When theoretical physicist David Gross was 13, he received a copy of a popular science book, "The Evolution of Physics" (Cambridge University Press, 1938), signed by Albert Einstein. The book, co-authored by Einstein himself, started Gross on a journey into the hearts of atoms, where he eventually helped answer a question that had bedeviled particle physicists for years: whether the constituent parts of protons and neutrons, called quarks, could be broken apart.

The resulting principle of asymptotic freedom, which he developed in concert with Frank Wilczek and H. David Politzer, revealed that the forces between quarks waned as they got close to each other and strengthened as they moved apart. Asymptotic freedom became part of a larger model called quantum chromodynamics and paved the way to unifying the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces, which completed the Standard Model of particle physics. The trio earned the Nobel prize in physics for their work in 2004.

For the past few decades, Gross has shifted from studying the parts of an atom to developing string theories that could unify the fourth force — gravity — with the other three. Formerly the director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Gross recently won the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, in honor of a lifetime of physics achievement.

Live Science spoke with Gross about his life and work, what lies at the heart of an atom, why uniting the four fundamental forces is so challenging, and why he thinks the major barrier to a theory of quantum gravity isn't science but humanity's time left on Earth.

Tia Ghose: Tell me how you first got interested in physics.

David Gross: I was always good at and enjoyed doing math puzzles. At my bar mitzvah, I got a present from a friend of the family who happened to be the brother of Leopold Infeld, who collaborated with Einstein on a popular science book. It's called "The Evolution of Physics."

I really got entranced by that book. At that time, I realized that mathematical puzzles were much more interesting when you applied mathematics to the real world, and I kind of decided to become a theoretical physicist. Once you decide you want to do theoretical physics, the path is straight; it's not particularly crooked: You have to learn mathematics; you have to learn physics; you have a long way to go till you get to the frontiers of knowledge. And so it was an early and wise decision.

TG: Do you feel like you got to the frontiers of knowledge?

DG: Oh yeah — even beyond!

TG: In 2004, you won the Nobel prize in physics for developing the theory of asymptotic freedom. Can you tell me about that?

DG: When I started graduate school … theorists really had no clues, no deep understanding of what was going on inside the nucleus.

Shortly after I got out of graduate school, I went off to a postdoctoral fellowship, from Berkeley to Harvard, and there were some wonderful experiments going on. [In these experiments, the goal] was to shoot electrons, which we understand very well, onto protons at very high energies, and look at the various scatterings of these electrons … to essentially have a microscope that looked inside the proton.

These experiments were very surprising, and they seemed to indicate that the proton was made out of some point-like particles, [with] no structure. That had at least been observed at short distances and over short times, and that was pretty mysterious.

I'd been working on this and making predictions of what might happen if you made various outrageous assumptions. And it looked like these particles were consistent with being what are called quarks, which were hypothesized earlier as mathematical objects to explain the patterns of the particles that were being produced.

But this experiment revealed that they were real and somehow moving freely ‪—‬ which made no sense at all, because then they would easily be knocked out of the proton if you hit it hard enough. Nobody had ever seen the quark.

And so I got obsessed with that, which led to the discovery of asymptotic freedom and then quantum chromodynamics. Asymptotic freedom is this property that the force between the quarks gets weaker when they get closer together, which is counterintuitive and unlike any other theory that we knew.

The force gets weaker when they get closer, the force gets stronger when they get farther apart, and maybe strong enough so that you can never pull them apart, which seems to be the case.

So that was the watershed moment for the theory of the strong nuclear force. In the same years — in the early '70s — the theory of the weak nuclear force was also being constructed, again, in a different setup, but the same kind of generalization of electrodynamics. And by the middle/end of the '70s, we completed what we call the Standard Model, the standard theory of particle physics: what makes up matter, what are the forces that act between them.

TG: At that point, it seems like we united three of the forces, but there's this outlier, gravity, right? So from there you move on?

DG: I couldn't move on immediately. Once we had a theory in which you could calculate nuclear phenomena … one could calculate, make predictions and test the theory.

Quantum chromodynamics is a very deep and long and complicated and beautiful story that goes on today in full force. At short distances, when the quarks are close, it's easy because the [strong] force gets weaker and weaker, so you can calculate easily ‪—‬ and people now have extended those calculations over 50 years to incredible accuracy.

But what I was most interested in was trying to understand, is it really true that quarks are completely confined, and how does that work? And how do you control the theory when the forces become strong? That's much harder.

Many questions are open. But I got tired of it because it was hard, and I couldn't really solve it.

And besides that, as you say, there were indications within the standard theory that, if you pushed it to the extreme — to very high energies and very short distances — it failed because gravity came in. So that was a sign that we should try to unify all the forces with gravity.

And that led to string theory, which I've been mostly working on ever since.

TG: Can you explain a little bit about string theory and what you're working on?

DG: Questions that we ask [in string theory] are even more ambitious than unifying all the forces. Gravity is, according to Einstein, in our understanding, the dynamics of space-time, right?

Now we're beginning to understand that we're going to have to, once again, like many times in the history of physics, modify, improve our understanding of space-time.

What is space-time made of, and how does it behave at short distances? How did the universe evolve?

We don't understand much of that. But we especially don't understand the beginning, and that's where all of our ideas break down — even, so far, attempts to use string theory — but string theory still offers the best hope of trying to address the question of how the universe began.

TG: So one of the roadblocks is that you have all these [unified] theories, but then to test them, you need experiments, and the energy regimes where you could test them are extreme?

DG: It's very hard to directly test them. So, in the 19th century, chemists and physicists hypothesized the existence of atoms.

But nobody had ever seen an atom or had any direct way of probing what an atom is made out of, or even if there are atoms and so on. So it was a similar situation.

And then breakthroughs or the real advances in understanding that the atomic structure of ordinary matter and of the atom happened in the 20th century — they weren't anticipated, and many people regarded atoms as, "OK, some kind of mathematical gimmick to construct theories' but they weren't really real."

That happens over and over again [in science], and of course, the great thing is that experiments can settle the issue. That happened with atoms, with Brownian motion [the random motion of particles, which was elucidated by Einstein] and Rutherford [whose gold foil experiments showed atoms were mostly empty space with densely-packed nuclei]. And then quantum mechanics was developed, and now we understand ordinary material completely.

In this case [testing string theories], it gets harder and harder the farther away you get from the human scale. I mean, the scale we're looking at is so teeny. It's about as teeny as you can get.

TG: And this is the Planck scale [1.6X10^-35 meters, where quantum effects are thought to dominate gravity]?

DG: Yes, the Planck scale is the scale where gravity becomes a very strong force, where the structure of space itself becomes so complicated that it's probably not a good idea to even think about space.

TG: To use the word "space" doesn't even make sense maybe at that scale.

DG: Space is … a picture of the world that we develop as infants in order to get the toy or the food. It's how we explain how the world works.

But it might not be the right explanation; it might be a coarse-grained or a kind of approximate notion. And in fact, that's where we're being led, but we're just beginning to understand what that could possibly mean and develop the tools to deal with it.

TG: Do you feel that in 50 years, we'll be closer to having some kind of unified theory that incorporates all the forces?

DG: Currently, I spend part of my time trying to tell people … that the chances of you living 50 [more] years are very small.

Due to the danger of nuclear war, you have about 35 years.

TG: Why do you think that we'll blow ourselves up, essentially, within 35 years, give or take?

DG: So it's a crude estimate. Even after the Cold War ended, [when] we had strategic arms control treaties, all of which have disappeared, there were estimates there was a 1% chance of nuclear war [every year]. Things have gotten so much worse in the last 30 years, as you can see every time you read the newspaper.

I feel it's not a rigorous estimate, that the chances are more likely 2%. So that's a 1-in-50 chance every year. The expected lifetime, in the case of 2% [per year], is about 35 years. [The expected lifetime is the average time it would take to have had a nuclear war by then. It is calculated using similar equations as those used to determine the "half-life" of a radioactive material.]

TG: So what do you suggest as remedies to lower that risk?

DG: We had something called the Nobel Laureate Assembly for reducing the risk of nuclear war in Chicago last year.

There are steps, which are easy to take — for nations, I mean. For example, talk to each other.

In the last 10 years, there are no treaties anymore. We're entering an incredible arms race. We have three super nuclear powers.

People are talking about using nuclear weapons; there's a major war going on in the middle of Europe; we're bombing Iran; India and Pakistan almost went to war.

OK, so that's increased the chance [of nuclear war]. I would really like to have a solid estimate — it might be more, and I think I'm being conservative — but a 2% estimate [of nuclear war] in today's crazy world.

TG: Do you think we'll ever get to a place where we get rid of nuclear weapons?

DG: We're not recommending that. That's idealistic, but yes, I hope so. Because if you don't, there's always some risk an AI 100 years from now [could launch nuclear weapons], but chances of [humanity] living, with this estimate, 100 years, is very small, and living 200 years is infinitesimal.

So [the answer to] Fermi's question of "Where are the civilizations, all the intelligent organisms around the galaxy, and why don't they talk to us?" is that they've killed themselves.

You asked me to think about the future, and I am obsessed the last few years, thinking about that ‪—‬ not the future of ideas and understanding nature, but of the survival of humanity.

TG: I think in some ways, during the Cold War, it was easier for people to conceptualize because we had one major enemy. Now there's chaotic interactions between countries.

DG: There are now nine nuclear powers. Even three is infinitely more complicated than two. The agreements, the norms between countries, are all falling apart. Weapons are getting crazier. Automation, and perhaps even AI, will be in control of those instruments pretty soon.

TG: That scares me too ‪—‬ that a lot of weapons are using AI systems to make decisions on some level.

DG: It's going to be very hard to resist making AI make decisions because it acts so fast. If you have 20 minutes to decide whether to send a few hundred nuclear armed missiles to both China and Russia for "our dear president," the military might feel that it's wiser to make AI make that decision. But if you play with AI, you know that it sometimes hallucinates.

TG: The problem feels too big for ordinary people to do anything about, which is the same thing with climate change, right?

DG: People have done something about climate. So that's something scientists began to warn people about 40 years ago. And they convinced people that's a real danger.

It's a much harder argument to make than about nuclear weapons.

We made them; we can stop them.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Three scientists who developed materials that are like something out of "Harry Potter" have won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University in Japan, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne in Australia and Omar M. Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley, won the prestigious prize "for the development of metal-organic frameworks."

The frameworks included new materials that store large amounts of gas in a tiny volume, "almost like Hermione's handbag in Harry Potter," Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a news conference announcing the prize.

In the Harry Potter series, Hermione Granger has a magical handbag that allows her to carry more objects than it should be possible to fit — like the handbag equivalent of the TARDIS from Doctor Who.

