2025

Nobel Prize in Physics

Quantum Weirdness Has No Size Limit

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

Quantum mechanics was originally understood to be the physics of the very small — electrons, photons, atoms — and for most of the twentieth century it was assumed that the strangeness of quantum behaviour, tunnelling through barriers and existing in superpositions, would be washed out by thermal noise long before it reached anything visible to the naked eye. Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis spent the 1980s and 1990s proving this assumption wrong, one superconducting circuit at a time. Their experiments demonstrated that macroscopic electrical circuits — loops of wire cooled near absolute zero — could tunnel through energy barriers and occupy quantised energy levels, behaviours that had been the exclusive province of individual particles. The discovery was not just surprising; it was foundational. Superconducting qubits, the physical platform on which most of the world's serious quantum computing efforts now run, are the direct descendants of those early circuits. The Nobel committee awarded the 2025 Physics Prize to the people who showed that quantum weirdness has no natural size limit — only a temperature one.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Football Pitch Folded Into a Gram

Susumu Kitagawa · Richard Robson · Omar M. Yaghi

A crystalline solid that is mostly empty space sounds like a paradox, but metal–organic frameworks are exactly that: three-dimensional cage structures assembled from metal ions and organic linkers with internal surface areas that can exceed 7,000 square metres per gram. To put this in terms that make the geometry feel genuinely strange: a single gram of certain MOFs contains more internal surface area than a football pitch. Kitagawa, Robson, and Yaghi each, independently and in different countries, worked out the design rules that made MOFs not just curiosities but controllable materials — understanding which metal-linker combinations produce which pore geometries, how to tune the chemistry of the internal surface, and how to make the frameworks robust enough to be useful. The applications range from capturing carbon dioxide directly from flue gas to storing hydrogen fuel to releasing drugs in specific tissues. The 2025 Nobel in Chemistry rewarded the three researchers who turned a beautiful structural idea into a programmable material.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Cells That Guard Against Yourself

Mary E. Brunkow · Fred Ramsdell · Shimon Sakaguchi

The immune system must solve, continuously and without error, one of the most consequential classification problems in biology: killing pathogens while leaving the body's own tissues alone. Errors in the first direction are infections; errors in the second are autoimmune disease, and some of them are fatal. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Sakaguchi identified a small population of T cells in mice whose sole apparent purpose was to suppress other immune cells — to keep the attack from turning inward — and showed that removing them caused widespread autoimmunity. The cells are now called regulatory T cells, and they are essential. Brunkow and Ramsdell discovered FOXP3, the transcription factor that defines and maintains these cells, by studying a mouse strain whose immune system attacked every organ in the body; the mutation responsible turned out to be in this single gene. A human version of the same syndrome — IPEX disease — confirmed that FOXP3 plays the same role in people. The 2025 Medicine Nobel recognised a discovery that explains a class of diseases, points toward cell therapies for autoimmunity, and offers a mechanism for why cancers sometimes evade the immune response.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Sentences Long Enough to Hold Despair

László Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai writes in Hungarian, in sentences of unusual duration — sentences that accumulate subordinate clauses the way a river accumulates tributaries, generating a prose that moves with great deliberation through landscapes of institutional collapse and individual despair before arriving, eventually, somewhere that feels both inevitable and slightly airless. His novel Satantango, published in 1985 and filmed by Béla Tarr in a seven-and-a-half-hour adaptation, follows the inhabitants of a decaying collective farm through a betrayal they cannot quite see coming. The Melancholy of Resistance, The World Goes On, Seiobo There Below — the oeuvre is large, formally various, and tonally consistent in its combination of cosmic pessimism and sardonic precision, a pairing that somehow remains not just bearable but absorbing. The Swedish Academy described his work as compelling and visionary; the description is accurate, if understated.

