2023

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Camera Fast Enough for Electrons

Pierre Agostini · Ferenc Krausz · Anne L'Huillier

An electron moving through an atom completes its journey in roughly a hundred attoseconds — one tenth of a billionth of a billionth of a second — a duration so brief that it had no practical meaning until physicists found a way to produce light pulses that fit inside it. Anne L'Huillier discovered in 1987 that firing intense laser pulses into noble gases generates higher harmonics of the light, and those harmonics combine into bursts on attosecond timescales; the physics was elegant, but the pulses themselves were invisible, mere inference from spectral data. Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz independently developed techniques to isolate and directly characterise individual attosecond pulses, turning what had been a theoretical curiosity into a working tool. The result is something that could fairly be called the fastest camera ever built — not for images, but for quantum states. Science had long been able to watch atoms; now it can watch electrons inside them, catching transitions and tunnelling events that had previously been averaged out of existence. Much of what drives chemistry happens in the attosecond regime, and understanding it at this resolution matters for everything from semiconductor design to the development of new drugs.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Colour Decided by Size Alone

Moungi Bawendi · Louis Brus · Aleksey Yekimov

In classical chemistry, a material's colour is a fixed property of what it is made of; quantum mechanics, applied at sufficiently small scales, disagrees. When a crystal is shrunk to just a few nanometres across — a quantum dot — its electrons are squeezed into a box so tight that quantum confinement takes over, and the energy gap governing which wavelengths the crystal absorbs and emits is determined not by composition but by size alone. Aleksey Yekimov observed this phenomenon in coloured glass in the early 1980s; Louis Brus demonstrated it independently in colloidal solutions; Moungi Bawendi then worked out the synthesis chemistry to make quantum dots uniform enough and controllable enough to be genuinely useful, rather than merely interesting. The practical applications arrived with rather satisfying promptness: quantum dots now provide the vivid, precisely tuned colours in QLED television screens, light up specific proteins in biological microscopy, and are being woven into solar cells that can be tuned to catch the sun's spectrum more efficiently. It is a rare case in which a purely quantum-mechanical phenomenon — the kind usually confined to textbooks and low-temperature laboratories — ended up brightening the pixels of televisions in ordinary living rooms.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Small Chemical Nudge, Decades Late

Katalin Karikó · Drew Weissman

Katalin Karikó spent the 1990s at the University of Pennsylvania being told, politely and then less politely, that mRNA as a therapeutic platform was not worth funding — it was too unstable, too inflammatory, and the immune system destroyed it before it could do anything useful. She was demoted in 1995 and continued the work anyway, sharing a photocopier and a line of inquiry with immunologist Drew Weissman. Their critical observation, published in 2005, was that substituting pseudouridine for uridine in synthetic mRNA — a small chemical nudge — made the molecule essentially invisible to the innate immune system's alarm circuits, allowing it to enter cells and direct protein synthesis without triggering the inflammatory cascade that had always shut the approach down. The paper landed with modest impact; it took another fifteen years and a global pandemic for the world to notice what that nudge was worth. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, administered to billions of people beginning in late 2020, were built directly on this chemistry. Stockholm awarded the Nobel in 2023, roughly four decades after Karikó first thought the question worth asking — a timeline that says something unflattering about how science allocates its attention.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Giving Voice to the Unsayable

Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse writes in Nynorsk, one of Norway's two official written forms and the minority one at that — a language with a literary tradition as serious as any in Scandinavia, though considerably less widely read outside it. His plays, which began appearing in the 1990s and brought him international attention on European stages before most readers had encountered him, are built from a kind of strategic evacuation: dialogue stripped of explanation, characters who circle what they cannot say, silence used with the deliberateness other playwrights use for speeches. The novels in his Septology series, which stretch across three volumes and are written as a single continuous sentence, apply the same method to interior life — the prose flows and doubles back and barely pauses, the way thought does when it has found something it cannot quite look at directly. The Swedish Academy honoured him for giving voice to the unsayable, which is either a paradox or a very precise description of what serious literature is for. Fosse himself is unlikely to have put it that way.