Unlike Hermione's bag, the new molecular architecture developed by Nobel laureates doesn't break the laws of physics, but it works in a similar way. The metal-organic frameworks are made up of metal ions linked together by long organic molecules. These ions and molecules are arranged in such a way that they form crystals with large cavities, which can be used to capture and store substances.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Wednesday (Oct. 8). This is the 117th Nobel chemistry prize and comes with a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million).

"I'm deeply honored that my long-standing research has been recognized," Kitagawa said by phone at the news conference, adding that the most significant potential application of his work is in separating materials from the air "which contain most of the elements for our important materials."

The researchers' work began in 1989, when Robson combined positively-charged copper atoms to a four-armed molecule to form a spacious crystal, like a diamond filled with countless tiny compartments. Yaghi and Kitagawa followed up on this between 1992 and 2003 with work that showed gases could flow in and out of this metal-organic framework; while also making it more stable, flexible and modifiable for unique properties.

Since these discoveries, other researchers have developed innumerable metal-organic frameworks, using them to capture toxic gases required to make semiconductors, harvest water from the desert air, catalyze chemical reactions, and break down harmful chemicals and pollutants — including PFA "forever chemical" plastics, pharmaceutical runoff and chemical weapons.

But the biggest application of the frameworks could lie in the future. They are currently being tested in capturing the carbon dioxide released by factories and power stations.

"My dream is to capture air and separate air," Kitagawa said. "For instance in CO₂, or oxygen, or water, and convert this to useful materials using renewable energy."

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a trio of researchers for discovering quantum mechanics on a whole new scale — one big enough to hold in your hand.

John Clarke of the University of California, Berkeley, Michel H. Devoret of Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, and John M. Martinis of the University of California, Santa Barbara, received the prestigious prize "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit."

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Tuesday (Oct. 7). This is the 119th Nobel physics prize and comes with a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million).

"To put it mildly, it was the surprise of my life," Clarke said by phone at a news conference. "I'm completely stunned, of course. It never occurred to me in any way that this might be the basis of a Nobel Prize."

He said that his discovery (which underlies the advanced microchips present in many modern-day technologies, including smartphones) is being used for the further development of quantum computers.

Clarke, Devoret and Martinis carried out experiments in which they were able to demonstrate quantum mechanical tunneling and quantised energy levels in an electrical circuit "big enough to hold in your hand," according to a statement released by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Quantum tunneling enables particles to pass through seemingly impassable barriers. This is because in quantum physics particles exist as both waves and particles simultaneously; those waves are the projected probabilities of the particle existing in a given space.

Much like a wave smashing against a groin at sea will result in a smaller wave propagating to the other side, particles that exist as waves also have some probability of existing at the other side of a barrier. It is this ability that allows electrons to leap between material layers that would otherwise be impassable, at least according to large-scale physical laws.

Prior to the researchers' discovery, quantum tunneling had been observed in single particles, but physicists soon wondered if multiple particles could tunnel at a single time. One way this could be done is by making materials extremely cold, transforming them into superconductors by prompting electrons to bind together into so-called "Cooper pairs."

Cooper pairs follow different quantum mechanical rules than those of lonesome electrons. Instead of stacking onto each other to form energy shells, they act like particles of light, or photons, an infinite number of which can occupy the same point in space at the same time. If enough of these Cooper pairs are created throughout a material, they become a superfluid, flowing without any loss of energy from electrical resistivity.

To make their discovery, the researchers sandwiched two superconductors between a thin insulating barrier — creating an experimental setup known as a Josephson junction. Working together in the mid-1980s, the scientists screened their own Josephson junction from interference before feeding a weak electrical current into it.

Initially the voltage across this circuit was zero, indicating that no current was flowing through the barrier. But repeating their experiment multiple times, the researchers soon found that a voltage did appear across the apparatus at various points in time. This showed that the electrons were indeed tunneling across the system, acting as a single, large-scale particle.

Firing microwaves to be absorbed by the electrons showed that, despite their collective state being macroscopic, the Cooper-paired electrons had discrete, quantized energy levels.

This discovery has had a number of practical applications in physics and beyond. The collective system is referred to as an artificial atom, from which numerous experiments and quantum technologies have been developed.

"It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises," Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in the statement. "It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology."

A trio of researchers has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how the immune system is prevented from attacking our own bodies.

Mary E. Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Fred Ramsdell of Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan were awarded the prize "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance." The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced the winners at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday (Oct. 6).

The three scientists' research, honored with the 116th medicine prize, provides insights into keeping the immune system under control to fight microbes and avoid autoimmune diseases.

"Their discoveries have been decisive for our understanding of how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases," Olle Kämpe, chair of the Nobel Committee, said in a statement.

Our immune system has to protect the body from a variety of harmful microbes, acting like a biological bodyguard. Some sneaky invaders, such as viruses, can mimic human cells, so part of the immune system's job is to determine who is on the guest list, while kicking out anything that shouldn't be there.

The new Nobel Prize winners revealed how our bodies use regulatory T cells to keep the immune system in check. Their work has launched a new field in peripheral tolerance research and led to the development of new medical treatments, including for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Sakaguchi made the first key peripheral immune tolerance discovery in 1995, when many researchers thought that the immune system only developed tolerance through a process called central tolerance, during which harmful immune cells are dealt with in the thymus — a specialized organ in the chest that makes white blood cells.

However, Sakaguchi demonstrated that the immune system has additional complexities by discovering immune cells, called regulatory T cells, that suppress overactive immune responses to protect the body's cells from autoimmune diseases.

These specialist cells keep an eye on other immune cells to ensure the immune system tolerates the body's natural tissues. In other words, they prevent our biological bodyguard from getting overzealous.

Brunkow and Ramsdell's contribution came six years later with their discovery that some mice had a gene mutation, named Foxp3, that makes them especially vulnerable to autoimmune diseases. The pair also found that alterations to the human version of this gene were responsible for immune dysregulation, polyendocrinopathy, enteropathy, X-linked (IPEX) syndrome, an autoimmune disease.

In 2003, Sakaguchi demonstrated that the Foxp3 gene is responsible for governing the development of regulatory T cells.

Stay tuned for more Nobel Prize announcements this week. The next announcement will be on Tuesday (Oct. 7), when we'll learn who is awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize for Physics.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who work in two closely intertwined fields of protein science.

David Baker, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington, received half of the 11 million Swedish krona ($1.06 million) prize for his work on computational protein design — a tool that enables researchers to design and create completely novel protein structures with properties unlike any found in nature.

The second half of the prize was shared between Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, respectively the CEO and director of Google DeepMind, for their work on protein structure prediction. The AI-powered program AlphaFold2, released in 2021, can predict the three-dimensional structure of any protein from the amino acid sequence encoded in DNA, revolutionizing our understanding of how proteins and molecules in living systems interact with each other.

"Proteins are the molecules which enable life," Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during the announcement ceremony in Sweden this morning (Oct. 9).

A protein has tens of thousands of individual atoms, and its specific function is determined by the precise positions of these atoms, with links and folds between the different parts of the molecule creating a unique 3D shape. "To understand how life works, we first need to understand the shape of proteins," Linke said.

Protein molecules are formed from many individual units called amino acids, which are encoded by three "letter" DNA sequences. It should therefore be possible to predict the 3D structure of a particular protein from this sequence of amino acids. But this problem has been frustrating scientists for decades because there are many possible ways for proteins to fold.

In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper finally cracked this code by developing a program called AlphaFold2, which boosted the accuracy of structure predictions from 40% to 90%. The AI program was trained on a database of protein sequences and protein structures and looks for correlations between the positions of amino acids across thousands of examples. The system then iteratively refines these results down to a single predicted 3D structure.

In the years since it was released, this tool has dramatically improved our understanding of thousands of protein-mediated processes, including antibiotic resistance, and it is now possible to mine these databases for proteins with previously unknown functions, such as plastic-degrading enzymes.

Protein design approaches this same problem from the opposite direction, enabling researchers to visualize the ideal 3D protein structure for a particular function and work backward to calculate the amino acid sequence needed to synthesize it. In 2003, Baker developed a computer program called Rosetta that combines shorter amino acid fragments from an existing database, successively tweaking and optimizing the sequence to match the required 3D shape.

"David Baker opened up a completely new world of protein structures," Johan Åqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during the announcement. "It's only your imagination which sets the limit for what you can do here." Rosetta has since helped to design hundreds of new proteins with diverse applications, ranging from inhibiting the COVID spike protein to acting as biological sensors for opioids in the environment.

Speaking to The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Secretary General Hans Ellegren following the prize announcement, Baker said he felt "very excited and very honored" and had been "really deeply inspired by others in the field and people I've worked with."

The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to two scientists who laid the foundations for today's rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI).

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton will share the 11 million Swedish krona ($1.03 million) prize for their work on artificial neural networks and the algorithms that enable machines to learn, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects the Nobel laureates in physics, announced Tuesday (Oct. 8).

"I'm flabbergasted, I had no idea this would happen, I'm very surprised," Hinton said by phone at a news conference. He was speaking from a hotel in California with poor internet and a bad phone connection. "I was going to get an MRI scan today, but I think I'll have to cancel that."

Hopfield, a professor in life science at Princeton University, was recognized for creating an associative memory network — which he first proposed as Hopfield network in 1982 — that can save and reconstruct images and other patterns from imperfect data.

Hinton, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, used Hopfield's network in the early 2000s as the foundation for a method known as the "Boltzmann machine." Using tools from statistical physics, Hinton's produced neural networks that can spot patterns in data, enabling them to classify images or create new examples of the patterns it was trained on.

Related: Humanity faces a 'catastrophic' future if we don't regulate AI, 'Godfather of AI' Yoshua Bengio says

Taken together, the two advances were fundamental to the development of machine learning, which has since produced an explosion in new AI technologies and applications.

"The laureates' work has already been of the greatest benefit. In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties," Ellen Moons, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement.

Commenting on the implications of his technology at the news conference, Hinton said that machine learning will "have a huge influence, it will be comparable with the industrial revolution. But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it's going to exceed people in intellectual ability."

The researchers’ work represented a shift in AI research away from symbolic logic — which attempted to replicate features of human intelligence using symbols embedded inside logic systems — to deep learning networks. The latter uses layers of artificial neurons and vast quantities of data to loosely emulate processes in the human brain.

Deep learning has been around since the 1980s, but enormous energy, data, and computational requirements kept the technology in a nascent stage until 10 years ago, when computing advances sped it up.

"We have no experience of what it's like to have things smarter than us. It's going to be wonderful in many respects," he added, citing benefits to healthcare and improvements to productivity. "But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control."

Two scientists have won the 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of a class of tiny molecules called microRNAs, which play a crucial role in switching genes on and off.

Victor Ambros, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Gary Ruvkun, a molecular biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, will share the 11 million Swedish krona prize, equivalent to $1.06 million.

MicroRNAs fall under a broader umbrella of molecules called RNAs, which resemble DNA but contain only one "strand" of genetic material, rather than two twisted together. Ambros and Ruvkun first discovered microRNA and its potential role in gene regulation in 1993 while studying the development of the teensy roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a creature commonly studied by biologists.