Nobel Peace Prize

She Organised a Country She Could Not Run

Maria Corina Machado

Venezuela's 2024 presidential election produced results showing that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, had won by a substantial margin. The government of Nicolás Maduro disputed this, arrested opposition figures, and claimed victory. María Corina Machado had organised and led the opposition coalition that produced that result — and had done so after being barred from running herself, after years of legal harassment, house arrest, and the imprisonment of allies. She continued organising. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded her the 2025 Peace Prize for what it called tireless work for democratic rights and a peaceful transition from dictatorship, in a year when that work remained very far from finished and the personal risk of it remained very real.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Ideas, Not Capital, Compound Fastest

Joel Mokyr · Philippe Aghion · Peter Howitt

The question of why some economies grow and others stagnate had occupied economists for most of the twentieth century, and for most of that century the standard answers involved capital accumulation, labour inputs, and productivity measured as a residual — a catch-all for everything the model couldn't explain. Mokyr approached the question differently: through the history of ideas, arguing in a series of books that the Industrial Revolution happened when and where it did because of a specific intellectual climate that valued useful knowledge and its application to practical problems. Aghion and Howitt translated this intuition into a rigorous model, building on Schumpeter's notion of creative destruction — new technologies displacing old ones — to produce a framework in which innovation is the engine of growth, firms compete by making each other obsolete, and the net effect over time is that living standards rise in ways that compound. The 2025 Economics Prize recognised that the most important driver of long-run prosperity is neither land nor capital but the organised accumulation of knowledge about how to do things.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Thirty-Five Years of One Fingernail

William B. Bean (posthumous)

William B. Bean was a physician who, sometime in the 1940s, began measuring the growth rate of one of his own fingernails and recording it. He continued doing this every day for thirty-five years — through illness and health, through seasonal change and age, accumulating a dataset of such specificity and duration that nothing else like it exists in the biological literature on nail growth. The data showed, among other things, that nails grow more slowly in winter and more slowly with age, and that illness produces measurable pauses in the growth record. The Ig Nobel was awarded posthumously, since Bean could no longer measure anything, but the dataset remains. There is something both admirable and slightly unnerving about a man who looks at his fingernail every morning for three and a half decades and writes it down.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Flattery the Narcissist Believed Twice As Much

Marcin Zajenkowski · Gilles Gignac

Narcissism is a conviction that one is more special than the available evidence warrants — a self-assessment that resists updating even when the evidence is presented directly. Zajenkowski and Gignac designed a study in which participants, including those who scored high on narcissism measures, were told they had performed above average on an intelligence test. High-narcissism participants were more likely to believe this flattering feedback, and reported feeling better about it, compared to people without that trait. The study confirmed, with rigour and data, something that most people with a difficult acquaintance already suspected. The Ig Nobel was awarded for producing findings that are simultaneously obvious and, now, documented.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

Lizards Have Opinions About Pizza

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

The team studied the dietary preferences of certain lizard species with access to different types of pizza, observing which varieties the animals selected, how consistently they selected them, and what this might suggest about learned food preferences in reptiles. The pizza preferences were specific and consistent across individuals. Whatever one thinks about this as a scientific programme, it represents a commitment to empirical rigour in an area that might charitably be described as underexplored, and the paper exists in a peer-reviewed journal, which means it was reviewed by peers who thought it was worth publishing. Science, it appears, has reached the pizza-preference-of-lizards stage. This seems, on balance, like a sign of good health.

Ig Nobel Prize in Pediatrics

Garlic Travels From Dinner Plate to Milk

Julie Mennella · Gary Beauchamp

Mennella and Beauchamp set out to answer a question that sounds domestic but has genuine implications for infant feeding: do flavour compounds from a mother's diet cross into breast milk in detectable quantities, and if so, does the infant notice? They administered garlic to nursing mothers and observed infant behaviour at the breast, finding that garlic-exposed milk produced measurable changes — infants fed longer, behaved differently, showed clear responses to the altered flavour. The flavour compounds had travelled from dinner plate to milk to infant mouth, and the infant was not indifferent to the journey. The result seems obvious in retrospect. Most correct results do, once the experiment has been run.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Painted Cows Confuse the Flies

Tomoki Kojima

The zebra's stripes have attracted more scientific hypotheses than almost any other animal marking — camouflage, heat regulation, species recognition, social signalling — but the most durable explanation, supported by several experimental lines, is that the high-contrast pattern disrupts the visual systems of biting flies. Tomoki Kojima tested this by painting cows with black-and-white zebra stripes and counting the fly attacks on painted versus unpainted control animals. Striped cattle received roughly half as many biting fly attacks. Whether flies are confused by the pattern, cannot land on it accurately, or simply find it aesthetically unappealing is not fully resolved. The cows, for their part, were not consulted about the paint.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Teflon, Eaten and Unbothered

