2025

Nobel Prize in Physics

John Clarke · Michel H. Devoret · John M. Martinis

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis demonstrated experimentally that superconducting electrical circuits — objects large enough to see with the naked eye — can tunnel through energy barriers and occupy quantised energy levels, behaviours that quantum mechanics had been thought to reserve for particles. That macroscopic quantum weirdness is now the physical platform on which superconducting qubit architectures run.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Susumu Kitagawa · Richard Robson · Omar M. Yaghi

Metal–organic frameworks are crystalline cages assembled from metal ions and organic linkers with internal surface areas that can exceed 7,000 square metres per gram — the surface area of a football pitch, squeezed into a sugar cube. Kitagawa, Robson, and Yaghi independently established the design rules that made MOFs controllable, opening applications from carbon capture to drug delivery.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Mary E. Brunkow · Fred Ramsdell · Shimon Sakaguchi

The immune system's central problem is distinguishing self from non-self — an error in either direction is catastrophic. Sakaguchi identified the regulatory T cells that suppress autoimmunity; Brunkow and Ramsdell discovered FOXP3, the transcription factor that makes those cells what they are, and whose loss causes the immune system to attack the body with lethal thoroughness. The discovery explains a class of diseases and points toward treatments for them.

Nobel Prize in Literature

László Krasznahorkai

Krasznahorkai writes in sentences that do not end when you expect them to, through societies that are in the process of ceasing to function, with a tone that combines cosmic despair and sardonic precision in proportions that somehow remain bearable. The Swedish Academy called his oeuvre compelling and visionary; readers who have spent time in Satantango will simply call it unforgettable.

Nobel Peace Prize

Maria Corina Machado

Machado led Venezuela's opposition coalition through an election campaign in which the government barred her from running, imprisoned her supporters, and then disputed results showing her candidate had won. She continued organising under those conditions. The committee cited her tireless work for democratic rights and peaceful transition from dictatorship.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Joel Mokyr · Philippe Aghion · Peter Howitt

Why do economies grow? Mokyr argued that the answer is in the history of ideas — specifically in the conditions that allow useful knowledge to accumulate faster than it is lost. Aghion and Howitt built the Schumpeterian model that made this quantitative: growth through creative destruction, where new technologies extinguish old ones and the net effect, over time, is wealth.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

William B. Bean (posthumous)

Bean measured the growth rate of one of his own fingernails every day for thirty-five years. The resulting dataset — tracking seasonal variation, the effect of illness, changes with age — is unique in all of science. It was awarded posthumously, since Bean could no longer measure anything, but the nail data endures.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Marcin Zajenkowski · Gilles Gignac

Zajenkowski and Gignac told people — including people scoring high in narcissism — that they were more intelligent than average, and observed how each group responded. Narcissists were more likely to believe it and feel good about it, a finding that will surprise no one who has ever met a narcissist, but which now has data behind it.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

Daniele Dendi · Gabriel H. Segniagbeto · Roger Meek · Luca Luiselli

The team studied the dietary choices of certain lizards with access to different types of pizza, contributing to the ethological literature on learned food preferences in reptiles. The pizza preferences were consistent and specific. Science has now reached the pizza-preference-of-lizards stage, which suggests it is in excellent health.

Ig Nobel Prize in Pediatrics

Julie Mennella · Gary Beauchamp

Mennella and Beauchamp showed that infants breastfed by mothers who had eaten garlic reacted visibly to the change in flavour — feeding differently, spending more time at the breast. The flavour compounds had crossed from dinner plate to milk to infant mouth, and the infant had noticed. This seems obvious in retrospect, which is the best kind of finding.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Tomoki Kojima

Kojima painted cows with black-and-white stripes and found that the zebra-patterned cattle received roughly half as many biting fly attacks as unpainted controls. Whether the flies are confused, disoriented, or simply have better taste is not specified. The cows' opinion of the experience was not recorded.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Rotem Naftalovich · Daniel Naftalovich · Frank Greenway

The Naftalovich family and Greenway tested whether eating PTFE — Teflon — could increase dietary bulk without adding calories, since the substance passes through the digestive system essentially unchanged. It does, and it can. The committee awarded this prize with no visible moral judgement about the experiment or the cuisine it implies.

