2024

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Landscape of Valleys for Memory

John J. Hopfield · Geoffrey Hinton

John Hopfield was a physicist working in the 1970s and 1980s on the question of whether the brain's memory could be described as a physical system with energy — a landscape of valleys that a network of interacting neurons would naturally settle into. His 1982 Hopfield network was an associative memory: a set of units whose connections could be tuned so that presenting a partial or noisy pattern would cause the system to relax into the nearest memorised state, as a marble rolls into the nearest valley. Geoffrey Hinton, a cognitive scientist and computer scientist, extended this physical intuition to the Boltzmann machine and then to the practical application of backpropagation to multi-layer neural networks — the technique that eventually made deep learning work at scale. The Royal Swedish Academy was openly divided about whether this constituted physics, and the prize sparked considerable internal debate; by the time it was awarded, the systems trained on Hinton's ideas had generated a large fraction of the internet's recent text, which is its own kind of comment on the question.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Fifty Years, Then a Machine Learned the Shape

David Baker · Demis Hassabis · John Jumper

The protein-folding problem — predicting the three-dimensional structure a protein adopts from its amino acid sequence alone — had been open since 1962, when Anfinsen showed that the sequence contains all the information needed and won a Nobel for it. The information was there; reading it was the difficulty. David Baker spent years using computational methods rooted in the physics of molecular interactions to design proteins that do not exist in nature, building novel enzymes and molecular machines from first principles. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper built AlphaFold2, which predicted the structures of essentially all known proteins from sequence alone, at accuracies that matched experimental determination — solving the folding problem for the species of protein that had accumulated in public databases. One half of the 2024 Chemistry Nobel rewarded the invention of entirely new proteins; the other half rewarded a prediction so accurate that structural biology as a field stopped asking certain questions and began asking others.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Gene Regulator That Is Not a Gene

Victor Ambros · Gary Ruvkun

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is one millimetre long, has exactly 959 cells, and has contributed to more Nobel Prizes per gram of body weight than any other organism in the history of biology. In the early 1990s, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were both studying the worm's development when Ambros discovered that a tiny RNA molecule called lin-4 regulated the timing of larval development, not by encoding a protein, but by binding to and silencing a messenger RNA. Ruvkun worked out the mechanism. The finding appeared to be a worm curiosity until, years later, microRNAs were found in every multicellular organism examined, numbering in the thousands, regulating perhaps a third of all protein-coding genes, and implicated in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and developmental abnormalities. A molecule that controls gene expression without being a gene itself; present everywhere, found first in a worm.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Prose That Refuses the Protection of Distance

Han Kang

Han Kang writes about the body with an attention that is clinical without being cold, and about history with a directness that other novelists approach only obliquely. "The Vegetarian" is narrated in three close perspectives around a woman who decides to stop eating meat and whose family's response escalates from bewilderment to violence; "Human Acts" enters the 1980 Gwangju Uprising through the experience of its victims, living and dead, in prose that refuses the protection of distance. Her structures are formal and unconventional; her sentences, in translation, are precise and physically immediate, placing the reader inside suffering rather than above it. She became the first South Korean writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature — an acknowledgment that Korean fiction had been doing something important that the world outside Korea was slow to notice.

Nobel Peace Prize

Survivors Who Kept the Memory From Fading

Nihon Hidankyo

Nihon Hidankyo was founded in 1956 by survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the hibakusha — with the aim of ensuring that political decision-makers, military planners, and the general public never lost sight of what nuclear weapons actually do to human bodies in a city. For nearly seven decades its members gave testimony, published accounts, lobbied international bodies, and kept the memory from becoming abstract. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the organisation the 2024 Peace Prize in a year when nuclear threats were being made in Europe with greater frequency and less embarrassment than at any point since the Cold War, which may or may not have concentrated the committee's choice. The prize went to people whose authority came from what they had survived, and who had spent their lives making sure the rest of the world understood why they were afraid of it.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

History, Made to Run Like an Experiment

Daron Acemoglu · Simon Johnson · James A. Robinson

The question of why some countries are rich and others persistently poor had generated decades of competing answers — geography, culture, natural resources, tropical disease burden — before Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson proposed a framework that was empirically testable in a specific and historical way. Their argument was that institutions — the rules that govern property rights, political power, and economic participation — are the primary determinant of long-run prosperity, and that the institutions colonial powers established were shaped by whether they intended to stay. Where settlers faced high mortality and couldn't build permanent communities, they installed extractive institutions designed to exploit; where they could settle, they built property rights and representative governance they intended to live under. Those institutional choices persisted, in many cases, for centuries after independence. The 2024 Economics Prize rewarded a framework that made history do the work of a controlled experiment, and found that political institutions matter more than almost anything else.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