Rotem Naftalovich · Daniel Naftalovich · Frank Greenway

Polytetrafluoroethylene — PTFE, sold commercially as Teflon — is chemically inert to a degree that is almost philosophically extreme: it passes through the human digestive system essentially unaltered, neither absorbed nor broken down. The Naftalovich family and Frank Greenway investigated whether this property could be turned to nutritional advantage, specifically whether consuming PTFE could increase dietary bulk without adding caloric content. It could. The body processes the Teflon exactly as you would expect from a substance famously reluctant to stick to anything. The committee awarded this prize without visible moral comment on the experiment, the cuisine it implies, or the conversations that presumably took place in the Naftalovich household during the research phase.

Ig Nobel Prize in Engineering Design

A Formal Engineering Analysis of Smelly Shoes

Vikash Kumar · Sarthak Mittal

The problem of malodorous footwear stored in domestic spaces is widespread, practically significant, and — until Kumar and Mittal addressed it — poorly quantified. Their formal engineering analysis examined what happens olfactorily when smelly shoes are placed on a shoe rack: how the competing odours interact, how ventilation and proximity affect the spread of the smell, and what design principles in shoe-rack construction might reduce the problem. The work is earnest, methodical, and peer-reviewed, which is more than most shoe-rack designs can claim. It is also, in the precise sense of the word, applied engineering — the kind that addresses problems that affect real people's real hallways, and is none the less useful for being funny.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

A Glass of Wine Improves Your Accent

Fritz Renner · Inge Kersbergen · Matt Field · Jessica Werthmann

Non-native speakers performing in a second language are burdened by a layer of self-monitoring that native speakers do not carry: a constant audit of grammar, vocabulary, accent, and comprehension that divides attention and degrades fluency. Renner, Kersbergen, Field, and Werthmann tested whether a modest amount of alcohol — enough to lower inhibition without substantially impairing cognition — could improve second-language performance by quieting that self-audit. It could, modestly. The effect size was real and the mechanism plausible. The prize was for Peace, presumably on the logic that international misunderstanding is a source of conflict, and that if a glass of wine makes you easier to understand, the world is very slightly better for it.

Ig Nobel Prize in Aviation

Drunk Bats Lose Their Sonar

Francisco Sánchez · Mariana Melcón · Carmi Korine · Berry Pinshow

Bats navigate in the dark using echolocation — a system of biological sonar so precise it can detect a moth's wing at a distance, track moving prey through cluttered environments, and distinguish the texture of surfaces at range. Sánchez, Melcón, Korine, and Pinshow gave fruit bats controlled doses of alcohol and then assessed their echolocation performance, finding measurably degraded navigational accuracy in intoxicated animals. The finding has implications for aviation safety research, specifically in understanding how impairment affects sonar-based navigation, which is a direct analogy to certain aircraft systems. It is also a blow to the social lives of bats, who were not asked whether they considered the trade-off worthwhile.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

The Physics of a Sauce That Breaks

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

Cacio e pepe is a Roman pasta dish consisting of three ingredients — pasta, pecorino romano, and black pepper — whose preparation is simultaneously simple in description and treacherous in execution. The sauce is an emulsion of melted cheese and pasta-cooking water, stabilised by the starch released from the pasta; at the wrong temperature or the wrong water-to-cheese ratio, the emulsion breaks and the sauce becomes grainy, clumped, and inedible. Eight Italian physicists modelled this phase transition, identifying the precise threshold temperatures and the starch concentration required to keep the emulsion stable. The paper includes a recommended recipe, which is either a masterstroke of practical science communication or the most Italian thing ever put in a methods section. The Ig Nobel was awarded for physics that is genuinely applied in the strictest possible sense.

Turing Award (2024, announced 2025)

The Vocabulary Reward Learning Now Speaks

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Andrew Barto · Richard Sutton

Reinforcement learning existed before Barto and Sutton in the way that chemistry existed before the periodic table: as a collection of useful techniques without a unifying framework that made it clear why they worked or how to extend them. Beginning in the early 1980s, they constructed that framework — introducing temporal-difference learning, formalising the relationship between value functions and optimal policies, developing the actor-critic architecture, and eventually writing the textbook that defined the field for the researchers who would follow them. The vocabulary they established — reward, environment, policy, value — is now standard across robotics, game-playing AI, and optimisation of complex systems. AlphaGo, the systems that play video games at superhuman level, and most modern robotic learning algorithms are their intellectual descendants. The 2024 Turing Award, announced in spring 2025, recognised the people who built the foundation that others are now building on at some speed.