Since then, the two collaborators and other scientists have shown that microRNAs are a key feature of the genomes of all multicellular organisms, including humans.

Related: Scientists just discovered a new way cells control their genes — it's called 'backtracking'

Thanks to their discovery, "researchers will have a much better understanding of how cells work," Olle Kämpe, the vice chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, said at a press conference Monday (Oct. 7).

Currently, there are no medical applications for this work, but there may well be in the future, Kämpe said.

For instance, microRNAs may sometimes contribute to the development of cancer by regulating gene activity in ways that encourage the growth and spread of tumors. Some diseases stem from mutations in genes that code for microRNAs, such as congenital hearing loss and some eye and skeletal disorders. In addition, dysregulated microRNA activity has been found to be associated with the development of epilepsy.

"We don't yet have any way to treat these disorders where microRNA networks are perturbed, but we hope that someday that will come," Kämpe said.

Every cell in our bodies contains the same 20,000 genes or so that encode instructions to build proteins, the basic building blocks of life. However, different types of cells, such as muscle or nerve cells, have specialized characteristics and functions, so they require different supplies. Thus, to build the necessary proteins, distinct sets of genes are activated in each type of cell. This happens both during embryonic development and throughout an individual's lifetime, as cells take cues from within the body and the surrounding environment.

When a gene gets "activated" — meaning the cell is going to utilize its code — the DNA within that gene is first converted into small molecules called messenger RNAs, or mRNAs, via a process known as transcription. These molecules are later delivered to protein-construction sites in the cell, where they're used as templates to make proteins.

For a long time, scientists thought that gene activity was mainly regulated by specialized proteins that latch onto DNA, called transcription factors. These proteins had been discovered in the 1960s. Ambros and Ruvkun's discovery of microRNAs decades later turned this long-held assumption on its head.

In a series of lab experiments in C. elegans, the duo identified a microRNA that they dubbed lin-4. This molecule can bind to mRNA, preventing the production of its corresponding protein. In 2000, the scientists discovered another type of microRNA, called let-7, that appeared to be found throughout the animal kingdom.

Flash forward two decades and scientists have now discovered a wide array of microRNAs, including more than a thousand in the human body. These molecules are now lauded as essential governors of cell development and function.

"I am delighted to hear that Dr Ambros and Dr Ruvkun have jointly been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024," Janosch Heller, an assistant professor in biomedical sciences at Dublin City University, said in a statement shared by the U.K. Science Media Centre. "Their pioneering work into gene regulation by microRNAs paved the way for groundbreaking research into novel therapies for devastating diseases such as epilepsy but also opened our eyes to the wonderful machinery that is tightly controlling what is happening in our cells."

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

Physicists have created the world’s fastest microscope, and it’s so quick that it can spot electrons in motion.

The new device, a newer version of a transmission electron microscope, captures images of electrons in flight by hitting them with one- quintillionth-of-a-second electron pulses.

This is quite a feat: Electrons travel at roughly 1367 miles per second (2,200 kilometers per second), making them capable of circumnavigating the Earth in only 18.4 seconds.

By using the microscope on the tiny particles, the researchers hope to make some new discoveries on how they take flight. The researchers published their findings Aug. 21 in the journal Science Advances.

"This transmission electron microscope is like a very powerful camera in the latest version of smart phones; it allows us to take pictures of things we were not able to see before – like electrons," lead-author Mohammed Hassan, an associate professor of physics and optical sciences at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. "With this microscope, we hope the scientific community can understand the quantum physics behind how an electron behaves and how an electron moves."

How electrons arrange and rearrange themselves inside atoms and molecules is an essential question in both physics and chemistry, but the zippy nature of the tiny particles makes them incredibly difficult to study.

Related: Razor-thin crystalline film 'built atom-by-atom' gets electrons moving 7 times faster than in semiconductors

To create an exposure time capable of capturing electron movements, physicists developed methods to generate tiny attosecond (or 1X10^-18 seconds) pulses in the early 2000s — an advance which earned the scientists who made it the 2023 Nobel Prize in physics.

By decreasing the exposure time of microscopes to the scale of a few attoseconds (an attosecond being to a second what a second is to the age of the universe), physicists have untangled how electrons carry charge, how they behave inside semiconductors and liquid water, and how chemical bonds between atoms rip apart.

But even the few attosecond scale is too big to capture the individual motions of electrons. To accomplish this, the physicists behind the new study tweaked an electron gun until it produced a pulse of just one attosecond.

These pulses hit the "sample" being studied, and as the electrons pass through it, they slow down and change the shape of the electron beam wavefront. The slowed beam is then magnified by a lens and then hits a fluorescent material that glows when the beam lands on it.

By pairing the electron pulse with two carefully synchronized pulses of light (to excite electrons in the material into motion and assist in the creation of the electron pulse respectively) they were able to probe the ultrafast movements of electrons inside atoms.

"We are able to attain attosecond temporal resolution with our electron transmission microscope – and we coined it 'attomicroscopy,'" Hassan said. "For the first time, we can see pieces of the electron in motion."

Isaac Newton once wrote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (That's sometimes been interpreted as a sarcastic remark directed at his rival Robert Hooke, who may have had a pronounced curvature of the spine, although many historians dispute this.) But Newton was expressing the truth that all science proceeds from previous achievements — and even the most famous scientists relied on the diligent and sometimes thankless work of their little-known colleagues. In celebration of these unsung stalwarts of science, here are 32 important scientists you've (probably) never heard of.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

In her 1925 doctoral thesis, the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin proposed that stars are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium — an idea that revolutionized science but was initially met with skepticism. According to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Payne-Gaposchkin was renowned for her work on variable stars, and wrote several books. She was born in England in 1900, immigrated to the United States to study astronomy at Harvard College Observatory, and died in 1979.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Born in Tamil Nadu, India, in 1887, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan caught the attention of British mathematician G. H. Hardy, with whom he collaborated and who sponsored his move to Cambridge in England. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Ramanujan is best known for his work on number theory, infinite series and fractions, while several areas of his work — including elliptical functions and Riemann zeta functions — still inspire modern mathematical research. Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32; his cause of death is debated.

Ellen Swallow Richards

In 1868, the pioneering American engineer and chemist Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911) became the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a degree in chemistry. According to Cornell University, she is regarded as the founder of the field of home economics, which applied scientific principles to domestic life, and she is considered one of the first environmental engineers thanks to her groundbreaking research on water quality and sanitation.

Oliver Heaviside

Born in London in 1850, mathematician and physicist Oliver Heaviside made developments in electromagnetic theory. These include work on transmission lines that advanced long-distance telephony and his prediction of a layer of Earth's ionosphere — sometimes called the Heaviside layer, or the Kennelly-Heaviside layer — that reflected some radio waves and allowed radio broadcasts around Earth's curvature. Heaviside died after falling from a ladder in 1925.

Dorothy Hodgkin

British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin is renowned for her pioneering work in X-ray crystallography and her development of methods for determining molecular structures using X-ray diffraction. Among other compounds, she researched the structures of drugs such as penicillin and insulin, which had significant implications for medicine and biochemistry. Hodgkin was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1910; won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964; and died in the U.K. in 1994.

Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks

Born in 1890, Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks was an American cellular biologist who made important contributions to toxicology. They include her 1932 discovery that the dye methylene blue, which is commonly used to stain organic samples in biology, can also act as an antidote to poisoning by carbon monoxide and cyanide. She was also an advocate for the role of women in science and faced challenges in securing a research position at the University of California because her husband, Sumner Cushing Brooks, was also a researcher there and anti-nepotism policies prevented her appointment. She died in 1981.

Nettie Stevens

The American geneticist Nettie Stevens was one of the first scientists to identify sex chromosomes. Her studies of mealworms showed that males produced two distinctive types of sperm, which always resulted in either male or female offspring; and her meticulous research showed the presence of X or Y sex chromosomes in the sperm. Her work laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the X-Y sex determination system, which is now a cornerstone of genetics. Stevens was born in Cavendish, Vermont in 1861 and died in Baltimore in 1912.

Ashoke Sen

Indian theoretical physicist Ashoke Sen is a pioneer of string theory and noted for his contributions to quantum field theory and black hole entropy. Sen was born in Kolkata in 1956 and has studied in the United States and the United Kingdom; his research has laid the foundations for explorations into the fundamental nature of the universe. He now lives and teaches in Bangalore, where he is a leading voice in the pursuit of a unified theory of everything.

Hermann Minkowski

Mathematician Hermann Minkowski is most famous for developing a geometric interpretation of Einstein's theory of special relativity. Among his other innovations, he proposed the idea of space-time, which combines the three physical dimensions of space with the fourth dimension of time into a unified mathematical framework. He also made important contributions to number theory and the geometry of numbers. Minkowski was born in Lithuania in 1864, when it was still part of the Russian Empire, and died in Germany in 1909 at the age of 44.

Prahalad Chunnilal Vaidya

Indian physicist and mathematician Prahalad Chunnilal Vaidya (1918-2010) made important contributions to general relativity, including a solution to Einstein's field equations that describes the gravitational field of a radiating star; earlier solutions had assumed only a nonradiating mass. He also contributed to the professional advancement of science in India after its independence from Britain in 1947, which included forming the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation and leading the Indian Mathematical Society.

Maurice Hilleman

American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman (1919-2005) was a pioneer of vaccinology and is thought to have saved millions of lives. In the 1950s, while working for the U.S. Army, he identified the mechanisms by which influenza viruses mutate, which allowed the creation of better vaccines and prevented the possible outbreak of flu pandemics. He also developed vaccines for hepatitis B and meningitis, and his vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella were combined into a single injection, known as the MMR vaccine, to simplify childhood immunizations.

Emmy Noether

German mathematician Amalie "Emmy" Noether (1882-1935) made important contributions to abstract algebra, particularly in what are known as ring, field and group theories, which laid the foundations for modern algebra. Her "Noether's theorem" linked symmetries in physical systems with the principles of energy conservation and is now a cornerstone of physics. Noether was born in Germany but emigrated to the United States in 1933, after her university professorship, along with those of other Jews, was revoked by the Nazis.

Abdus Salam

Abdus Salam (1926-1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist who contributed to the scientific understanding of fundamental forces. One of his key achievements was the theory of the electroweak force, which combined the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force — a step toward a unified theory of everything. With his colleagues, Salam was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics for this work. Salam also championed scientific collaboration between countries and co-founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, in 1964.

Saharon Shelah

Mathematician Saharon Shelah is a leading figure in model theory, which explores the relationships between logical structures and their interpretations, and set theory, which studies sets of mathematical objects and their properties. Shelah's work examines the foundations of mathematics — particularly the structure and properties of mathematical objects. He was born in Jerusalem in 1945; in 2001, he won the Wolf Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics.