Ig Nobel Prize in Engineering Design

Vikash Kumar · Sarthak Mittal

Kumar and Mittal conducted a formal engineering analysis of what happens, olfactorily speaking, when malodorous shoes are stored on a shoe rack — quantifying how the competing smells interact and what design choices might reduce the unpleasantness. This is a real problem that afflicts real households, and now has a peer-reviewed solution.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Fritz Renner · Inge Kersbergen · Matt Field · Jessica Werthmann

The team demonstrated that a small amount of alcohol can improve fluency in a second language — specifically, by lowering the self-monitoring and anxiety that trip up non-native speakers. The effect is real and the effect size modest. The prize was for Peace, presumably because international misunderstanding is itself a source of conflict.

Ig Nobel Prize in Aviation

Francisco Sánchez · Mariana Melcón · Carmi Korine · Berry Pinshow

The team gave fruit bats alcohol and then assessed their echolocation. The intoxicated bats showed measurably degraded navigational accuracy. This is a blow to the social lives of bats and an advance for aviation safety research, neither of which the bats were consulted about.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Giacomo Bartolucci · Daniel Maria Busiello · Matteo Ciarchi · Alberto Corticelli · Ivan Di Terlizzi · Fabrizio Olmeda · Davide Revignas · Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti

Eight Italian physicists modelled the phase transition that turns cacio e pepe sauce from a smooth, glossy emulsion into a clumped, grainy disappointment — identifying the precise temperature threshold and the ratio of starch water to cheese that keeps it on the right side. This is applied physics in the most literal sense of the word, and the paper comes with a recommended recipe.

Turing Award (2024, announced 2025)

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Andrew Barto · Richard Sutton

Beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton built reinforcement learning into a coherent discipline with its own vocabulary — temporal-difference learning, the actor-critic architecture, value functions — and wrote the textbook that every researcher in the field has read. The game-playing AI systems and robotic learners that followed are their direct descendants.

Abel Prize 2025

Abel Prize

Masaki Kashiwara

Kashiwara developed the theory of D-modules — a framework for studying differential equations using algebraic geometry — and discovered crystal bases, algebraic structures that encode the representation theory of quantum groups. He became the first Japanese mathematician to receive the Abel Prize, awarded in Oslo in May.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Dirk Görlich · Steven L. McKnight

Görlich and McKnight discovered that the disordered, low-complexity regions of certain proteins — previously thought to be structural filler — can condense into liquid-like droplets inside cells. These membrane-less organelles regulate transcription, RNA processing, and much else besides; their malfunction is implicated in neurodegenerative disease.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Michael J. Welsh · Jesús González · Paul A. Negulescu

For most cystic fibrosis patients, the disease comes down to a single misfolded protein — the F508del variant of CFTR — that fails to reach the cell surface. Welsh, González, and Negulescu developed elexacaftor–tezacaftor–ivacaftor, the triple combination that corrects the fold, escorts the protein to where it belongs, and holds it open once there. About 90 percent of patients with cystic fibrosis now have a treatment that substantially extends and improves their lives.

Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award

Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science

Lucy Shapiro

Shapiro spent decades studying how Caulobacter crescentus divides asymmetrically — one daughter cell swimming, one stalked, each with a different destiny — and in doing so built a rigorous molecular model for cell differentiation from first principles. She also raised an early and prescient alarm about antibiotic resistance, which has turned out to be among the most consequential warnings in modern medicine.

Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

Breakthrough Prize

Daniel J. Drucker · Joel Habener · Jens Juul Holst · Lotte Bjerre Knudsen · Svetlana Mojsov · David R. Liu

Five of the six laureates shared the prize for the decades of work on GLP-1 that eventually produced semaglutide and its pharmaceutical relatives. Liu received it separately for base editing and prime editing — precise DNA-editing tools that can correct single-letter mutations in the genome without cutting both strands, reducing the off-target damage that had limited earlier gene-editing approaches.

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Breakthrough Prize

ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb Collaborations at CERN (13,000+ researchers)

The four major LHC experiments — more than 13,000 researchers between them — received the prize collectively for their decades of particle physics discoveries. A Special Breakthrough Prize also went to Gerardus 't Hooft, whose mathematical work in the 1970s gave the Standard Model the renormalisable framework that made it calculable, and thus testable.

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics

Breakthrough Prize

Dennis Gaitsgory

Gaitsgory, over many years and a monumental collaborative paper, proved the geometric Langlands conjecture — a central problem connecting number theory, algebraic geometry, and representation theory. The geometric Langlands program is a kind of dictionary between two large regions of mathematics; his proof confirmed that the dictionary works.

