2021

Nobel Prize in Physics

Syukuro Manabe · Klaus Hasselmann · Giorgio Parisi

The planet has a climate, and that climate is warming — Manabe and Hasselmann provided the physics to say so precisely, modeling the deep patterns beneath the noise. Half a world away in subject, Parisi uncovered how disorder and fluctuation cooperate from atomic to planetary scales, in systems apparently too chaotic to be understood at all.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Benjamin List · David W.C. MacMillan

Chemists had long had two tools for speeding reactions: metals and enzymes. List and MacMillan independently found a third — small organic molecules that can do the same job with considerably less fuss — and along the way made the synthesis of pharmaceuticals cleaner and cheaper.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

David Julius · Ardem Patapoutian

You know when something is hot, or cold, or when a hand is pressing on your shoulder — Julius found the ion channel, TRPV1, that makes the first two possible, and Patapoutian discovered Piezo1 and Piezo2, the channels that translate physical pressure into sensation. The question of how flesh knows the world it lives in turned out to have a pleasingly precise answer.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Born in Zanzibar, long based in Britain, Gurnah has spent ten novels attending to what colonialism cost the people it moved around the board — the displaced, the refugee, those caught in the gulf between continents. The Swedish Academy honoured his uncompromising compassion.

Nobel Peace Prize

Maria Ressa · Dmitry Muratov

Ressa co-founded Rappler in the Philippines and was rewarded with criminal charges; Muratov edited Novaya Gazeta in Russia and watched colleagues get killed. The committee gave the prize not to victors but to working journalists who had simply refused to stop.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

David Card · Joshua D. Angrist · Guido W. Imbens

Card's natural-experiment studies — including the finding that a minimum-wage rise in New Jersey did not reduce employment relative to neighbouring Pennsylvania — gave economists sharper tools for asking causal questions. Angrist and Imbens formalised those tools, explaining when and why such accidental experiments can be trusted.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Susanne Schötz

Schötz catalogued the sounds cats make when addressing humans — trills, chirps, meows modulated with suspicious intentionality — and examined whether cats consciously tune their vocalisations to get what they want. Cat owners will feel this needed no scientific confirmation. They are probably right, which makes it a perfect Ig Nobel subject.

Ig Nobel Prize in Ecology

Leila Satari

The grey pellets adhered to pavements in several countries turned out, on genetic analysis, to harbour distinct and surprisingly varied bacterial communities. Discarded chewing gum is, it seems, an ecosystem. A small, unpleasant one, but an ecosystem nonetheless.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Jörg Wicker

Wicker analysed the air inside a cinema during screenings of different films and found that the audience's collective chemistry — the volatile compounds they exhaled — changed measurably depending on what was happening on screen. A thriller smells, apparently, different from a comedy.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Pavlo Blavatskyy

Blavatskyy found a statistically significant correlation between the body-mass index of a nation's politicians and that nation's level of corruption. Causality, as always, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Olcay Cem Bulut

Bulut demonstrated that sexual orgasm provides temporary relief from nasal congestion comparable to a commercial decongestant. This finding is unlikely to alter prescription habits, but it does mean the research was not entirely without practical implications.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Ethan Beseris

Beseris proposed that the human beard evolved partly to cushion blows to the jaw during fights — a kind of biological crash helmet, only fluffier. He tested this on synthetic bone and fibre specimens, since volunteers willing to have their faces punched for science proved difficult to recruit in sufficient numbers.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Alessandro Corbetta · Hisashi Murakami

Corbetta's team studied why pedestrians in a corridor sometimes fail to sort themselves into lanes, while Murakami's team investigated the precise moment when two people walking toward each other decide to veer — or, more entertainingly, fail to. Together they mapped the social physics of the near-miss.

Ig Nobel Prize in Transportation

Robin Radcliffe

Radcliffe addressed a genuine conservation problem — how best to airlift rhinoceroses to new reserves — by measuring their respiratory function when suspended upside-down from a helicopter versus other orientations. The inverted position proved no worse, and in some respects better, than the alternatives. The rhinoceroses were unavailable for comment.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Jack Dongarra

For four decades, Dongarra built and maintained the numerical libraries — LINPACK, LAPACK, MPI — that let scientific software keep pace with hardware that doubled in power every couple of years. Without that invisible scaffolding, the calculations underpinning modern science and AI would have taken considerably longer, or not happened at all.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Peter Hegemann · Dieter Oesterhelt · Karl Deisseroth

Oesterhelt found the first light-driven ion pump hiding in archaea; Hegemann discovered light-gated channels in algae; Deisseroth asked what would happen if you installed those microbial proteins into neurons. The answer — that you could switch specific brain cells on or off with a flash of light — became optogenetics, now standard in neuroscience laboratories worldwide.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Katalin Karikó · Drew Weissman

For years, the idea of using messenger RNA as medicine kept hitting the same wall: the body attacked synthetic mRNA as a foreign invader. Karikó and Weissman found that swapping in a modified nucleoside — pseudouridine — quieted that response while leaving the protein-making instructions intact. The COVID-19 vaccines that followed are the most publicly consequential result.

Parker Solar Probe enters the solar corona

On 28 April 2021, during its eighth close flyby of the Sun, NASA's Parker Solar Probe crossed the Alfvén surface at 18.8 solar radii and became the first human-made object to enter the solar corona and sample it directly. The measurements confirmed the existence of magnetic switchbacks and captured plasma structures that no instrument had ever touched before.

Perseverance lands on Mars and Ingenuity makes first powered flight on another world

On 18 February, Perseverance set down in Jezero Crater with the quiet confidence of a rover that had spent seven months rehearsing the seven minutes of terror. Two months later, on 19 April, the small helicopter strapped to its belly hovered for 39 seconds at three metres above the Martian surface — the first powered, controlled flight on another world, on a planet where the air is barely there.

James Webb Space Telescope launches

On Christmas Day 2021, an Ariane 5 rocket lifted off from Kourou carrying a telescope that had taken thirty years and ten billion dollars to build. Its 6.5-metre gold-coated mirror would unfurl over the following month on its way to the L2 Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth, where it would begin looking at light that left the universe when the universe was very young.

Death of E.O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson

Wilson built the science of sociobiology, gave biodiversity the framework it had been lacking, and wrote the definitive monograph on ants — a task he pursued for decades with a pleasure that never quite resembled work. He died on 26 December 2021, aged 92, having spent his life insisting that the natural world was worth paying very close attention to.

Death of Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg

Weinberg unified two of nature's forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear interaction — into a single framework that became a cornerstone of the Standard Model, for which he shared the 1979 Nobel. He was also one of science's finest prose stylists, whose "The First Three Minutes" explained the early universe to anyone willing to sit down and think. He died in Austin, Texas, on 23 July 2021, aged 88.