Jagadish Chandra Bose

Indian polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) is known for his contributions to the fields of physics, botany and biology. He invented an instrument called the crescograph, which can detect minute changes in plant tissues in response to fluctuations in light, temperature and other factors. His experiments in this field challenged the prevailing view of plants as passive entities and showed they were sensitive to their environments. He also conducted research into radio waves and independently achieved wireless transmission in 1895.

Aristarchus of Samos

Aristarchus of Samos was an ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer who lived from roughly 310 to 230 B.C. in the city-state of Samos. He is thought to be the first to develop the heliocentric model of the solar system, in which the planets orbit the sun. A few centuries after Aristarchus, however, most astronomers preferred the geocentric model, in which the sun and planets orbited the Earth; and that was the dominant theory until it was challenged in the 16th century A.D. by the Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus had developed his own heliocentric model, and seems not to have known about Aristarchus.

John Michell

No portrait survives of the early English scientist John Michell (1724-1793) but he made important contributions to several scientific fields, including astronomy and geology. Michell was a friend of the astronomer William Herschel and was the first to determine that double or "binary" stars were in fact orbiting each other. Before this, Herschel and other astronomers believed the many double stars they had seen were just tricks of alignment, and that one of the stars was much further behind the other. But Mitchel showed there were far too many observations of double stars than could occur at random. He also showed that star clusters like the Pleiades could not have occurred at random, which indicated the stars in such clusters shared a common origin. Michell was the first scientist to apply statistics to astronomy; statistical techniques are now a cornerstone of the field.

Daniel Hale Williams

Daniel Hale Williams (1858-1931) was a pioneer in modern medicine and an important Black American scientist. He performed the world's first successful heart surgery in 1893, by controlling the bleeding of a man who had been stabbed in a fight. Williams co-founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, which was the first Black-owned and -operated medical institution in the United States. He was a vocal critic of racial disparities in health care and co-founded the National Medical Association, a professional organization for Black doctors facing limitations in the medical community.

Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky

Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky was born in 1862 in Russia. He was an important electrical engineer and invented the first practical alternating-current (AC) induction motor that could easily convert electricity into mechanical power. Earlier AC motors were complex and unreliable, but Dolivo-Dobrovolsky's invention paved the way for the wide-scale adoption of national AC grids. He also designed transformers to vary AC voltage, which allowed it to be transmitted over long distances. In the 1890s, he helped build the world's first long-distance AC power transmission system between Frankfurt and Offenbach, Germany. He died in 1919.

Marguerite Perey

French nuclear chemist Marguerite Perey, born in 1909, was a student of the Polish-French physicist and chemist Marie Curie. She worked for many years as Curie's personal assistant at Curie's Radium Institute in Paris, where she learned how to isolate and purify radioactive elements. In 1935, while studying the radioactive element actinium, Perey discovered the 87th element of the periodic table, which she called "francium" after her home country. She'd hoped the radioactivity of francium would help diagnose cancer in patients, but in fact it was carcinogenic; Perey developed bone cancer and died in 1975.

Sofya Kovalevskaya

Sofya Kovalevskaya, born in 1850, was a Russian mathematician who made important contributions to mathematical methods of analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. She was the first woman to obtain a modern doctorate and the first woman in Northern Europe to be appointed to a full professorship. Her most notable contribution was the development of the "Kovalevskaya top" — equations that describe a virtual spinning top within a gravitational field — thereby solving what was one of the most complex problems in classical mechanics. She lived in Sweden after the 1870s and died in 1891 at the age of 41.

Émilie du Châtelet

Émilie du Châtelet was an 18th-century French natural philosopher and mathematician who is best known for her translation of and commentary on Isaac Newton's 1687 book "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica," often called the "Principia." Her commentary made several contributions to Newtonian mechanics, including an additional conservation law for the kinetic energy of motion, and she developed new ideas about the relationship between energy and the mass and velocity of an object. Du Châtelet was born in 1706 and died in 1749 from complications during childbirth.

Hero of Alexandria

Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria was an engineer and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, when it was ruled by the Romans in the first century A.D. He is credited with the invention of a steam-powered device called the aeolipile, or "Hero's engine," which featured a primitive steam turbine. He also developed the technology behind windmills — an important contribution to civilization. In mathematics, he is best remembered for Heron's formula, which is a way of calculating the area of a triangle using only the lengths of its sides.

Johann Rudolf Glauber

Born in 1604 in Karlstadt, Bavaria (which in 1871 became part of the German Empire), Johann Rudolf Glauber is considered one of the first chemical engineers, and his inventions often had commercial uses. He was the first to describe "chemical gardens," in which inorganic chemicals immersed in a sodium silicate solution appear to "grow" into complex structures. In 1625, Glauber discovered sodium sulfate, also known as "Glauber's salt," which is now a major chemical commodity used to make detergents and paper. He died in about 1670, possibly from poisoning by the chemicals he used in his work.

Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham

Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen, was born in Basra, now in southern Iraq, in about A.D. 965. He lived mainly in Cairo, Egypt, until 1040, during the Islamic Golden Age. He is sometimes called "the father of modern optics" and made important discoveries in the field, including a theory of vision that argued, correctly, that it occurred in the brain. (Earlier theories had suggested light rays were emitted from the eyes.) He also studied reflections, refraction, and the nature of images formed from rays of light.

Norman Borlaug

American agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) is known as "the father of the Green Revolution." His research contributed to global food production, and he spent decades developing disease-resistant strains of wheat that are now planted around the world. Borlaug also championed the transfer of farming technologies to developing nations, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and stressed the importance of population control to achieve long-term food security.

Annie Jump Cannon

Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) was a pioneering American astronomer nicknamed "the census taker of the sky" for her meticulous work classifying stars. She studied physics and astronomy at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and worked at Harvard College Observatory from the late 1890s, where she developed a classification method based on the spectra of stars that was first used by astronomer Edward Pickering. Cannon had exceptional eyesight and classified over 350,000 stars in her lifetime, sometimes at a rate of more than 5,000 stars a month. Her classification system played a crucial role in the development of the modern stellar classification system, which is based on a star's temperature and surface conditions.

Fritz Zwicky

Born in 1898 in Bulgaria to a Swiss father and a Czech mother, Fritz Zwicky emigrated to the United States in 1925 and studied astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. Zwicky developed many astronomical concepts, and with astronomer Walter Baade described neutron stars and supernovae — the powerful explosions of massive stars. His greatest contribution to science, however, was suggesting that galaxy-scale concentrations of what's now called dark matter — he called it "dunkle materie" in German — may be the cause of anomalies in the behavior of galaxies within galactic clusters and the orbital speeds of stars at the edges of galaxies. He died in 1974.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) was an Indian-American astrophysicist who studied the evolution of stars. His most famous research resulted in his determination of what's now known as the Chandrasekhar limit, which is the point at which a star that has run out of fuel will collapse into a white dwarf. Each of these incredibly dense stellar remnants can be smaller than Earth but have a mass greater than that of the sun. His research expanded into the study of black holes, which initially were not widely accepted but now are regarded as both an important feature of astronomy and possible clues to the nature of the universe. Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on stellar evolution.

Ida Noddack

German chemist Ida Noddack (1896-1978) was the first woman to hold a professional position in Germany's chemical industry. Her most famous discovery, which she made with her husband Walter Noddack and collaborator Otto Berg, was their isolation in 1925 of the 75th element on the periodic table, a rare metal they named "rhenium" after the river Rhine. The element had been predicted decades earlier, and the discovery confirmed the theoretical structure of the periodic table. Noddack was also one of the first scientists to suggest that the nuclei of some elements bombarded with neutrons could split — a phenomenon now known as nuclear fission.

Eunice Foote

The 19th century American scientist and inventor Eunice Foote (1819-1888) carried out early research on the greenhouse effect, in which some atmospheric gases trap heat from the sun near Earth's surface. In 1856, she presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science demonstrating the effect of the sun's rays on different gases and suggested this had taken place in Earth's atmosphere and affected its climate. But Foote, as a woman in the 19th century, was not permitted to read her own paper at the meeting, so a male professor read it on her behalf.

Kary Mullis

American biochemist Kary Mullis revolutionized molecular biology with his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique. He conceived the idea in the 1980s while working for an early biotechnology company. It allows the rapid amplification of specific DNA sequences within a controlled environment, sharply reducing the amount of starting DNA required and cutting the time needed for analysis. PCR can detect DNA from viruses, bacteria and genetic mutations, and it is now a cornerstone of medical diagnostics, genetics, forensics and archaeology. Along with Michael Smith, Mullis was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the invention. He was born in 1944 and died in 2019.

The Google Doodle released today (July 11) is a tribute to César Lattes, a pioneering Brazilian physicist who would have celebrated his 100th birthday today.

Born to Italian immigrants in 1924 in Curitiba, Brazil, Lattes is widely credited with the discovery of the subatomic particle known as the pion, or pi meson — which is produced in the shockwaves from star explosions and rains down on Earth in the form of cosmic rays.

"Happy birthday César Lattes, thank you for paving the way for experimental physics in Latin America and around the world!" Google representatives wrote in a blog post honoring Lattes.

Lattes’ induction to advanced experimental physics began in 1934 at the recently founded University of São Paulo, where he was the only student enrolled in a course run by the then-famous Italian experimental physicist Giuseppe Occhialini. Occhialini taught Lattes to develop photographic film exposed to radiation.

In 1944 Occhialini went to the University of Bristol to work with the English physicist Cecil Frank Powell on the development of nuclear emulsion plates that could detect traces of highly energetic particles. Consisting of photosensitive silver salt suspended inside gelatin, the plates, upon development, clearly showed the tracks of charged particles that had passed through them.

Related: Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer? Biographer Kai Bird delves into the physicist's fascinating life and legacy

After obtaining one of the plates sent by Occhialini, Lattes realized that it was missing a key ingredient: boron.

"Lattes correctly suspected that adding boron to photographic plates would give him a clearer image of particles breaking down," according to the Google blog post. "It worked so well, he could see each proton."

In April 1947, at 23 years old, Lattes climbed 17,060 feet (5,200 meters) to a weather station atop Bolivia’s Mount Chacaltaya with two of his photographic plates. There, clear as day inside the tracks preserved in the plates, Lattes discovered a particle that had been predicted but never seen — the pion.

Consisting of a quark and an antiquark glued together by the strong nuclear force, the pion (or pi meson) can come in three distinct types. The discovery earned Powell — but neither Lattes nor Occhialini — the 1950 Nobel Prize.

In fact, Lattes was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize — despite never having earned a doctorate — but never won.

Lattes later returned to Brazil to teach, and died in 2005 from a heart attack in the suburbs near his São Paulo campus. Despite his rockstar status across Brazil and Latin America, Lattes was characteristically nonchalant about his fame.

"I was dragged along by history, and I did my best," Lattes told the Brazilian science and culture magazine Superinteressante in 1997. "If I had to choose, today I would be a veterinarian."