Nobel Peace Prize

Accepted by Her Children, in Absentia

Narges Mohammadi

Narges Mohammadi accepted the Nobel Peace Prize through her children, who received it on her behalf in Oslo; she was at the time in Tehran's Evin Prison, serving a sentence of more than ten years on charges that included spreading propaganda against the state. This was not her first time in Evin: she has been arrested, convicted, and imprisoned repeatedly since 2011 for her work with the Defenders of Human Rights Center and her campaigns against the death penalty and, most prominently, against the compulsory hijab laws that placed Iran's women's rights movement at the centre of global attention during the 2022 uprising. The Norwegian Nobel Committee's citation noted her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her effort to promote human rights for all. The Iranian government responded by declining to release her and by preventing state media from reporting the award at all. She continued writing from prison. The prize did not free her, but it did mean that her imprisonment became more difficult to conduct in the dark.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

The Wage Gap Is Shaped Like Motherhood

Claudia Goldin

Claudia Goldin spent decades assembling something that economic history rarely produces: a continuous, rigorous account of American women's labour force participation stretching back to the nineteenth century, drawn from census records, company payrolls, and data sets that had never before been cleaned and connected. What she found, and what earlier researchers who had looked only at recent decades had missed, is a U-shaped curve: women's paid work was relatively high in pre-industrial America, fell sharply as the economy industrialised and social norms hardened around the separation of home and market, then slowly climbed back through the twentieth century. The gender wage gap, she showed, is not primarily a story of discrimination or occupational segregation, though those exist; it is a story about parenthood. Motherhood reduces earnings in ways that fatherhood does not, and the penalty is sharpest in jobs — law, finance, consulting — that reward continuous availability and penalise anyone who needs to step away. The finding is patient and historical and quietly devastating, in the way that facts are sometimes more devastating than arguments: it shifts the question from whether the gap exists to precisely why it is so stubbornly shaped like that.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Geology

Why Geologists Lick Rocks

Jan Zalasiewicz

Field geologists lick rocks. This is not peculiarity or boredom; it is technique. Saliva temporarily enhances the contrast and apparent colour of a specimen's surface in ways that make textural identification — grain size, mineral content, cleavage patterns — considerably easier than a quick squint in daylight. Palaeontologist Jan Zalasiewicz, with the serene confidence of a man explaining something obvious, published an explanation of this practice for the edification of anyone who had ever wondered why geologists in documentaries keep putting rocks in their mouths. The Ig Nobel committee duly honoured the work, presumably after trying it themselves. Zalasiewicz is also one of the scholars most associated with the concept of the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch, which suggests that a man who helped name a new chapter in Earth's history was, at a quieter moment, also the world's leading authority on the proper use of saliva as an analytical tool.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Writing a Word Until It Dissolves

Chris Moulin

Déjà vu — the uncanny sense that you have experienced this moment before — has received a good deal of scientific attention over the years, mostly because it is strange and everyone has had it. Its inverse, jamais vu, has been rather neglected: the experience where something thoroughly familiar suddenly feels alien, as though you are encountering it for the first time. Chris Moulin and colleagues at the University of Leeds investigated jamais vu by the elegant and somewhat cruel method of asking volunteers to write the same word repeatedly until something happened. After writing "door" or "the" for several minutes, a significant proportion of subjects reported that the word had begun to dissolve — that the letters no longer cohered into meaning, that they could no longer be confident they were spelling it correctly, that the concept itself seemed to slip away. The phenomenon has a name — semantic satiation — and a neurological explanation involving the attenuation of neural responses to repeated stimuli. Whether this is a flaw in the architecture of the mind or, as the researchers suggested with a pleasingly straight face, the beginning of philosophy is left as an exercise for the reader.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mechanical Engineering

A Dead Spider, Reanimated as a Claw

Te Faye Yap

Spiders do not have muscles that extend their legs; they extend them hydraulically, pumping hemolymph — their equivalent of blood — into the limb under pressure from a small chamber near the body. This is why a dead spider curls inward: the pump stops, the pressure drops, the legs contract. Te Faye Yap and colleagues at Rice University noticed that a recently deceased spider, with its hydraulic plumbing still structurally intact, could serve as a readymade gripper if you inserted a needle into the body cavity and applied compressed air. The reanimated appendages opened; the pressure released, they gripped; the resulting device could pick up objects and put them down on command, repeatedly, with a dexterity that most purpose-built robotic grippers quietly envy. The team coined the term "necrobotics" for the approach, which, to be clear, did not previously exist as a word. It is biodegradable, inexpensive, and derived from an organism that spent millions of years optimising exactly this mechanism. The spiders remain unavailable for comment.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