A Missile Guided by Pigeons

B.F. Skinner (posthumous)

During the Second World War, B.F. Skinner — behaviourist, pigeon expert, inventor of the Skinner box — proposed a guidance system for bombs in which live, trained pigeons would be housed in the nose cone of the weapon, pecking at a projected image of the target to keep the missile on course through feedback controls. He called it Project Pigeon. The military took it seriously enough to fund multiple rounds of development; the pigeons were apparently quite reliable. It was never deployed, and the reasons given varied over time, though one imagines that a weapons programme dependent on the sustained attention of birds introduced certain failure modes that the specifications did not fully anticipate. The posthumous 2024 Ig Nobel for Peace recognised a man who thought carefully about the problem of guidance systems and arrived at pigeons.

Ig Nobel Prize in Botany

A Vine That Copies Plastic Leaves

Jacob White · Felipe Yamashita

Boquila trifoliolata is a vine that mimics the leaves of the host plants it grows on — changing its leaf shape, colour, size, and texture to resemble whatever is nearby. This had been documented for real plants. White and Yamashita presented the vine with artificial plastic plants and found that it mimicked those too: changing its leaves to approximate the shape and colour of plastic foliage it had never evolved alongside and cannot smell or touch. The mechanism by which it does this is entirely unknown. No chemical signal, no physical contact, no obvious pathway by which the vine could be receiving information about the plastic leaves has been identified. The paper was published; the question of how a vine knows what a plastic plant looks like remains open; and the prize was awarded for a finding whose explanation is more interesting than the finding itself.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

The Side Effects Were the Point

Lieven Schenk

The placebo effect depends on belief, and belief is shaped by information — which suggests, uncomfortably, that the information provided alongside a placebo might itself be an active ingredient. Schenk tested this by running a clinical trial comparing two placebos: one accompanied by a label listing invented side effects, the other given without any side-effect information. The placebo with side effects worked better: participants who had been told they might experience dizziness or nausea rated the pill as more effective. The mechanism is presumably that side effects signal potency, and perceived potency feeds back into the effect. In placebo research, credibility is the mechanism, and Schenk had found a way to alter it with a label. This is either deeply interesting or mildly alarming, depending on how much time you have spent reading pharmaceutical packaging.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

A Dead Trout Swims Upstream

James Liao

A dead trout, placed in flowing water, will under the right hydrodynamic conditions begin to move upstream — not because it is doing anything, but because the vortices in the stream create pressure differentials that passively propel the body forward. Liao documented this with careful experiment: the fish is contributing nothing; the water is doing all the work, interacting with the body's passive flexibility in ways that produce thrust. The finding has implications for understanding how live fish exploit turbulence to reduce the energetic cost of swimming — passive vortex exploitation appears to be a genuine locomotion strategy — but it is difficult to engage with those implications before first sitting with the image of a dead fish swimming upstream, animated entirely by the river it can no longer fight.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology

Breathing Through the Wrong End

Ryo Okabe

The intestinal wall is highly vascularised and thin, which makes it an efficient interface for absorbing things from the gut into the bloodstream. Ryo Okabe demonstrated that this efficiency extends to oxygen: mice and pigs with respiratory failure could absorb supplemental oxygen administered rectally, with measurable improvements in blood oxygen saturation. The paper notes carefully that this finding has potential clinical applications for conditions in which conventional respiratory support is unavailable or insufficient — ventilators are expensive, scarce, and require intubation; this approach is none of those things. The clinical implications require a moment to fully arrive, after which they are quite clear. The 2024 Ig Nobel for Physiology rewarded a finding that is simultaneously absurd in presentation and entirely serious in implication.

Ig Nobel Prize in Probability

Three Hundred Fifty Thousand Coin Flips Later

František Bartoš

In 2007, a physics paper predicted that a flipped coin has a slight bias toward landing on the same side it started: the precession of the coin in flight means it spends fractionally more time with its starting face up, producing a bias of about one percent. It was a clean prediction, but nobody had tested it at a scale large enough to distinguish the effect from noise. Bartoš and colleagues remedied this by flipping 350,757 coins across multiple national currencies and painstakingly recording starting orientation and outcome — finding a landing-on-starting-side bias of approximately 50.8 percent, precisely consistent with the 2007 model. The team committed to this project with a rigour and patience that either reflects exemplary scientific dedication or raises certain questions about how they have chosen to spend their evenings. The predicted bias is real, small, and now confirmed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Breathalyser for Worms

Tess Heeremans

C. elegans, the millimetre-long nematode that has been responsible for multiple Nobel Prizes, turns out also to be useful for studying the effects of alcohol on cellular physiology — but only if you can efficiently sort the drunk worms from the sober ones. Tess Heeremans developed a technique for doing exactly this: intoxicated C. elegans worms move in measurably different patterns from controls, and the method quantifies those differences precisely enough to separate them at scale. The tool is useful for studying how ethanol affects neuronal function at the cellular level, where the worm's simple and well-mapped nervous system makes interpretation cleaner than in more complex organisms. It is also, in a precise sense, a breathalyser for invertebrates — a more rigorous version of the tests employed in many social settings, and significantly more reliable.