Albert Einstein was arguably the most famous scientist of the 20th century. Most people are familiar with his iconic E=mc^2 equation, but his life and work encompassed so much more than that. For instance, the brilliant physicist actually won the Nobel Prize for very different work. From his humble beginnings as a patent clerk to the offer to run a small country (that he turned down), here are 32 facts you may not have known about Einstein.

Einstein discovered that the universe has a "speed limit." 

His special theory of relativity, which explains the relationship between mass, time and space, suggests that as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass and energy become infinite, as Space.com explains. That means that it's impossible for an object to travel faster than light.

He argued that space and time are interwoven. 

While Einstein didn't invent the concept of space-time, which was first proposed by German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, his special theory of relativity showed that space and time grow and shrink relative to one another in order to keep the speed of light constant for the observer. Based on his theory, when we travel through space, time moves a tiny bit slower. At incredible speeds, like the speed of light, time stands still.

He won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. 

The photoelectric effect is the observation that metal plates eject electrons when hit by beams of high-energy light. The photoelectric effect can't be explained by classical physics, which saw light as a wave. Einstein proposed that we view light as both a particle and a wave — with the frequency of the wave determining the energy of the particle and vice versa.

Einstein transformed the way physicists view light.

Before Einstein's special theory of relativity, physicists thought that light traveled through a substance called "the luminiferous ether." Throughout the late 19th century, scientists ran experiments to try to prove its existence.

Einstein's fascination with physics was lifelong.

Beginning at age 5, Einstein became captivated by the invisible forces that moved the needle of his compass, according to the American Physical Society. That led to a lifelong quest to explain those invisible forces.

At the age of 12, he taught himself geometry. 

To study, he read out of a textbook, which he dubbed his "holy geometry book" and "second miracle" (the first being his compass needle).

He wasn't well-liked by his teachers.

One of the instructors at the Luitpold-Gymnasium in Munich, where Einstein received much of his early education, told the young Einstein that nothing good would ever come of his life.

Einstein played the violin.

At 5 years old, his mother signed him up for lessons. At first, he didn't enjoy playing at all, according to the American Nuclear Society. But after discovering Mozart, he developed a love for the hobby and played into his old age.

He wrote his first scientific paper at the age of 16.

Titled "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field," the essay asked how magnetic fields impact "ether," the theoretical substance that at the time was believed to transmit electromagnetic waves.

After university, Einstein was rejected from every academic position he applied for.

Eventually, he settled for a job evaluating patent claims for the Swiss government, according to the American Institute of Physics. He described the job, which gave him the time and energy to focus on solving the physics problems that underlie our world, as "a kind of salvation."

He helped convince the physics world that atoms exist. 

Einstein was interested in the problem of Brownian motion, the observation that if you put tiny objects (like pollen) in water, they appear to jump around erratically. Einstein proposed that invisible particles were colliding with the pollen, causing it to move, and came up with a formula describing this phenomenon. In 1908, French physicist Jean Baptiste Perrin tested and confirmed Einstein's theory, swaying the physics world to accept the existence of atoms, according to the American Physical Society.

Einstein was a pacifist.

At 16, he left Germany to escape mandatory military service. Later, he was one of only four German intellectuals to openly declare their opposition to German participation in World War I, calling nationalism "the measles of the human race."

Einstein's theories of relativity challenged the view that the universe was static.

His equations predicted a dynamic universe, one that was expanding or contracting. Flummoxed by this finding, Einstein assumed there was a flaw in his equations and introduced a "cosmological constant" which allowed for a universe that didn't change size. When Edwin Hubble confirmed that the universe is, indeed, expanding, Einstein called the cosmological constant "his greatest mistake."

Four of Einstein's most notable papers were all published in one year. 

In 1905, dubbed his "year of miracles," Einstein published his explanation of the photoelectric effect, his theory on Brownian motion, and two papers on his general theory of relativity.

He was friends with Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin even invited Einstein and his wife, Elsa Einstein, as his guests of honor at the premier of his 1931 film "City Lights." There, Chaplin famously told Einstein: "The people applaud me because everybody understands me, and they applaud you because no one understands you."

Einstein believed in God.

However, he didn't believe in a personal god that answered prayers. Instead, he thought that God revealed himself through the "harmony" of the universe. "He [God] does not play dice," he famously wrote.

Einstein was a target for the Nazis.

They sponsored conferences and book burnings against Einstein and labeled his theories "Jewish physics." In 1933, Einstein fled Germany to escape Nazi death threats, settling first in Britain and then eventually in Princeton, New Jersey.

His work enabled the development of the atomic bomb.

The equation E = mc2 provided the theoretical basis for the weapon's potential — but didn't explain how to build one.

At the start of World War II, he wrote to then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning of possible German nuclear weapons research.

He urged the president to initiate development of an atomic bomb — but later regretted doing so, according to the American History of Natural History. In an interview with Newsweek, he said: "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing."

Later, he opposed the use of atomic weapons. 

After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an organization that educated Americans about the dangers of atomic weapons.

Einstein was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 

He saw parallels between the experience of Black Americans and his experience as a Jew living in Nazi Germany. In a 1946 commencement speech delivered at the historically black college Lincoln University, Einstein decried segregation and called it "a disease of white people," Smithsonian magazine reported.

The FBI kept a 1,400-page dossier on Einstein.

His pacifist stance and left-leaning politics made him suspicious in the eyes of the agency as a potentially "extreme radical," National Geographic reported. This was especially true during the McCarthy era, when many people were accused of communism or blacklisted from work.

Einstein was asked to be the president of Israel. 

However, when he was offered the position in 1952, he was already near the end of his life, according to the American Museum of Natural History. Due to his poor health and lack of experience "dealing properly with people," he declined.

He did not believe that black holes could exist. 

In a 1939 article, he laid out a series of arguments trying to prove that black holes — objects with such high gravity that even light can't escape them — are impossible, Scientific American reported. Ironically, It's Einstein's general theory of relativity that shows us black holes do, in fact, exist.

He did believe in the possibility of wormholes.

In a 1935 paper published in the journal Physics Reviews, Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen proposed that near objects of enormous mass, space-time might curve inward like a rubber tube, creating a tunnel between two different regions. If they exist, these objects would enable travel across vast distances of time and space, Space.com reported.

Einstein didn't wear socks. 

Black holes weren't the only holes this physicist vehemently disagreed with. Because socks invariably develop holes, he disliked them to such an extent that he refused to wear them, according to the American Nuclear Society.

Einstein's brain was stolen.

After his death in 1955, pathologist Thomas Harvey dissected and stole Einstein's brain during an autopsy. Harvey, who wanted to discover the anatomical secrets of genius, eventually received permission from Einstein's son to use the brain for scientific research.

Research on Einstein's brain found extra folding. 

The human brain's wrinkled surface gives it a much larger surface area than a smooth brain and is an important part of advanced cognition. Einstein's brain had extra folding in its gray matter, the site of conscious thinking, especially in the frontal lobe, where abstract thought and planning occurs.

He loved sailing. 

However, the physicist was terrible at it — so terrible, in fact, that his neighbors frequently had to rescue him when is boat invariably capsized, according to the American Nuclear Society.

His birthday is Pi Day. 

March 14 is a special date because written numerically, it matches the first three digits of mathematical constant pi: 3.14. However, that's not the only reason it's significant. It's also the birthday of Einstein, who was born in 1879.

Einstein invented a refrigerator. 

The contraption, which he developed alongside colleague Leo Szilard, didn't require motors or coolant. Instead, it used boiling butane to suck energy from a compartment, lowering the temperature inside, Live Science previously reported.

Einstein's ultimate goal was to describe the workings of the entire universe — from subatomic particles to the farthest reaches of space — in one theory. 

He called the concept "The Grand Unified Theory." He never realized this dream, but physicists are still working to find it.

This week in science news, we unearthed some Norwegian treasures, revealed the 2023 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and learned why Earth's inner core is "surprisingly soft."

It has been a stand-out week in the world of archaeology, with all manner of incredible artifacts and exciting treasures found beneath the ground. In Norway, a 1,200-year-old Viking treasure was unearthed from a family's backyard, and archaeologists discovered even older gold figures depicting Norse gods. Elsewhere in Scandinavia, Denmark's famous Jelling Stone — which bears the earliest mention of the modern name of the country — is revealing new clues about its creator.

Meanwhile, researchers found the grave of a courtesan to Alexander the Great's army, an "exceptional" 1,800-year-old sarcophagus in France and a 700-year-old coin depicting Jesus. This barely scratches the surface of this week's discoveries, so be sure to check out the rest of our latest archaeology news.

This week, we also delved deeper into our planet — to its inner core, no less — which, until recently, was long thought to be an unmoving ball of solid metal. Now, scientists believe Earth's inner core might be a lot less rigid than we expected, and this surprising softness may be caused by hyperactive atoms. At Earth's other extreme, satellite data show that this year's ozone hole grew to around twice the size of Antarctica, and the eruption of Tonga's underwater volcano early last year may be partly to blame.

Beyond our planet's atmosphere, the James Webb Space Telescope continues to wow us with its spectacular science discoveries, such as physics-breaking rogue objects and "impossible" galaxies. We also heard about the potential discovery of a dozen objects beyond Pluto that could reveal a new section of the solar system we never knew about.

In health news, an updated COVID-19 vaccine made by Novavax has been authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; a study in rodents revealed that neurons aren't the only cells that make memories in the brain; and we learned that the success of anyone thinking of going vegetarian might be influenced by their genes.

And finally, the start of October means it's the season of Nobel Prizes, with the awards for physics, chemistry and medicine handed out for the creation of the tiniest slices of light, the discovery of bizarre quantum dots and seminal work on mRNA vaccines, respectively.

Picture of the week

It may look like an unassuming Martian landscape, but circled at the top of this image is a "dust devil" dancing across the surface of the Red Planet. And this is no tiny twister: NASA scientists estimate it reaches about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) in height — five times taller than the Empire State Building.

The image is a still from video footage taken by NASA's Perseverance rover, which spotted the swirling storm on Aug. 30. It filmed the dust devil for around 84 seconds as the twister raged on top of a nearby ridge. A time lapse of the dust devil, showcasing the action at 20 times speed, was shared online by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Sept. 29.

And while we're on the subject of strange things on Mars, here are 15 weird objects that look like they shouldn't be there at all. 

Sunday reading

• There is a very good reason why baby animals have spots, and it's not just to make them cute.
• Here's when and where to see Venus appear exceptionally close to the crescent moon this week.
• Beware the brassica — these are the foods that give you the smelliest farts.
• Why do you sometimes get dizzy when you stand up, and why can your vision go dark? 
• How many animals have ever existed on Earth? 