Abel Prize 2025

A Translation Layer for Differential Equations

Abel Prize

Masaki Kashiwara

Differential equations are the natural language of physics, but understanding their solutions geometrically — treating the space of solutions as an algebraic object to be studied with the tools of geometry — requires a translation layer. Masaki Kashiwara built one of the most powerful such layers available: D-modules, a framework that allows differential equations to be studied using the machinery of algebraic geometry, and whose development occupied much of his early career. He also discovered crystal bases, combinatorial structures that encode the representation theory of quantum groups and made certain calculations tractable that had not previously been so. Kashiwara received the 2025 Abel Prize in Oslo, becoming the first Japanese mathematician to be so honoured — a distinction that reflects both the originality of the work and the specific way Japanese mathematics developed through the twentieth century in productive isolation from some Western traditions.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

The Messy Parts of a Protein Were Working

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Dirk Görlich · Steven L. McKnight

Proteins have ordered regions that fold into stable three-dimensional structures, and then they have disordered regions — stretches of amino acids that don't settle into any fixed shape — which were for a long time dismissed as structural filler between the parts that mattered. Görlich and McKnight independently discovered that certain of these low-complexity, disordered regions can, under the right conditions, condense into liquid-like droplets: dynamic, membrane-less compartments inside cells that concentrate specific molecules and regulate processes including transcription and RNA processing. These condensates are not static structures but living droplets, forming and dissolving as conditions change. Their malfunction has since been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases including ALS, where certain condensates solidify when they should remain liquid. The 2025 Lasker Basic Research Award recognised a discovery that forced biologists to reconsider which parts of a protein are doing work — and found it was the messy parts they had been ignoring.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Three Molecules Fix a Misfolded Channel

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

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

Cystic fibrosis is caused by mutations in the CFTR gene, which encodes a chloride channel that sits in the membranes of lung, gut, and pancreatic cells; when it fails, thick mucus accumulates in the lungs and other organs. The most common mutation, F508del, produces a protein that misfolds and is destroyed before it reaches the cell surface. For decades the only treatments addressed symptoms — thinning the mucus, fighting the infections it caused — rather than the underlying defect. Welsh, González, and Negulescu developed elexacaftor–tezacaftor–ivacaftor, a triple combination of small molecules: one that helps the misfolded protein reach the surface, one that stabilises it there, and one that holds the channel open once it arrives. The result, approved in 2019 and reaching the clinic over the following years, transformed the lives of roughly ninety percent of cystic fibrosis patients, and the 2025 Lasker Clinical Award recognised what is, by any measure, one of the most mechanistically precise disease treatments ever developed.

Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award

One Bacterium, Two Different Fates

Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science

Lucy Shapiro

Most cell biology is studied in cells that divide symmetrically, producing daughters that are essentially identical, which makes the question of how differentiation works — how one cell becomes one thing and its sibling becomes something else — difficult to address directly. Lucy Shapiro chose Caulobacter crescentus, a bacterium that divides asymmetrically by design: one daughter swims, equipped with a flagellum; the other is sessile, attached to a surface by a stalk. By studying Caulobacter for decades, Shapiro built a detailed molecular model of how a single cell encodes instructions for two different fates, identifying the regulatory circuits that make each daughter what it is. Along the way she raised early and increasingly urgent warnings about antibiotic resistance at a time when the scientific community had not yet treated it as a crisis. The 2025 Special Achievement Award recognised both the science and the foresight.

Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

A Gut Hormone Became a Weekly Injection

Breakthrough Prize

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

GLP-1 — glucagon-like peptide-1 — is a hormone secreted by cells in the gut after eating, where it stimulates insulin release, slows gastric emptying, and signals satiety to the brain. It was identified in the 1980s by Habener, Mojsov, and Holst working independently and in competition; Drucker characterised how it worked; and Knudsen, at Novo Nordisk, spent years engineering semaglutide — a version of GLP-1 modified to survive in the bloodstream long enough to be a weekly injection rather than a continuous infusion. The resulting drug, approved initially for type 2 diabetes, turned out to suppress appetite with an effectiveness that has since transformed obesity treatment as well. The other 2025 Life Sciences Breakthrough went to David Liu for base editing and prime editing, DNA-editing approaches that can correct single-letter mutations in the genome without cutting both DNA strands, reducing the collateral damage that had limited earlier editing techniques to problems where precision was less critical.

