2022

Nobel Prize in Physics

Alain Aspect · John Clauser · Anton Zeilinger

For decades, entanglement occupied an uncomfortable position in physics — real as mathematics, contested as fact. Clauser, then Aspect, then Zeilinger ran the experiments that closed the loopholes one by one, until the conclusion became inescapable: two particles really can be correlated in ways that no local hidden variable explains. What they built on top of that — quantum cryptography, quantum computing — followed from having trusted the strangeness.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Carolyn Bertozzi · Morten Meldal · K. Barry Sharpless

Sharpless introduced click chemistry — the idea of building molecules the way a seatbelt clicks, fast and reliable — and Meldal independently found the copper-catalysed reaction that made it practical. Bertozzi extended the concept into living cells without poisoning them, giving biologists a way to label and study molecules inside organisms that previously had to be killed first.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Svante Pääbo

Pääbo did what most biologists considered impossible: he extracted readable DNA from bones tens of thousands of years old. What he found reordered human prehistory. Neanderthals had not simply vanished — they had intermarried with our ancestors, and their DNA persists in most people alive today. He also found the Denisovans, a species known only from a finger bone and a few teeth, in the genomes of living humans across Asia.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Annie Ernaux

Ernaux's autofiction proceeds with a surgeon's precision on material that would buckle a less controlled writer: class shame, abortion, desire, grief, the long defeat of ageing. The Swedish Academy cited her courage and clinical acuity; the clinical acuity is the courage.

Nobel Peace Prize

Ales Bialiatski · Memorial · Center for Civil Liberties

Bialiatski was in a Belarusian prison when the prize was announced. Memorial, the Russian human rights organisation that had spent decades documenting Soviet terror and post-Soviet abuses, was being dissolved by court order in Moscow. The Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties was documenting war crimes in real time. The committee was awarding the prize to people doing the work that their governments most wanted stopped.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Ben Bernanke · Douglas Diamond · Philip Dybvig

Diamond and Dybvig's 1983 model explained why banks are inherently fragile — they borrow short and lend long, and a sufficiently large rumour is enough to make the rumour true. Bernanke showed empirically that bank failures in the 1930s did not merely reflect the Depression but deepened it, by destroying the credit knowledge only banks hold. Their work became relevant again in 2008, when Bernanke was running the Federal Reserve.

Ig Nobel Prize in Applied Cardiology

Eliska Prochazkova

Prochazkova ran speed-dating sessions with heart-rate monitors and found that participants who were genuinely attracted to each other had measurably synchronised cardiac rhythms while talking. The heart, it turns out, has opinions about the person sitting across the table — and it voices them without asking permission.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Eric Martínez

Martínez analysed legal language and found, with the rigour of a man reading far too many contracts, that it is hard to understand because of embedded clauses, centre-embedding, and jargon — not because lawyers are being devious (that is a separate inquiry) but because legal writing genuinely evolved to defeat comprehension.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Solimary García-Hernández

García-Hernández discovered that constipated scorpions do worse in courtship and reproduce less successfully. The precise mechanism was not investigated, but there is a long tradition of science declining to speculate on certain things.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Marcin Jasiński

Jasiński ran a randomised trial showing that ice cream reduces the pain of oral mucositis — the mouth sores caused by chemotherapy — in children. This is one of those findings that both requires and deserves a clinical trial, and which anyone who has ever had a sore throat could have guessed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Frank Fish

Fish — a wonderfully apt name for the investigator — found that ducklings swimming behind their mother surf her bow wave, then pass energy forward along the line so that each duckling benefits from the one ahead. The formation is less charming than it looks; it is cooperative hydrodynamics.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Alessandro Pluchino

Pluchino built a mathematical model showing that the most successful individuals in a simulated career are rarely the most talented — they are the luckiest. This is one of those results that will be cited approvingly by everyone who considers themselves talented and overlooked.

Ig Nobel Prize in Safety Engineering

Magnus Gens

Moose are an unusual road hazard in the sense that conventional crash-test dummies are not built to their proportions. Gens built one. It is, by some margin, the largest crash-test dummy in existence, and also the one with the most haunting silhouette.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Robert Metcalfe

In 1973, at Xerox PARC, Metcalfe sketched the design of Ethernet on a memo and then spent the following years turning it into a standard that billions of devices would eventually use. He was not merely the inventor but the salesman, the standardiser, and the commercialiser — a combination rarer than any of its parts.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Hugo Duminil-Copin · June Huh · James Maynard · Maryna Viazovska

The International Congress of Mathematicians was supposed to meet in Moscow; Russia's invasion of Ukraine moved it to Helsinki. Duminil-Copin cracked phase-transition problems that had resisted physicists for decades; Huh proved combinatorial conjectures using algebraic geometry he had taught himself from scratch; Maynard made prime gaps small in ways previously thought impossible; and Viazovska proved that no arrangement of spheres in eight and twenty-four dimensions can pack more tightly than the ones mathematicians had long suspected were optimal.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Richard O. Hynes · Erkki Ruoslahti · Timothy A. Springer

Hynes, Ruoslahti, and Springer discovered integrins — the cell-surface proteins that let cells grip the scaffolding around them and signal back through it. Those molecular handholds turned out to regulate wound healing, immune traffic, and cancer metastasis, and have since been targeted by drugs used in cardiology and multiple sclerosis.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Yuk Ming Dennis Lo

Lo discovered that fetal DNA circulates freely in the mother's bloodstream during pregnancy. The implication — that you could screen for chromosomal conditions like Down syndrome with a blood draw rather than a needle into the amniotic sac — took time to act on, but the resulting tests are now standard prenatal care worldwide.

NIF achieves nuclear fusion ignition

On 5 December, at the National Ignition Facility in California, 192 lasers delivered 2.05 megajoules of energy to a pellet of hydrogen fuel the size of a peppercorn, and the pellet released 3.15 megajoules in return. Fusion had produced more energy than it consumed, for the first time in sixty years of trying. The margin was modest; the principle was not.

JWST detects CO₂ in an exoplanet atmosphere

Webb had been operational for months when its infrared instruments picked out a clear signature of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of WASP-39 b, a hot gas giant 700 light-years away — the first unambiguous atmospheric CO₂ detection on any world beyond our own. It was a demonstration of what the telescope could do before it had even started doing the things it was actually built for.

James Webb Space Telescope releases first science images

On 12 July, NASA released five images: a deep field of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 showing light bent by gravity into arcs; the Carina Nebula's star-forming cliffs in infrared; the ghostly rings of the Southern Ring Nebula; the five galaxies of Stephan's Quintet in collision; and a spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere. After thirty years and ten billion dollars, the telescope worked.

ChatGPT launches

On 30 November, OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free research preview, and the internet's relationship with text generation changed in ways that would take years to fully measure. One million users arrived in five days; 100 million within two months. The model was not the most powerful available; it was the first one that felt, to an ordinary person sitting at a keyboard, like a conversation.