Ig Nobel Prize in Demography

The Oldest People Who Never Were

Saul Justin Newman

The scientific literature on extreme longevity — supercentenarians, people claimed to be 110 or older — rests heavily on records from specific regions: Sardinia, Okinawa, Loma Linda, a handful of others whose populations live, apparently, far beyond the norm. Saul Justin Newman examined the statistical relationship between claimed supercentenarian prevalence and the quality of birth registration in those regions, and found a striking correlation: the areas with the most reported 110-year-olds tended to be exactly the areas where birth records were historically incomplete, unreliable, or easy to falsify. The world may have considerably fewer genuine supercentenarians than the literature suggests, and the famous longevity of certain Blue Zones may owe something to administrative failure. This does not diminish the value of the lifestyle advice, merely the certainty of the lifespan claims it is derived from.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

A Cat, a Paper Bag, and a Startled Cow

Fordyce Ely · William E. Petersen

Fordyce Ely and William Petersen were investigating milk ejection in dairy cows — the reflex by which a cow, under the influence of stress hormones, either releases her milk or withholds it — and needed a reliable way to frighten a cow on demand. Their chosen method, documented in the 1930s, involved placing a cat on the cow's back and then exploding a paper bag, on the reasonable theory that a startled cat on one's spine combined with a sudden loud report would produce a measurable adrenaline response. It did; the cow's milk let-down was duly disrupted, confirming that fear inhibits the reflex. The finding is legitimate dairy physiology, of real importance to anyone whose livelihood depends on cooperative cows. The experimental design, however, reads less like a laboratory protocol than like the opening line of a rural anecdote that no one present would ever be permitted to forget.

Ig Nobel Prize in Anatomy

Hair Whorls Ignore the Equator

Marjolaine Willems · Quentin Hennocq · Roman Hossein Khonsari

Marjolaine Willems and colleagues examined the direction in which the hair whorl at the crown of the human head spirals — clockwise or anticlockwise — and asked whether people in the southern hemisphere tend to swirl in the opposite direction to those in the north, in the manner popularly and wrongly attributed to draining bathwater. They gathered scalp data from both hemispheres and compared. The Coriolis force, which does genuinely influence very large, slow-moving systems such as ocean currents and cyclones, has no measurable authority over anything as small as a developing follicle; the study found instead that hair whorls follow developmental rules of their own, with a general bias toward clockwise that does not politely reverse when one crosses the equator. It is a careful debunking of a charming misconception, and a reminder that the forces which steer hurricanes are entirely indifferent to the top of your head.

Turing Award

A Vocabulary for Learning by Reward

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Andrew Barto · Richard Sutton

Reinforcement learning — the framework in which an agent learns to behave by taking actions, observing outcomes, and accumulating rewards — existed in scattered form across psychology, control theory, and operations research before Barto and Sutton began the systematic work of turning it into a discipline. Their 1998 textbook "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction" gave the field its standard vocabulary, its core algorithms — temporal-difference learning, Q-learning, policy gradient methods — and a unifying conceptual framework that made it possible to understand why things worked rather than merely that they did. AlphaGo, the algorithms that play Atari games and StarCraft at superhuman levels, and most modern robotic learning are direct descendants of that programme. The 2024 Turing Award recognised the architects of a field that had become one of the central technologies of the machine learning era.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

How a Cell Notices Its Own DNA Astray

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Zhijian Chen

Cells have a surveillance problem: DNA belongs in the nucleus, and its presence in the cytoplasm — whether from a viral infection, a damaged mitochondrion, or a chromosome fragment that escaped into the wrong compartment — is a sign that something has gone wrong and an immune response may be warranted. Zhijian Chen discovered cGAS, an enzyme that sits in the cytoplasm watching for exactly this: double-stranded DNA where it should not be. When cGAS finds it, it produces a signalling molecule that activates the STING pathway, which in turn triggers the innate immune response. The system is ancient, conserved across species, and central to the immune response to both infection and cancer. Its disruption — cGAS-STING becoming over-activated — drives autoimmune diseases. The 2024 Lasker Basic Research Award recognised a discovery about how cells know when they are under attack from within.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