"Ring of fire" solar eclipse 2023

A "ring of fire," or annular, solar eclipse will be visible in eight U.S. states on Saturday, Oct. 14. During the event, skywatchers across North, Central and South America will see a partial solar eclipse lasting about three hours. But the ring will be visible only within a 125- to 137-mile-wide (201 to 220 km) "path of annularity", and even there, the view will last only 4 minutes, 29 seconds to 4 minutes 52 seconds, depending on the exact location. 

"It matters where you are across the path — being close to the center gives you a longer duration than if you're at the edge," Angela Speck, an astronomer at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the AAS Solar Eclipse Task Force, said in a YouTube video.

There will be plenty more from Live Science in the run-up to the event, but to be perfectly clear, do not look directly at the sun. For this stargazing experience, you'll need a DIY eclipse viewer or special glasses — or perhaps even a disco ball.  

A group of three researchers earned the 2023 Nobel Prize in physics for work that has revolutionized how scientists study the electron — by illuminating molecules with attosecond-long flashes of light. But how long is an attosecond, and what can these infinitesimally short pulses tell researchers about the nature of matter?

I first learned of this area of research as a graduate student in physical chemistry. My doctoral adviser's group had a project dedicated to studying chemical reactions with attosecond pulses. Before understanding why attosecond research resulted in the most prestigious award in the sciences, it helps to understand what an attosecond pulse of light is.

Related: The 'Attoclock' Shows How Fast Electrons Move in a Millionth of a Billionth of a Second

How long is an attosecond?

"Atto" is the scientific notation prefix that represents 10^-18, which is a decimal point followed by 17 zeroes and a 1. So a flash of light lasting an attosecond, or 0.000000000000000001 of a second, is an extremely short pulse of light.

In fact, there are approximately as many attoseconds in one second as there are seconds in the age of the universe.

Previously, scientists could study the motion of heavier and slower-moving atomic nuclei with femtosecond (10-15) light pulses. One thousand attoseconds are in 1 femtosecond. But researchers couldn't see movement on the electron scale until they could generate attosecond light pulses – electrons move too fast for scientists to parse exactly what they are up to at the femtosecond level.

Attosecond pulses

The rearrangement of electrons in atoms and molecules guides a lot of processes in physics, and it underlies practically every part of chemistry. Therefore, researchers have put a lot of effort into figuring out how electrons are moving and rearranging.

However, electrons move around very rapidly in physical and chemical processes, making them difficult to study. To investigate these processes, scientists use spectroscopy, a method of examining how matter absorbs or emits light. In order to follow the electrons in real time, researchers need a pulse of light that is shorter than the time it takes for electrons to rearrange.

As an analogy, imagine a camera that could only take longer exposures, around 1 second long. Things in motion, like a person running toward the camera or a bird flying across the sky, would appear blurry in the photos taken, and it would be difficult to see exactly what was going on.

Then, imagine you use a camera with a 1 millisecond exposure. Now, motions that were previously smeared out would be nicely resolved into clear and precise snapshots. That's how using the attosecond scale, rather than the femtosecond scale, can illuminate electron behavior.

Attosecond research

So what kind of research questions can attosecond pulses help answer?

For one, breaking a chemical bond is a fundamental process in nature where electrons that are shared between two atoms separate out into unbound atoms. The previously shared electrons undergo ultrafast changes during this process, and attosecond pulses made it possible for researchers to follow the real-time breaking of a chemical bond.

The ability to generate attosecond pulses — the research for which three researchers earned the 2023 Nobel Prize in physics — first became possible in the early 2000s, and the field has continued to grow rapidly since. By providing shorter snapshots of atoms and molecules, attosecond spectroscopy has helped researchers understand electron behavior in single molecules, such as how electron charge migrates and how chemical bonds between atoms break.

On a larger scale, attosecond technology has also been applied to studying how electrons behave in liquid water as well as electron transfer in solid-state semiconductors. As researchers continue to improve their ability to produce attosecond light pulses, they'll gain a deeper understanding of the basic particles that make up matter.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The 2023 Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists for the discovery and development of quantum dots — super-tiny semiconductors that can be used in LED lights and TV screens, as well as to aid doctors in the removal of cancer tissue. 

Moungi Bawendi, professor of chemistry at MIT, Louis Brus, professor emeritus at Columbia University, and Alexei Ekimov, a physicist at Nanocrystals Technology Inc. in New York, will share the 11 million Swedish krona (around $1 million) prize for their role as "pioneers in the exploration of the nanoworld," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said at a news conference Wednesday (Oct. 4). 

"For a long time, nobody thought you could ever actually make such small particles," Johan Åqvist, the chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry, said at a news conference announcing the 2023 laureates. "But this year's laureates succeeded."

Related: Quantum 'yin-yang' shows two photons being entangled in real-time

Quantum dots are crystals of lead sulfide or cadmium selenide consisting of just a few thousand atoms, and are as small as one-10,000th the width of a human hair.

The tiny size of these particles means they sit somewhere between the quantum realm and the macro world, giving them a weird jumble of semi-quantum properties. For instance, if you change a quantum dot's size by swapping out atoms, it will suddenly change color.

This bizarre quantum behavior means the dots are perfect for imaging technology, making LCD screens more vibrant and medical procedures more accurate.

Bawendi was "sound asleep" when he got the call that he had won the prize and felt "very surprised, sleepy, shocked, unexpected and very honored," he said over the phone at the news conference.

The 2023 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to two scientists who developed the messenger RNA vaccine technology used in the first effective shots against COVID-19.

Katalin Karikó, a professor at the University of Szeged in Hungary), and Dr. Drew Weissman, director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations, will share the 11 million Swedish krona ($1.02 million) prize. 

The duo's work led to messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines that do not generate an unwanted immune response, enabling the shots to enter the body without causing severe inflammation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said in a statement on Monday (Oct. 2). The COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are both built on the mRNA research developed by the scientists. 

"mRNA vaccines, together with other COVID-19 vaccines, have been administered over 13 billion times," Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel committee for physiology or medicine and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said during the committee's announcement on Monday. "Together [the two prize winners] have saved millions of lives, prevented severe COVID-19, reduced the overall disease burden, and enabled societies to open up again."

Related: 85% of COVID-19 long-haulers have multiple brain-related symptoms 

Vaccines work by prodding the immune system into generating an immune response to a particular germ, such as a virus. Prior to the advent of mRNA vaccines, the first vaccines worked by introducing a killed or severely weakened version of the virus into the body, giving the immune system a chance to acquire immunity before it encounters the full-fledged pathogen. 

Later developed vaccines contained proteins snatched from a virus's surface. Upon exposure to these proteins, immune cells make antibodies that can block them and the viruses they came from. There are also shots, such as Ebola vaccines, that use empty carrier viruses to transport DNA "blueprints" of a pathogen into the body, producing a similar effect, according to the Nobel committee statement. 

However, to manufacture vaccines like these, scientists have to cultivate large batches of cells, infect them with the necessary pathogens and then remove the viral and protein chunks necessary for the vaccine. This process is resource-intensive and slow, which can delay vaccine rollouts during outbreaks and pandemics. 

To get around this, in the 1980s scientists began looking at more efficient ways of getting cells to make the required proteins. One method, called in vitro transcription, worked by generating mRNA (a molecule that transports instructions from DNA to the cell's protein construction factories) directly inside cells in culture. 

But a huge hurdle remained: When animals were injected with lab-made mRNA, they experienced a massive immune response that led to dangerous levels of inflammation, destroying the vaccine and harming the animal. 

The two prize winners refined the injected mRNA's building blocks (or nucleotides) to resemble those found in the body, meaning the immune response was no longer triggered. 

In the early pandemic, this helped scientists to rapidly produce mRNA vaccines that acted against the coronavirus's "spike" protein — a pointy protein on the germ's surface.  

The research has also opened the door for work on potential cancer vaccines and for the rapid development of vaccines in response to possible future viral threats, such as bird flu, the Nobel committee said in its announcement.

"During the biggest public health crisis of our lifetimes, vaccine developers relied upon the discoveries by Dr. Weissman and Dr. Karikó, which saved innumerable lives and paved a path out of the pandemic," Dr. J. Larry Jameson, executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System, said in a statement.

"Now, the same approach is being tested for other diseases and conditions," Jameson said. "More than 15 years after their visionary laboratory partnership, Kati and Drew have made an everlasting imprint on medicine."

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Karikó and Weissman previously won the Breakthrough Prize and Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for their work on mRNA vaccines.

On Oct. 4, 80-year-old John F. Clauser woke up in his California home to the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. He will receive the prize at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10 together with Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect for their work on quantum entanglement. 

It was a moment of celebration for Clauser, whose groundbreaking experiments with particles of light helped to prove key elements of quantum mechanics.

"Everybody wants to win a Nobel Prize," Clauser said. "I'm very happy."

But Clauser's journey to winning the biggest prize in science was not always straightforward. 

In the 1960s, Clauser was a graduate physics student at Columbia University. By chance, he found an article in the university library that would shape his career and lead him to pursue the experimental work that eventually earned him the Nobel Prize.

The article, written by Irish physicist John Stewart Bell and published in the  journal Physics in 1964, considered whether quantum mechanics gave a complete description of reality or not. At the heart of the question was the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.

Quantum entanglement happens when two or more particles link up in a certain way, and no matter how far apart they are in space, their states remain linked. 

For example, imagine particle A flying off in one direction and particle B in the other. If the two particles are entangled — which means that they share a joint quantum state — a measurement of particle A will immediately determine the measurement outcome of particle B. It doesn't matter if the particles are a few feet or several light-years apart — their long-distance quantum affair is instantaneous. 

This possibility was rejected by Albert Einstein and his colleagues in the 1930s. Instead, they argued that there exists an "element of reality" that is not accounted for in quantum mechanics. 

In his 1964 article, Bell argued that it was possible to experimentally test whether quantum mechanics failed in describing such elements of reality. He called these unaccounted-for elements "hidden variables."

In particular, Bell had local variables in mind. This means that they only affect the physical setup in their immediate vicinity. As Clauser explained, "If you put stuff locally in a box and make a measurement in another box very far away, the experimental parameter choices made in one box can't affect the experimental results in the other box, and vice versa."

Clauser decided to test Bell's proposal. But when he wanted to do the experiment, his advisor urged him to reconsider. 

"The hardest part initially was to get the opportunity," Clauser recalled. "Everybody was telling me that it was not possible, why bother!"

The quantum laboratory 

In 1972, Clauser finally got a chance to test Bell's proposal while in a postdoctoral position at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He joined forces with doctoral student Stuart Freedman. Together they set up a laboratory filled with optical equipment. 

"Nobody had done this before," Clauser said. "We didn't have any money to do anything. We had to build everything from scratch. I got my hands dirty, I got immersed in cutting oil, there were lots of wires and I built lots of electronics."

Clauser and Freedman managed to create entangled photons by manipulating calcium atoms. The particles of light, or photons, flew into polarizing filters that Clauser and Freedman could rotate relative to each other. 

