2024

Nobel Prize in Physics

John J. Hopfield · Geoffrey Hinton

Hopfield invented an associative memory network in 1982 that stored patterns the way the brain might — a partial cue is enough to recover the whole. Hinton built on that physical intuition to develop the Boltzmann machine and, eventually, backpropagation applied to deep networks. The Royal Swedish Academy was openly divided about whether this was physics; the machines trained on these ideas had by then written half the internet's recent output.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

David Baker · Demis Hassabis · John Jumper

Baker spent years designing proteins that do not exist in nature — novel enzymes, molecular machines, binders — using computational methods built on first principles. Hassabis and Jumper built AlphaFold2, which predicted the shapes of essentially every known protein from its amino acid sequence. One half of the prize went to invention; the other half to a prediction so accurate it settled a problem that had occupied structural biologists for fifty years.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Victor Ambros · Gary Ruvkun

Working with C. elegans — the millimetre-long worm that has earned more Nobel Prizes per body-mass unit than any other organism — Ambros and Ruvkun discovered microRNAs: tiny molecules that regulate gene expression by binding to messenger RNA and silencing it. They are present in every multicellular organism and implicated in cancer, heart disease, and developmental defects, none of which the worm particularly cares about.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Han Kang

Han Kang writes about the body — what it endures, what it refuses, what is done to it by history and by grief. "The Vegetarian" and "Human Acts" work in lyrical, unconventional structures that leave the reader in the material of suffering rather than observing it from a safe distance. She became the first South Korean writer to receive the prize.

Nobel Peace Prize

Nihon Hidankyo

Nihon Hidankyo is an organisation of hibakusha — survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — founded in 1956 to ensure the world never forgot what nuclear weapons actually do to human beings. The committee gave the prize in a year when nuclear threats were being made with unusual frequency, which may or may not have concentrated the choice.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Daron Acemoglu · Simon Johnson · James A. Robinson

Why are some countries rich and others not? Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson spent years arguing that the answer is institutions — and that institutions were shaped, often permanently, by the choices colonial powers made when they arrived. Settlers brought extractive institutions to places where they could exploit; they built better ones where they planned to stay. The consequences persist centuries later.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

B.F. Skinner (posthumous)

Skinner was awarded the prize posthumously for Project Pigeon — his wartime proposal to steer bombs to their targets using live pigeons trained to peck at images of the intended destination, housed in the nose cone of the missile. The military took it seriously enough to fund it. It was never deployed, possibly because someone thought carefully about what it said about their ordnance.

Ig Nobel Prize in Botany

Jacob White · Felipe Yamashita

White and Yamashita discovered that the vine Boquila trifoliolata can change the shape and colour of its leaves to match those of artificial plastic plants placed nearby — without touching them, and without any chemical signal the researchers could detect. How it does this is entirely unclear, which is presumably why the paper was published.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Lieven Schenk

Schenk ran a clinical trial comparing two placebos: one with a list of fictional side effects on the label, one without. The placebo with side effects worked better. Patients who had been told they might experience dizziness or nausea found the pill more convincing — and convincing, in placebo research, is the mechanism.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

James Liao

Liao showed that dead trout placed in flowing water will, under the right conditions, swim upstream — passively, through hydrodynamic interaction with the vortices the stream creates. The fish are doing nothing. The water is doing everything. This does not seem especially comforting if you are a trout, but the trout is past caring.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology

Ryo Okabe

Okabe demonstrated that mice and pigs can absorb supplemental oxygen through their rectum when it is administered there directly — a finding with potential clinical applications for respiratory failure, which the paper notes carefully, and which requires a moment to absorb before the clinical implications become the foremost thing in one's mind.

Ig Nobel Prize in Probability

František Bartoš

Bartoš and colleagues flipped 350,757 coins and found that a coin lands on the same side it started on about 51 percent of the time — a tiny bias predicted by a 2007 physics paper that nobody had previously bothered to confirm at sufficient scale. The team committed to the project with an equanimity that either speaks well of their scientific dedication or raises questions about their evenings.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Tess Heeremans

Heeremans developed a technique for separating intoxicated C. elegans worms from sober ones — the drunk worms move differently, and the method quantifies exactly how differently. This is useful for studying how alcohol affects cells, and also represents a more rigorous approach to the question than is employed in most social settings.

Ig Nobel Prize in Demography

Saul Justin Newman

Newman examined the records behind claims of supercentenarian longevity — people reported to be 110 or older — and found a strong statistical association with poor birth registration and administrative errors rather than genuine extreme age. Regions with the most centenarians tended to be regions where record-keeping had historically been worst. The world may have fewer 115-year-olds than previously supposed.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Andrew Barto · Richard Sutton

Barto and Sutton developed reinforcement learning — the framework in which an agent learns by interacting with an environment and collecting rewards — from a scattered collection of ideas into a coherent discipline, and wrote the textbook that defined the field. AlphaGo, the algorithms that play video games, and much of modern robotics are their intellectual descendants.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Zhijian Chen

Chen discovered cGAS, an enzyme that sits in the cytoplasm watching for double-stranded DNA where it should not be — from a virus, a damaged cell, or a chromosome fragment — and, upon finding it, sounds the innate immune alarm via the STING pathway. The system guards against infection and cancer alike, and disruptions in it drive autoimmune disease.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Joel Habener · Lotte Bjerre Knudsen · Svetlana Mojsov

Habener and Mojsov identified and characterised the hormone GLP-1 in the 1980s; Knudsen developed semaglutide, a long-acting version of it, decades later. The resulting drugs — originally for type 2 diabetes — turned out to suppress appetite so powerfully that they transformed the treatment of obesity, and are among the most widely prescribed medications in the world.

First pig kidney transplanted into a living human recipient

On 16 March, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital placed a gene-edited pig kidney — the pig had had 14 genetic modifications made to it — into Richard Slayman, a patient with end-stage renal disease. The kidney showed signs of function. Slayman died in May of unrelated causes, but the kidney was still working when he did.

SpaceX Starship achieves first fully successful orbital test flight

On 6 June, Starship's fourth integrated flight test completed its intended mission from beginning to end: the Super Heavy booster performed a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, and the upper stage — Ship 29 — survived atmospheric reentry and splashed down in the Indian Ocean. The vehicle had, at last, gone up and come down intact.

NASA restores communications with Voyager 1 via remote software patch

Voyager 1, more than 24 billion kilometres from Earth, had been returning garbled data since late 2023 — a memory chip in its flight data system had failed. In April, engineers at JPL identified the problem, wrote a patch, and transmitted it across a round-trip signal delay of 45 hours. The 47-year-old spacecraft began returning intelligible data again, and the people in the room who had launched it as young engineers were mostly in their seventies.

Death of Peter Higgs

Peter Higgs

In 1964, Higgs predicted a mechanism by which particles acquire mass — a scalar field pervading all of space, with a corresponding boson. It took forty-eight years and a particle accelerator seventeen miles around to confirm the boson existed. Higgs died in Edinburgh on 8 April 2024, aged 94, having spent much of those intervening decades explaining that he hadn't actually done all that much.