A Toilet That Knows Who You Are

Seung-min Park

Seung-min Park's toilet, developed at Stanford, is equipped with a pressure sensor, a camera pointed at the water surface, a second camera positioned rather more intimately, a fingerprint reader on the flush handle, and software that analyses the resulting images for biomarkers associated with kidney disease, certain cancers, and gastrointestinal disorders. The device identifies the user through the fingerprint and, as a secondary and rather more distinctive biometric, through an anal-print recognition system, on the reasonable grounds that this particular feature is both unique and reliably present at the relevant moment. The paper, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, addresses the clinical applications with admirable thoroughness and the identification method with somewhat more restraint. The vision is continuous, passive monitoring of one's own digestive health without any effort or additional appointments; the privacy questions raised by installing a camera at that angle in a household bathroom are left, perhaps wisely, for a different paper.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Counting Nostril Hairs, Left and Right

Christine Pham

Nasal hair — vibrissae, to use the term that makes the subject sound appropriately serious — filters particles from inhaled air, provides some warning of environmental hazards, and has been the subject of surprisingly little systematic study. Christine Pham and colleagues addressed one specific and previously unresolved question: are the hairs distributed symmetrically between the left and right nostrils? The investigation required cadavers, patience, and a willingness to count things that most people do not think about at all. The answer — that the distribution is more or less symmetrical, with no consistent bias toward either side — is not a discovery that reshapes medicine, but it closes a small gap in the map of the human body with the quiet satisfaction of a fact that is now simply known. Science contains multitudes, and not all of them announce themselves.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Anchovies Stir the Ocean Too

Bieito Fernández Castro

Ocean mixing — the process by which warm surface water and cold deep water are kept from stratifying entirely — matters enormously for climate, nutrient distribution, and the circulation systems that make large parts of the planet habitable. The conventional drivers are wind and tidal forces, and models of ocean circulation have been built around them for decades. Bieito Fernández Castro and colleagues decided to measure how much a school of spawning anchovies contributes to this mixing: the fish swim, they generate turbulence, the turbulence moves water, and the question is whether the scale is negligible or not. It is, it turns out, not negligible. The biological mixing generated by large aggregations of fish is a real term in the ocean's energy budget, one that had been largely omitted from models because it seemed too minor and too strange to quantify. The anchovies have been doing this for longer than the models have existed, and are, as far as anyone can determine, indifferent to the recognition.

Ig Nobel Prize in Communication

Some People Can Speak in Reverse

María José Torres-Prioris · Diana López-Barroso · Estela Càmara · Sol Fittipaldi · Lucas Sedeño · Agustín Ibáñez · Marcelo Berthier · Adolfo García

María José Torres-Prioris and colleagues studied a small population of people who can speak backwards — not merely reversing the odd word, but fluently inverting entire sentences in real time, so that speech emerges phoneme by phoneme in the opposite order to how it would ordinarily be produced. Using neuroimaging, the team examined what these reverse-speakers were doing that the rest of us cannot, and found evidence of unusually strong interaction between the brain systems that handle sound and those that handle working memory and mental manipulation. The ability appears to rest on an exceptionally vivid internal representation of words as objects that can be held in the mind and rotated at speed. It is a skill of no obvious practical use whatsoever, which is precisely what makes the people who possess it worth studying — the brain tends to reveal its architecture most clearly when it is doing something it was never obliged to do.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

Electric Chopsticks Argue With Your Tongue

Homei Miyashita · Hiromi Nakamura

Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura have spent years pursuing a genuinely strange idea: that the perceived taste of food can be altered not by changing the food but by passing a weak electrical current across the tongue as one eats. Their electrified chopsticks and drinking straws deliver a small, carefully controlled current that modulates the movement of charged ions across the taste receptors, enhancing the sensation of saltiness without adding any actual salt. The motivation is not mischief but public health — a way of letting people on low-sodium diets enjoy food that tastes properly seasoned while consuming considerably less salt than the flavour would normally require. It is a rare case of a gadget that sounds like a prank and turns out to be aimed squarely at hypertension. The tongue, it emerges, can be argued with electrically, and does not appear to hold a grudge.