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Thirteen Thousand Names on One Prize

Breakthrough Prize

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

The four major experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider — ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb — represent one of the largest collaborative endeavours in the history of science, with more than 13,000 researchers from dozens of countries contributing to instruments that each weigh thousands of tonnes and record particle collisions at rates that would overwhelm any previous data-processing system. Together they shared the 2025 Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Prize for their cumulative body of discoveries, including the Higgs boson, precision measurements of the Standard Model, and searches for physics beyond it. A Special Prize went separately to Gerardus 't Hooft, whose mathematical work in the early 1970s demonstrated that the Standard Model is renormalisable — that its infinities can be consistently absorbed — making the theory not just descriptive but calculable, and in doing so making it actually testable by the machines those 13,000 researchers now operate.

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics

A Dictionary Between Two Worlds, Proven

Breakthrough Prize

Dennis Gaitsgory

The Langlands program is one of the most ambitious unifying frameworks in modern mathematics: a conjectured web of deep correspondences connecting number theory, automorphic forms, and representation theory, whose various parts have been proven piecemeal over decades but whose full scope remains aspirational. The geometric Langlands conjecture is a version of this program set in the language of algebraic geometry rather than number fields, and it had been an open central problem in the area for years. Dennis Gaitsgory, in a sprawling collaborative paper of unusual length and technical difficulty, proved it. The proof established that the conjectured dictionary between two mathematical domains — geometric objects on one side, representations on the other — actually works as claimed. The 2025 Mathematics Breakthrough Prize recognised a result that closed a major chapter in one of mathematics' longest-running research programs.

First atomically thin sheets of metal synthesised

Metal, Squeezed Flat to One Atom

Two-dimensional materials — single-atom-thick sheets with properties unlike those of the bulk material — became a major area of physics after graphene's isolation in 2004, but metals had resisted the treatment: unlike graphene, metallic bonds don't naturally stabilise into flat monolayers, and attempts to produce them tended to result in clusters rather than sheets. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences solved this by squeezing molten metals — bismuth, tin, lead, indium, gallium — between layers of MoS₂ under pressure, using the van der Waals forces of the enclosing layers to hold the metal atoms in a flat configuration while they cooled and solidified. The result was free-standing metallic monolayers, a few ångströms thick, with quantum properties inaccessible in bulk metals. Physics World named it the 2025 Breakthrough of the Year — a recognition that the van der Waals squeezing technique had opened a genuinely new class of material.

Third interstellar object discovered: Comet 3I/ATLAS

A Third Visitor From Beyond the Sun

The first interstellar object ever detected, 'Oumuamua, passed through the solar system in 2017 — tumbling, cigar-shaped, accelerating in a way that puzzled astronomers for years. The second, 2I/Borisov, arrived in 2019 and was more conventionally comet-like. The third, designated 3I/ATLAS, was detected on 1 July 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile, moving at roughly 130,000 miles per hour — far too fast to be gravitationally bound to the Sun. Hubble observations subsequently estimated its nucleus at somewhere between 440 metres and 5.6 kilometres across, a range that reflects both the object's distance and the difficulty of resolving a small dark body in space. It made its closest approach to Earth on 19 December at about 170 million miles. The detection rate of interstellar objects is accelerating as survey telescopes improve, suggesting the interstellar medium contains considerably more of them than was previously assumed — and that the solar system is, in a quiet way, a busier neighbourhood than it appears.