First atomically thin sheets of metal synthesised

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences sandwiched molten metals — bismuth, tin, lead, indium, gallium — between MoS₂ sheets under pressure, producing free-standing metallic monolayers just a few ångströms thick. Two-dimensional metals had been predicted but never made; the van der Waals squeezing technique that produced them opened routes to quantum phenomena that bulk metals cannot access. Physics World named it the 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.

Third interstellar object discovered: Comet 3I/ATLAS

On 1 July, the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile detected a comet moving too fast to be gravitationally bound to the Sun. Designated 3I/ATLAS, it is only the third interstellar object ever observed — after 'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019 — and was travelling at roughly 130,000 mph when it entered the solar system. Hubble observations estimated a nucleus between 440 metres and 5.6 kilometres across; it made its closest Earth approach on 19 December at about 170 million miles.

Gene therapy restores hearing in children with hereditary deafness

Children born deaf due to mutations in the OTOF gene — which encodes otoferlin, a protein essential for the inner hair cells to transmit signals — received a single cochlear injection of an adeno-associated virus carrying a functional copy. In multiple participants, hearing thresholds improved from around 106 dB to 52 dB within weeks. They could hear speech.

ESA's Gaia spacecraft ends operations after 12 years

Gaia ran out of cold-gas propellant on 15 January and was switched off and placed in a retirement orbit on 27 March. During twelve years at the L2 point, it measured the positions, distances, proper motions, and properties of nearly two billion stars, producing the most precise three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever assembled.

Firefly Blue Ghost makes first commercial Moon landing

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander launched on 15 January and set down in Mare Crisium on 2 March — the first commercial spacecraft to complete a fully successful soft lunar landing. It carried ten NASA science instruments and operated for more than 346 hours of sunlight on the surface before the lunar night ended operations, a longer commercial surface mission than any previous attempt.

SpaceX Starship achieves repeated booster catches and extended missions

Starship's seventh flight test in January caught the Super Heavy booster at the launch tower for the second time; subsequent tests through the year achieved longer upper-stage endurance, Starlink payload deployment, and repeated booster catches. SpaceX also completed a record 166 Falcon 9 orbital launches in 2025, including the 500th flight of a previously flown booster.

ISS marks 25 years of continuous human habitation

On 2 November, the International Space Station marked twenty-five uninterrupted years of human presence — the same date Expedition 1 had docked in 2000. In that time, more than 290 astronauts from 21 countries had lived aboard it, and more than 4,000 experiments had been conducted in its modules. The station's scheduled deorbit is approaching; its era is already the longest single chapter in human spaceflight.

Google Willow achieves verifiable quantum advantage

In October, Google's 105-qubit Willow processor solved a defined computational problem 13,000 times faster than the Frontier supercomputer — the most powerful classical machine available — using the Quantum Echoes algorithm, with results independently reproducible on any equivalent quantum device. It is the first quantum advantage that cannot be explained away as a sampling artefact or an unfair comparison.

Death of Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall

Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream in 1960 with a notebook and binoculars, and spent six decades watching chimpanzees closely enough to overturn the assumption that tool use was what separated humans from other animals. She died on 1 October at age 91, having spent her last decades travelling the world to make the case that it was still worth saving.

Death of Chen Ning Yang

Chen Ning Yang

Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee demonstrated in 1956 that the weak nuclear force does not respect mirror symmetry — that nature, at the subatomic level, distinguishes left from right. The Nobel followed the next year. Yang went on to make central contributions to gauge theory and statistical mechanics, and died in Beijing on 18 October at age 103.

Death of Sir John Gurdon

Sir John Gurdon

In the 1960s, Gurdon took the nucleus from an adult frog cell — a cell that had already become something specific — and placed it into an enucleated egg, which then developed normally. The nucleus, in other words, had forgotten nothing. That demonstration of full nuclear reprogramming eventually led to induced pluripotent stem cells and a Nobel Prize shared with Shinya Yamanaka in 2012. Gurdon died on 7 October at age 92.

Death of George E. Smith

George E. Smith

Smith co-invented the charge-coupled device at Bell Labs in 1969 — the light-sensitive silicon chip that became the basis of digital cameras, medical imaging, and the astronomical observations that eventually required the invention of something better. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for the CCD with Willard Boyle, and died on 28 May at age 95.

Death of Peter Lax

Peter Lax

Lax built much of the mathematical machinery used to solve partial differential equations on computers — shock-wave theory, numerical analysis, the foundations of computational fluid dynamics — for which he received the 2005 Abel Prize as the first applied mathematician to be so honoured. He died in Manhattan on 16 May, one month short of his hundredth birthday.