Quantum mechanics predicted that a higher amount of photons would simultaneously pass the filters than would be the case if the photons' polarization was determined by local and hidden variables.

Clauser's and Freedman's experiment showed that the predictions of quantum mechanics were correct. "We consider these results to be strong evidence against local hidden-variable theories," they wrote in 1972 in Physical Review Letters.

A difficult start

Clauser's and Freedman's results were confirmed in further experiments by Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. 

"My work was in the 70s, Aspect's was in the 80s, Zeilinger's was in the 90s," Clauser said. "We worked sequentially in improving the field."

But the impact of Clauser's groundbreaking experiment was not recognized immediately.

"Things were difficult," Clauser recalled. "Everybody said: 'Nice experiment, but maybe you want to go out and measure some numbers and stop wasting time and money and instead start doing some real physics.'"

It took 50 years until Clauser was awarded with the Nobel Prize for his experimental work. His colleague, Stuart Freedman, died in 2012. 

"My associates are long-time dead," Clauser said. "My claim to fame is that I've lived long enough."

When asked if he has any advice to young researchers in view of his own initial difficulty, Clauser said: "If you prove something that everybody thinks is true, and you're the first one to do it, you probably will not be recognized for 50 years. That's the bad news. The good news is that I had a lot of fun doing this work."

Quantum reflections

Clauser's and Freedman's experiment paved the way for elaborate technologies that use quantum entanglement, such as quantum computers and cryptographic protocols.

When asked if he thinks quantum mechanics is a complete theory, Clauser answered: "I suspect there is a more fundamental theory below it, but that's purely conjecture. I don't know what it is. I confess also that I'm totally confused, I have no idea what all of this means."

John F. Clauser's quotes have previously been published in an interview that the author made for the Swedish magazine Forskning och Framsteg.

According to Alfred Nobel's will, the Nobel Prize in Physics was to go to "the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics." The prize has been awarded every year except for 1916, 1931, 1934, 1940, 1941 and 1942.

Here is the full list of winners:

2025: John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis won the 2025 prize for their work observing quantum mechanical tunnelling and quantised energy levels in a system big enough to be held in the hand.

2024: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 prize for their work on artificial neural networks and the algorithms that enable machines to learn. Their work brought the field of deep learning to fruition, and set the foundations for the plethora of AI technologies we see today.

2023: Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 prize for devising a way to generate pulses of light measured in attoseconds — one quintillionth of a second. An attosecond is to a second what a second is to the age of the universe, a miniscule slice of time so short that it can be used to peer at the movements of electrons and molecules.

2022: American physicist John Clauser, French physicist Alain Aspect and Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger each shared the 2022 prize "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science,” according to the Nobel Prize organization. Their work demonstrated that what Einstein so famously dubbed "spooky action at a distance" is real and laid the groundwork for early quantum computers.

2021: The 2021 Nobel prize went to three scientists whose work alerted the world to the dangers of climate change. The prize was awarded for "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems." Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann shared one-half of the prize "for the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming" while Giorgio Parisi won the other half "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales."

2020: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was divided amongst a trio of black hole researchers. One half of the award went to Roger Penrose, "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity", while Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez jointly shared the other half "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy"

2019: Canadian-American James Peebles of Princeton University received one-half of the Nobel "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. The other half of the prize was awarded jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star," the Academy said. Mayor is a professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and Queloz is at both the University of Geneva and the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

Together, the trio won the Nobel "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos," the Academy said.

2018: Arthur Ashkin was awarded one half of the prize, and the other half was awarded jointly to Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou, "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics." This was the first time in 55 years that a woman was part of the Nobel Prize in physics. [Read more about the 2018 prize and Nobel Laureates]

2017: Half of the 9 million Swedish krona ($1.1 million) award went to Rainer Weiss of MIT. The other half was shared jointly to Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of Caltech. The prize honored the trio's "decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves," according to Nobelprize.org. The three scientists were integral in the first detection of the ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. The waves in this case came from the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago.

2016: One half was awarded to David J. Thouless, of the University of Washington, Seattle, and the other half to F. Duncan M. Haldane, Princeton University, and J. Michael Kosterlitz, Brown University, Providence. Their theoretical discoveries opened the door to a weird world where matter can take on strange states. According to the Nobel Foundation: "Thanks to their pioneering work, the hunt is now on for new and exotic phases of matter. Many people are hopeful of future applications in both materials science and electronics."

2015: Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for showing the metamorphosis of neutrinos, which revealed that the subatomic particles have mass and opened up a new realm in particle physics.

2014: Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for their invention of an energy-efficient light source: blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

2013: Peter Higgs of the United Kingdom and François Englert of Belgium, two of the scientists who predicted the existence of the Higgs boson nearly 50 years ago. [Related: Higgs Boson Physicists Snag Nobel Prize]

2012: French physicist Serge Haroche and American physicist David Wineland, for their pioneering research in quantum optics.

2011: One half awarded to Saul Perlmutter, the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess, "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae."

2010: Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene."

2009: Charles K. Kao, "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication," and Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor."

2008: Yoichiro Nambu, "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics," and Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Maskawa, "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."

2007: Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg, "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance"

2006: John C. Mather and George F. Smoot, "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation."

2005: Roy J. Glauber, "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence," and John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch, "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique."

2004: David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek, "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction."

2003: Alexei A. Abrikosov, Vitaly L. Ginzburg and Anthony J. Leggett, "for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids."

2002: Raymond Davis Jr. and Masatoshi Koshiba, "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos," and Riccardo Giacconi, "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources."

2001: Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl E. Wieman, "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates."

2000: Zhores I. Alferov and Herbert Kroemer, "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics," and Jack S. Kilby "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit."

1999: Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus J.G. Veltman, "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics."

1998: Robert B. Laughlin, Horst L. Störmer and Daniel C. Tsui, "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations."

1997: Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."

1996: David M. Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff and Robert C. Richardson, "for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3."

1995: Martin L. Perl, "for the discovery of the tau lepton," and Frederick Reines, "for the detection of the neutrino."

1994: Bertram N. Brockhouse, "for the development of neutron spectroscopy," and Clifford G. Shull, "for the development of the neutron diffraction technique."

1993: Russell A. Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor Jr., "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."

1992: Georges Charpak, "for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber."

1991: Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, "for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers."

1990: Jerome I. Friedman, Henry W. Kendall and Richard E. Taylor, "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."

1989: Norman F. Ramsey, "for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks," and Hans G. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul, "for the development of the ion trap technique."

1988: Leon M. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino."

1987: J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alexander Müller, "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials."

1986: Ernst Ruska, "for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope," and Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, "for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope."

1985: Klaus von Klitzing, "for the discovery of the quantized Hall effect".

1984: Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer, "for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction."

1983: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars," and William Alfred Fowler, "for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe."

1982: Kenneth G. Wilson, "for his theory for critical phenomena in connection with phase transitions."

1981: Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Leonard Schawlow, "for their contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy," and Kai M. Siegbahn, "for his contribution to the development of high-resolution electron spectroscopy."

1980: James Watson Cronin and Val Logsdon Fitch, "for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons."

1979: Sheldon Lee Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg, "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current."

1978: Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, "for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics," and Arno Allan Penzias, Robert Woodrow Wilson "for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation."

1977: Philip Warren Anderson, Sir Nevill Francis Mott and John Hasbrouck van Vleck, "for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems."

1976: Burton Richter and Samuel Chao Chung Ting, "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind."

1975: Aage Niels Bohr, Ben Roy Mottelson and Leo James Rainwater, "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection."

1974: Sir Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish, "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars."

1973: Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, for "for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively," and Brian David Josephson, "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects."

1972: John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, John Robert Schrieffer, "for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory."

1971: Dennis Gabor, "for his invention and development of the holographic method."

1970: Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén, "for fundamental work and discoveries in magnetohydro- dynamics with fruitful applications in different parts of plasma physics," and Louis Eugène Félix Néel, "for fundamental work and discoveries concerning antiferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism which have led to important applications in solid state physics."

1969: Murray Gell-Mann, "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions."

1968: Luis Walter Alvarez, "for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis."

1967: Hans Albrecht Bethe, "for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars."

1966: Alfred Kastler, "for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in atoms."

1965: Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger and Richard P. Feynman, "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles."

1964: Charles Hard Townes, "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle," and Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov, "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle."

1963: Eugene Paul Wigner, "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles," and Maria Goeppert-Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen, "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure."

1962: Lev Davidovich Landau, "for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium."

1961: Robert Hofstadter, "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure of the nucleons," and Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer, "for his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma radiation and his discovery in this connection of the effect which bears his name."

1960: Donald Arthur Glaser, "for the invention of the bubble chamber."

1959: Emilio Gino Segrè and Owen Chamberlain, "for their discovery of the antiproton."

1958: Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, Il´ja Mikhailovich Frank and Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm, "for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect."

1957: Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao (T.D.) Lee, "for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles."

1956: William Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."

1955: Willis Eugene Lamb, "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum," and Polykarp Kusch, "for his precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron."

1954: Max Born, "for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction," and Walther Bothe, "for the coincidence method and his discoveries made therewith."

1953: Frits (Frederik) Zernike, "for his demonstration of the phase contrast method, especially for his invention of the phase contrast microscope."

1952: Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell, "for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith."

1951: Sir John Douglas Cockcroft and Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton, "for their pioneer work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles."

1950: Cecil Frank Powell, "for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method."

1949: Hideki Yukawa, "for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces."

1948: Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, "for his development of the Wilson cloud chamber method, and his discoveries therewith in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmic radiation."

1947: Sir Edward Victor Appleton, "for his investigations of the physics of the upper atmosphere especially for the discovery of the so-called Appleton layer."

1946: Percy Williams Bridgman, "for the invention of an apparatus to produce extremely high pressures, and for the discoveries he made therewith in the field of high pressure physics."

1945: Wolfgang Pauli, "for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle."

1944: Isidor Isaac Rabi, "for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei."

1943: Otto Stern, "for his contribution to the development of the molecular ray method and his discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton."

1940-1942: No Prizes awarded.

1939: Ernest Orlando Lawrence, "for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it, especially with regard to artificial radioactive elements."

1938: Enrico Fermi, "for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons."

1937: Clinton Joseph Davisson and George Paget Thomson, "for their experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals."

1936: Victor Franz Hess, "for his discovery of cosmic radiation," and Carl David Anderson, "for his discovery of the positron."

1935: James Chadwick, "for the discovery of the neutron."

1934: No Prize awarded

1933: Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."

1932: Werner Karl Heisenberg, "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen."

1931: No Prize awarded

1930: Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him"

1929: Prince Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie, "for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons."

1928: Owen Willans Richardson, "for his work on the thermionic phenomenon and especially for the discovery of the law named after him."