Gene therapy restores hearing in children with hereditary deafness

A Silent Synapse, Switched Back On

Otoferlin is a protein produced in the inner ear's hair cells that is essential for the synaptic release that converts mechanical vibration into electrical signals the auditory nerve can carry. Children born with mutations in the OTOF gene lack it, and are profoundly deaf from birth — their ears detect sound, but the signal cannot cross the synapse. In 2025, clinical trials delivered a functional copy of OTOF via an adeno-associated virus injected directly into the cochlea, bypassing the blood-brain barrier and reaching the hair cells that needed it. In multiple participants, hearing thresholds improved from around 106 decibels — the threshold of profound deafness — to roughly 52 decibels within weeks of the injection. They could hear speech. A single dose of a well-targeted gene therapy had restored a sense that had been absent since birth, which is precisely the therapeutic promise that gene therapy made decades ago and is only now beginning to keep.

ESA's Gaia spacecraft ends operations after 12 years

Two Billion Stars, Mapped and Then Silent

The European Space Agency launched Gaia in December 2013 and placed it at the L2 Lagrange point — 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, in stable shade — where it spent twelve years scanning the sky with two telescopes, measuring the precise positions and distances of stars by the method of parallax, repeated billions of times. It ran out of cold-gas attitude-control propellant on 15 January 2025 and was switched off and moved to a retirement orbit on 27 March. By then it had measured the positions, distances, proper motions, radial velocities, and spectra of nearly two billion stars, producing the most precise three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever assembled — a map so detailed that it has revealed the Galaxy's merger history, identified stellar streams from long-ago collisions, and produced an asteroid catalogue as a side effect. The astronomy that will be extracted from Gaia's data releases will continue for decades after the spacecraft itself is silent.

Firefly Blue Ghost makes first commercial Moon landing

Upright at Last, in the Sea of Crises

The history of commercial lunar landing attempts before 2025 was not a history of unqualified success: Astrobotic's Peregrine lander experienced a propellant anomaly in January 2024 and never made it to the surface; Intuitive Machines' IM-1 landed but tipped over. Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost changed that record on 2 March 2025, setting down in Mare Crisium in a controlled, upright landing — the first commercial spacecraft to complete a fully successful soft landing on the Moon. The lander carried ten NASA science instruments as part of the CLPS programme and operated for more than 346 hours of lunar sunlight before the night came and ended operations, a longer surface mission than any previous commercial attempt. The instruments collected data on the lunar regolith, magnetic fields, and the plasma environment near the surface.

SpaceX Starship achieves repeated booster catches and extended missions

Steel Arms Catch a Falling Skyscraper

Starship's seventh flight test in January 2025 caught the Super Heavy booster at the launch tower for the second time — a manoeuvre in which a vehicle taller than the Statue of Liberty descends from space and is grabbed in mid-air by steel arms, which is the sort of thing that sounds like science fiction until you have watched it twice. Subsequent tests through 2025 extended upper-stage endurance, demonstrated Starlink satellite deployment from Starship, and repeated the booster catch with sufficient consistency to suggest it was becoming routine. SpaceX also completed a record 166 Falcon 9 orbital launches in 2025, including the 500th flight of a previously flown booster — a cadence of reuse that has made the Falcon 9 the most frequently flown orbital rocket in history and reshaped the economics of getting things to space.

ISS marks 25 years of continuous human habitation

A Quarter Century Without an Empty Day

Expedition 1 docked with the International Space Station on 2 November 2000, and on 2 November 2025 — twenty-five years later, without interruption — human beings were still living there. The station has hosted more than 290 astronauts from 21 countries, conducted more than 4,000 experiments, and survived the several near-misses with debris, mechanical failures, and geopolitical tension that might have ended the programme at any point. It was assembled by seventeen nations during a period when international cooperation in space seemed improbable and has remained operational during a period when it seems, at times, almost remarkable. The station's scheduled deorbit is now approaching, and its era is already the longest single chapter in the history of human spaceflight — 25 years of people living, working, and occasionally arguing in a pressurised module 400 kilometres above everything else.

Google Willow achieves verifiable quantum advantage

A Promise That Finally Felt Like a Deadline

Claims of quantum advantage had been made before — Google's 2019 Sycamore result was disputed as soon as it was published, and subsequent claimed advantages were questioned on the grounds that the comparison was to classical algorithms that could be improved. In October 2025, Google's 105-qubit Willow processor solved a defined computational problem using the Quantum Echoes algorithm at a speed 13,000 times faster than Frontier, the most powerful classical supercomputer available; the results were independently reproducible on any equivalent quantum device. The design of the experiment — a specific problem with a verifiable answer, compared against the best available classical machine running the best available classical algorithm — was intended to foreclose the objections that had diluted previous claims. Quantum computing had been promising to be useful for a long time; Willow was the first result that made the promise feel more like a deadline.

