes turn to when the equations get tired of being tidy.