The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023 to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus, and Alexei I. Ekimov "for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots." Quantum dots are tiny nanoparticles that diffuse their light from televisions and LED lights, and can also guide surgeons when removing tumor tissue, among many other applications.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier for developing "experimental methods generating attosecond light pulses". These advances made it possible to observe the motion of particles in atoms on the shortest time scale captured by humans. An attosecond is a unit of time equivalent to one trillionth of a second, roughly the time it takes light to travel the diameter of an atom.
The Karolinska Institute has awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their groundbreaking discoveries, which have radically changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, and made it possible to develop vaccines at unprecedented speed during the covid-19 pandemic.
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has awarded the Abel Prize to Luis A. Caffarelli, a native of Argentina with US-Argentine nationality, for his "fundamental contributions to the theory of the regularity of nonlinear partial differential equations". Considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, the award recognises work over an entire career - unlike the Fields Medal, which is awarded for a result under the age of 40. Caffarelli has become the first Latin American to receive this award.
In January 2013, two laboratories demonstrated that CRISPR tools could be used to edit genes in human cells. Ten years later, the first patients are already benefiting from the molecular scissors to overcome incurable diseases. This week in Science, one of the pioneers of CRISPR, Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, summarises the history of these tools, without forgetting that it all began thirty years ago with the findings of Francis Mojica in the Santa Pola salt flats.
The so-called Nobel Prize in Economics 2022 - officially the Bank of Sweden's Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences - has been awarded to Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. "They have significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, especially during financial crises," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences notes.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 has been awarded to Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal for laying the foundations of click chemistry, which quickly and efficiently joins molecular building blocks; and to Carolyn Bertozzi, who pioneered bioorthogonal reactions, which use this technique inside living organisms without altering the chemistry of the cell.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell's inequalities and becoming pioneers in quantum information science.
The Karolinska Institute has awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology to Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo, a specialist in evolutionary genetics, for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution.
Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska was today awarded one of four Fields Medals, considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics. After Iran's Maryam Mirzakhan, who received it in 2014, she is the second woman to be honoured with this prestigious award.