Death of Jane Goodall

She Waited Until the Chimpanzees Stayed

Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream Reserve in what is now Tanzania in 1960 with a notebook, binoculars, and a leaky tent, and began sitting quietly in the forest until the chimpanzees stopped running away from her. What she observed over the following years overturned received wisdom about the boundary between human and animal: chimpanzees made and used tools, had complex social hierarchies, formed lasting family bonds, and waged something that looked disturbingly like war. Louis Leakey, who had sent her there, remarked that we would now have to redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human. Goodall spent the first twenty years watching, and the last fifty campaigning — for chimpanzees, for forests, for the idea that knowing something deeply enough creates an obligation to protect it. She died on 1 October 2025, at age 91.

Death of Chen Ning Yang

Left and Right Were Never Equal

Chen Ning Yang

In 1956, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee published a paper arguing that no one had actually bothered to test whether the weak nuclear force respects parity — whether it distinguishes left from right — and that the experimental evidence usually cited in support of conservation was irrelevant to the weak interaction. Chien-Shiung Wu tested it that year; parity was violated, emphatically. The Nobel Prize went to Yang and Lee the following year, in what remains one of the fastest Nobel awards on record. Yang went on to make central contributions to gauge field theory and statistical mechanics, and lived to 103, dying in Beijing on 18 October 2025 — long enough to see the gauge theories he helped develop become the mathematical skeleton of the Standard Model of particle physics, and to reflect on what it means to have been right about something that everyone else was wrong about.

Death of Sir John Gurdon

A Frog Egg Already Knew the Way

Sir John Gurdon

In the 1960s, the biological consensus held that once a cell had differentiated — become a neuron, a liver cell, a skin cell — the genetic information not relevant to that identity was permanently silenced or lost. John Gurdon tested this by removing the nucleus from a frog egg, replacing it with the nucleus from an intestinal cell of an adult frog, and watching the egg develop. It developed normally. The adult nucleus, fully differentiated, still contained all the information needed to build a complete organism; the egg's cytoplasm reprogrammed it. The experiment was widely disbelieved for years, which is one of the more embarrassing episodes in the history of biology, and eventually confirmed. Gurdon shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Shinya Yamanaka, whose induced pluripotent stem cells extended the principle to human medicine. Gurdon died on 7 October 2025, at age 92, having spent sixty years watching people catch up to a frog egg's sense of what was possible.

Death of George E. Smith

An Hour at a Blackboard, Then Every Camera

George E. Smith

On a Friday afternoon in 1969, George Smith and Willard Boyle sat down at a blackboard at Bell Labs and sketched out the charge-coupled device in about an hour — an imaging chip in which photons knock electrons loose from silicon, the electrons are collected in potential wells, and the charge is then shifted across the chip to be read out, pixel by pixel. The CCD became the basis of digital cameras, medical imaging, satellite observation, and the astronomical instruments that produced most of the universe's best portraits, from the Hubble Deep Field to the first images of extrasolar planets. It also became, eventually, obsolete in consumer electronics — replaced by CMOS sensors that are cheaper and faster — which is a peculiar fate for an invention that spent thirty years being the best imaging technology available. Smith shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for it with Boyle, and died on 28 May 2025, at age 95.

Death of Peter Lax

The Applied Mathematician Who Won Anyway

Peter Lax

Peter Lax arrived in the United States from Hungary in 1941, at age fifteen, was drafted into the army in 1944, and spent part of the war at Los Alamos before returning to New York University's Courant Institute, where he spent the rest of his career. He became one of the central figures in numerical analysis and the mathematical theory of partial differential equations — developing the theory of hyperbolic conservation laws, shock waves, and the computational methods needed to solve them, which are now the foundation of computational fluid dynamics and the numerical methods underlying aerodynamic simulation, weather forecasting, and most scientific computing involving fluid flow. He received the 2005 Abel Prize as, notably, the first applied mathematician to be so honoured — a recognition that the prize committee had previously restricted itself too narrowly. Lax died in Manhattan on 16 May 2025, one month short of his hundredth birthday.