A Gut Hormone's Thirty-Year Journey to the Clinic

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Joel Habener · Lotte Bjerre Knudsen · Svetlana Mojsov

GLP-1 — glucagon-like peptide-1 — was characterised in the 1980s by Habener and Mojsov as a gut hormone that stimulates insulin secretion in response to food and slows gastric emptying, modulating blood sugar after meals. It was interesting biology that suggested a potential approach to type 2 diabetes; the difficulty was that GLP-1 is destroyed within minutes by plasma enzymes, making it useless as a drug. Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, working at Novo Nordisk, spent years engineering around this constraint, producing semaglutide: a version of GLP-1 modified with a fatty acid chain that binds to albumin and dramatically extends its half-life in circulation, allowing once-weekly dosing. The resulting drug worked for diabetes, and then turned out to suppress appetite with a power that made it among the most effective obesity treatments ever developed. The 2024 Lasker Clinical Award recognised the thirty-year arc from gut hormone to one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world.

First pig kidney transplanted into a living human recipient

Fourteen Edits, One Working Kidney

The global shortage of transplantable kidneys is chronic and mathematical: demand substantially exceeds the number of organs available from human donors, and the gap has not closed in decades. Pigs are an obvious candidate species for xenotransplantation — their kidneys are anatomically similar to ours, they are already raised in large numbers, and they grow to surgical size quickly — but the immune barriers are severe: pig cells carry sugar molecules that trigger hyperacute rejection in humans within minutes, and pig retroviruses pose unknown risks. On 16 March 2024, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a pig kidney into Richard Slayman, a patient with end-stage renal disease, after making fourteen targeted genetic modifications to the donor pig — removing the sugar-producing genes and adding human immune-tolerance genes. The kidney showed signs of function. Slayman died in May of causes unrelated to the transplant; the kidney was still working when he did. That the question is no longer whether a gene-edited pig organ can function in a living person, but for how long and in whom, is not a small shift.

SpaceX Starship achieves first fully successful orbital test flight

Up and Down, Intact at Both Ends

Starship's first three flight tests in 2023 had each ended with the vehicle destroyed — either in a pad explosion, in a range safety detonation, or in a breakup during atmospheric reentry. The fourth integrated flight test, on 6 June 2024, was different. The Super Heavy booster completed its burn, separated, and performed a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. Ship 29, the upper stage, completed the intended trajectory, survived atmospheric reentry — a phase that had destroyed previous vehicles — and splashed down in the Indian Ocean. No hardware was destroyed by design; the losses were by intent. The vehicle had, for the first time, gone up and come down intact at both ends. For a system whose stated purpose is to land on the Moon and eventually Mars, the ability to return in one piece is a prerequisite that had been missing for three attempts.

NASA restores communications with Voyager 1 via remote software patch

A Repair Mailed to Interstellar Space

Voyager 1 launched in 1977 and is now more than 24 billion kilometres from Earth — so far that a radio signal travelling at the speed of light takes more than twenty-two hours to arrive, and another twenty-two to receive a reply. Since late 2023, the spacecraft had been returning garbled telemetry: the science and engineering data appeared corrupted in a specific, repeating way. Engineers at JPL eventually traced the problem to a failed memory chip in the flight data system — a chip that had been routing data through a faulty memory address. In April 2024 they wrote a software patch, transmitted it across a 45-hour round-trip signal delay, and waited. The 47-year-old spacecraft began returning intelligible data again. The engineers who had launched it were mostly in their seventies. The spacecraft was beyond the edge of the heliosphere, in interstellar space, and the people who fixed it had to do it by mailing a repair instruction to the dark.

Death of Peter Higgs

The Reluctant Owner of a Field

Peter Higgs

In 1964, Peter Higgs — working at the University of Edinburgh, in a paper rejected by one journal before it was accepted by another — proposed that space is permeated by a scalar field, and that particles acquire mass by interacting with it. The corresponding quantum of that field, the Higgs boson, should be detectable if you could build a particle accelerator large enough and energetic enough to produce it. It took forty-eight years. The Large Hadron Collider, seventeen miles in circumference, announced the boson's discovery in July 2012; Higgs shared the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year. In the intervening decades he had become one of the more reluctant celebrities in physics — someone who had made a prediction and then spent most of his career explaining patiently to journalists that the field was named after him partly as an accident of citation convention, and that five other physicists had made related contributions around the same time. He died in Edinburgh on 8 April 2024, aged 94.