Ig Nobel Prize in Education

A Bored Teacher Bores the Room

Katy Tam · Cyanea Poon · Victoria Hui · Wijnand van Tilburg · Christy Wong · Vivian Kwong · Gigi Yuen · Christian Chan

Katy Tam and colleagues undertook a systematic study of boredom in the classroom — a phenomenon so universal that it had, characteristically, gone under-researched, on the apparent assumption that everybody already understood it. What they found is that a teacher's own boredom is contagious: students who expect their teacher to be bored become more bored themselves, and a teacher visibly going through the motions transmits that state to the room with some efficiency. Expectation did a great deal of the work throughout; simply anticipating that something would be boring reliably made it more so, which suggests boredom is at least partly a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than a neutral verdict on the material. The study treats a state most people are desperate to escape as a legitimate object of enquiry, and does so without, by all accounts, becoming boring itself — which, given the subject, counts as a small methodological triumph.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Strangers Stare Up at Nothing Together

Stanley Milgram · Leonard Bickman · Lawrence Berkowitz

In the late 1960s, Stanley Milgram — already famous for his experiments on obedience — and his colleagues Leonard Bickman and Lawrence Berkowitz stationed people on a busy New York pavement and had them stop and stare upward at nothing in particular, then counted how many passers-by followed their gaze. The results were tidy and slightly deflating about human independence: a single person looking up drew only a modest number of imitators, but as the staring group grew, the proportion of passers-by who stopped to look up rose steadily, the crowd's attention pulling in strangers who had no idea what they were meant to be seeing. The study became a foundational demonstration of how social cues propagate through a group, and the Ig Nobel arrived more than half a century later, long after Milgram's death — a belated honour for work that established, with a stopwatch and a patch of empty sky, that curiosity is contagious and rarely pauses to ask what it is about.

Turing Award

Proving Randomness and Hardness Are Twins

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Avi Wigderson

Avi Wigderson arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton by way of Jerusalem and has spent four decades producing mathematics that is, by the standards of theoretical computer science, unusually readable — the ideas arrive with a sense of inevitability that good mathematical exposition produces and good mathematical results actually justify. His central contribution is a body of work demonstrating that randomness and computational hardness are not independent properties of algorithms but are, in a precise technical sense, equivalent: if certain hard problems are genuinely hard, then it is possible to derandomise algorithms that appear to require chance, replacing truly random bits with pseudorandom ones indistinguishable from them. This is either reassuring or unsettling depending on one's views about the nature of randomness. Wigderson also contributed foundational work on zero-knowledge proofs — cryptographic protocols that allow one party to convince another they possess a piece of knowledge without revealing what that knowledge is — which now underlie privacy-preserving authentication systems and a significant portion of modern cryptographic infrastructure. The Turing Award in 2023 honoured a career that had been shaping the field since before most of its current practitioners had started their PhDs.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Fifty Years, Then a Machine Learned the Shape

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Demis Hassabis · John Jumper

The protein-folding problem — given a linear sequence of amino acids, predict the precise three-dimensional shape the chain will fold into when left to its own thermodynamic devices — had been considered one of biology's great unsolved puzzles since at least the 1960s, when Christian Anfinsen showed that the sequence determines the structure but offered no efficient route to predicting it. Fifty years of clever algorithms, structural biology, and brute-force computation had made progress without making a dent in the general case. AlphaFold 2, built by Demis Hassabis and John Jumper at DeepMind and released in 2021, solved it with enough accuracy to be genuinely useful: at the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction competition, its predictions matched experimental structures at a level that had simply not been reached before. Structural biologists who had spent careers coaxing proteins into crystals suitable for X-ray diffraction found that they could now look up predictions for proteins they had never managed to crystallise at all. The AlphaFold protein structure database released predictions for hundreds of millions of proteins within a year of the system's unveiling. The Lasker committee awarded the basic research prize in 2023; a Nobel followed in 2024.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Seeing Inside the Eye, One Micrometre at a Time

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

James G. Fujimoto · David Huang · Eric A. Swanson

Light, passed through tissue at an angle and interfered with a reference beam, produces a pattern of echoes that can be reconstructed into a cross-sectional image of the tissue's internal structure — an observation that James Fujimoto, David Huang, and Eric Swanson at MIT translated, in the early 1990s, into optical coherence tomography, or OCT. The resolution is extraordinary: single micrometres, better than ultrasound by a factor of ten or more, and achieved without ionising radiation, contrast agents, or any contact with the tissue at all. Ophthalmology adopted it first and most enthusiastically, because the eye is conveniently transparent; OCT can now image the retinal layers and the optic nerve head with a precision that allows ophthalmologists to detect glaucoma and macular degeneration years before the patient notices any change in their vision, catching diseases that would otherwise be manageable only after doing damage they cannot undo. From there the technology has spread to cardiology, oncology, and dermatology. The Lasker citation came thirty years after the first paper, by which time tens of millions of OCT scans were being performed annually — a timeline that makes the award feel less like recognition than eventual acknowledgment.

Chandrayaan-3 lands near the lunar south pole

First to the Moon's Shadowed Pole

On 23 August 2023, the Indian Space Research Organisation's Vikram lander settled onto the lunar surface within a few degrees of the Moon's south pole, in a region that had never before received a spacecraft in one piece. The lunar south pole is defined by permanent shadow: craters there have not seen sunlight in billions of years, and radar and orbital observations had long suggested the cold traps within them might contain water ice — a resource significant enough to shape future exploration plans. The Soviet Union, the United States, and China had all landed on the Moon before; none had reached its southern high latitudes. India's Chandrayaan-3 was also, notably, arriving after Russia's Luna-25 had crashed nearby just days earlier in an attempt to reach the same region first, adding a sharper edge to the timing than mission planners might have chosen. The Pragyan rover rolled out, operated for roughly two weeks before the onset of the lunar night ended the mission, and confirmed the presence of sulphur, oxygen, iron, and several other elements in the regolith. The ice question remains open, but the south pole is no longer unreached.

GPT-4 and large language models reach mainstream deployment

The Year Everyone Argued About Machines That Talk

GPT-4 arrived in March 2023 having, by OpenAI's account, passed the bar exam near the ninetieth percentile, scored well on the medical licensing examination, and demonstrated a facility with language that the previous generation of models had gestured at without quite achieving. Within weeks it was embedded in Microsoft's productivity suite and accessible to tens of millions of people who had never previously had occasion to think about language models. Anthropic released Claude the same month; Google released Bard; Meta released LLaMA weights; by summer the pace of deployment had made the question of whether to release feel almost quaint. What the year produced, more than any single model, was a shift in the population of people arguing about these systems: it expanded from AI researchers and technology journalists to include lawyers, doctors, teachers, novelists, and regulators who had strong opinions about what the systems were and stronger ones about what should be done about them. The arguments — about intelligence, about authorship, about employment, about safety, about consciousness — were conducted with great heat and varying quantities of light, and remained, at year's end, largely unresolved.

SpaceX Starship completes first integrated flight tests

Two Failures That Counted as Data

Starship stands 120 metres tall and is, by the measures that aerospace engineers use to settle arguments, the most powerful rocket ever built, with a first-stage thrust roughly twice that of the Saturn V that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Its first fully integrated test flight, in April 2023, ended after about four minutes when the vehicle tumbled and the automated flight termination system destroyed it over the Gulf of Mexico; the launch pad itself was substantially damaged by the exhaust, scattering concrete and debris across a wide area. The second test, in November, made it to stage separation — a milestone the first flight had not — before both stages were lost. SpaceX described both results as successful tests, which would be glib if the engineering logic were not, on inspection, sound: an uncrewed vehicle that makes it off the pad generates data that no simulation can replace, and the pad damage led to the construction of a far more robust water-deluge system. Starship is intended to carry Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface and, eventually, to serve as the architecture for Mars missions; the gap between that ambition and a reliable orbital flight remained, at year's end, non-trivial.