1927: Arthur Holly Compton, "for his discovery of the effect named after him," and Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, "for his method of making the paths of electrically charged particles visible by condensation of vapor."

1926: Jean Baptiste Perrin, "for his work on the discontinuous structure of matter, and especially for his discovery of sedimentation equilibrium."

1925: James Franck and Gustav Ludwig Hertz, "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom."

1924: Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn, "for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy."

1923: Robert Andrews Millikan, "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect."

1922: Niels Henrik David Bohr, "for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them."

1921: Albert Einstein, "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

1920: Charles Edouard Guillaume, "in recognition of the service he has rendered to precision measurements in Physics by his discovery of anomalies in nickel steel alloys."

1919: Johannes Stark, "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields."

1918: Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, "in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta."

1917: Charles Glover Barkla, "for his discovery of the characteristic Röntgen radiation of the elements."

1916: No Prize awarded.

1915: Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg, "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays."

1914: Max von Laue, "for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals."

1913: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, "for his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium."

1912: Nils Gustaf Dalén, "for his invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys."

1911: Wilhelm Wien, "for his discoveries regarding the laws governing the radiation of heat."

1910: Johannes Diderik van der Waals, "for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids."

1909: Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun, "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy."

1908: Gabriel Lippmann, "for his method of reproducing colors photographically based on the phenomenon of interference."

1907: Albert Abraham Michelson, "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid."

1906: Joseph John Thomson, "in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases."

1905: Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard, "for his work on cathode rays."

1904: Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt), "for his investigations of the densities of the most important gases and for his discovery of argon in connection with these studies."

1903: Antoine Henri Becquerel, " "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity," and Pierre Curie and Marie Curie, née Sklodowska, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel."

1902: Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman, "in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena."

1901: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him."

CRISPR, short for CRISPR-Cas9, is a genome-editing tool that allows scientists to precisely cut and modify DNA sequences. It has revolutionized the study of genes, helped to enhance crops and improved health care.

The gene-editing system was originally discovered in bacteria, where it limits infections by clipping viral DNA. Then, in Nobel prize-winning work, this bacterial defense apparatus was co-opted by scientists to devise a new approach to genome editing. 

"It's really the simplicity, the cost and the ease of use" that democratized this editing tool, Alison Van Eenennaam, a livestock geneticist at the University of California, Davis who uses CRISPR to alter the genetics of farm animals, told Live Science.

Recently, CRISPR has been approved to treat two blood disorders, and early-stage trials reveal its potential to treat inherited blindness. Here's everything you need to know about the groundbreaking technology.

Related: CRISPR 'will provide cures for genetic diseases that were incurable before,' says renowned biochemist Virginijus Šikšnys 

What is CRISPR?

The CRISPR system includes the following major components:  

CRISPR: "CRISPR" stands for "clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats." This unwieldy name describes a pattern of DNA sequences found in bacterial genomes that helps the bacteria fend off viruses.

"Short palindromic repeats" refers to sequences that read the same forward and backward, like the words "kayak" and "racecar." DNA consists of two paired strands twisted around each other in a helix. A DNA palindrome thus refers to a string of DNA letters, or bases — A (adenine), C (cytosine), G guanine) and T (thymine) — that are the same when read forward on one strand and read backward on the other. 

For example, if one strand reads "GATC" in one direction, these DNA bases will pair up with "CTAG" on the opposite strand because G always pairs with C and A always pairs with T. When read backward, CTAG becomes the original sequence, GATC.

These repeats are "regularly interspaced," meaning that these CRISPR regions in the genome contain an alternating pattern of palindromes with "spacer" sequences wedged between them. Bacteria co-opt the spacer sequences from the DNA of invading viruses and store them in their CRISPR regions to fight future infections.  

This system is often likened to the human adaptive immune system, which similarly stores a "memory" of previous infections in order to stave off repeat encounters. Rather than using immune cells, like humans do, bacteria use CRISPR.

CRISPR RNA (crRNA) and Cas9: CRISPR DNA serves as a permanent record of past infections, but for bacteria to use these sequences to thwart viruses, they must convert them into DNA's cousin, RNA. Through a process called transcription, bacteria first copy one of the two CRISPR DNA strands into a single complementary strand of RNA; the strand is complementary in that it matches the original DNA code, except it replaces T with U (uracil). Then, the microbes chop the lengthy strand into shorter crRNA snippets, each carrying one repeat and one spacer. 

The bacteria also make a second RNA molecule, called "trans-activating crRNA," or tracrRNA. This RNA contains a reversed version of the palindromic repeat on the crRNA molecule, allowing the two RNAs to bind together. 

The resulting complex can then latch onto viral DNA carrying the spacer sequence, calling forth an enzyme that cuts and disables that DNA. The enzyme, called "CRISPR-associated protein 9," or Cas9, is essentially a pair of molecular scissors.

There are also other types of Cas enzymes that can be utilized in gene editing. For example, one called Cas12a produces staggered cuts in DNA, in which one strand is longer than the other at each end. DNA sequences can then be paired with the overhanging strand. Cas14 makes cuts in RNA, instead of DNA, and could be useful for temporarily altering what proteins a cell makes without making permanent edits to its genome.

Related: Meet 'Fanzor,' the 1st CRISPR-like system found in complex life  

How does CRISPR edit DNA?

Researchers have taken advantage of the CRISPR system's ability to make precise cuts in DNA. By adapting CRISPR to make desirable genome edits in any cell type, researchers can alter genes or DNA sequences that regulate genes' activity, changing their function or expression.

To simplify the system, scientists combined the crRNA and tracrRNA molecules described in the previous section into a single molecule called "guide RNA." 

"All you need to do to target a new sequence is alter the guide," Van Eenennaam said, which is cheap and quick to do. In contrast, other genome-editing techniques require the time-consuming and expensive design of a lab-made protein that targets a sequence of interest. 

The guide RNA is paired with a Cas9 enzyme to make edits in the genome. Once the RNA binds to the desired sequence, the enzyme swoops in and cuts both strands of DNA. In response, the cell attempts to glue the strands back together, but it uses a fault-ridden process that often introduces mutations. For instance, it may add a few extra letters. This change often deactivates the gene, making CRISPR editing a simple strategy to switch off genes.

Scientists have also modified the Cas9 enzyme to make other types of edits. By disabling Cas9's genetic scissors and then fusing this "dead Cas9" to another enzyme, they can rig the machinery to alter single bases, converting a C into a T, for example. This CRISPR formulation is called "base editing," and it allows researchers to make fine changes that alter the structure of the product encoded by the gene, whether that's a protein or RNA. 

Dead Cas9 has also been paired with enzymes that activate or silence genes to tune their activity. Dead Cas9 has also been fused to fluorescent proteins, which light up when the guide RNA binds to a specific stretch of DNA, essentially revealing its post code in the cell. 

Related: Could CRISPR cure HIV someday? 

Who discovered CRISPR?

CRISPR's history goes back to 1987, when Yoshizumi Ishino and colleagues at Osaka University in Japan first reported the unusually repetitive sequences in Escherichia coli, a well-known bacterium. At the time, the scientists didn't know how these clusters were related to bacterial defense. 

In the 1990s, these clusters drew the attention of more scientists when Francisco Mojica (who coined the term "CRISPR") and his team at the University of Alicante in Spain spotted them in 20 other bacterial genomes, suggesting they had widespread importance in bacteria. 

In 2005, Alexander Bolotin and colleagues at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research came across genes for Cas enzymes located near the CRISPR region of a genome. Shortly after, Eugene Koonin's group at the National Institutes of Health revealed that the spacer sequences matched viral DNA, leading researchers to connect CRISPR with bacterial immunity.

Emmanuelle Charpentier, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and Jennifer Doudna, of the University of California, Berkeley, later adapted CRISPR for genome editing. Their work led them to share the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry. 

Shortly after the groundbreaking publication of Charpentier's and Doudna's work, Virginijus Šikšnys of the Vilnius University Institute of Biotechnology and his colleagues also demonstrated how CRISPR could be used in gene editing. Feng Zhang's group at the Broad Institute later developed other CRISPR systems into gene-editing tools, including an RNA-editing system involving an enzyme called Cas13. 

How has CRISPR been used in people? What about in plants and animals?

CRISPR has been used to correct genetic disorders, such as cystic fibrosis and cataracts, in laboratory-grown cells and in lab animals. It has also shown recent success as a treatment for other conditions in human trials. Notably, the U.K. and the U.S. have both approved a CRISPR-based gene therapy called Casgevy for two blood disorders: sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. This is the first CRISPR-based therapy to ever be approved.

Casgevy works by cutting and disabling the gene BCL11A, which controls the switch from fetal hemoglobin to adult hemoglobin shortly after birth. 

The fetal version binds more strongly to oxygen, allowing a fetus to gather enough oxygen from its mother's bloodstream. The adult version normally takes over after birth, once oxygen can be obtained through breathing. However, in sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia, people have faulty versions of the adult gene. Casgevy reverses the switch to adult hemoglobin so that patients can continue using their fetal hemoglobin gene instead.

One form of inherited blindness may be among the next disorders treated using CRISPR. An early-stage trial tested injecting CRISPR components into the eye and suggested the approach to be safe and effective mode. The base-editing form of CRISPR also showed promising results in lowering cholesterol levels during a small trial. 

Beyond health care, CRISPR editing has been used to enhance at least 41 food crops, including rice and wheat, by improving their palatability, nutritional value and resistance to disease. It's also been used to edit the genes of pigs whose organs are then harvested for human transplant operations. 

In addition, Van Eenennaam uses CRISPR in proof-of-concept experiments to endow farmed animals with desirable traits. For example, she enhances meat yields in cattle so farmers can rear fewer livestock and thus limit their environmental impact. 

What are potential dangers and downsides of CRISPR?

CRISPR is a versatile and powerful genome editing tool, but at this juncture, it has some limitations and risks and also raises ethical quandaries. 

For instance, in regards to treating genetic disorders, some people embrace their conditions and don't regard them as disorders, Van Eenennaam said. For instance, "should you 'cure' hereditary deafness in the offspring of a deaf couple who don't believe deafness is a bad thing?" she questioned.

Regarding CRISPR's limitations, it can introduce "off-target effects" if the Cas9 enzyme cuts DNA at unintended places in the genome. This might occur if researchers don't customize the guide RNA sequence for a unique DNA target but instead target a common sequence found in a family of genes. Such off-target effects could have negative outcomes on health. For example, if the guide RNA matches a gene that suppresses tumor growth, there is a risk that disabling it could turn the cell cancerous.

Another issue is that CRISPR editing is not 100% efficient, so only a proportion of the targeted cells undergo the desired genetic change. This means that, in some scenarios, unedited cells might avoid harmful off-target effects and thus fare better than edited cells and eventually outnumber them. Researchers recently found that edited blood stem cells can die out overtime, suggesting blood-disorder treatments may become less effective in the long haul.

These risks also pose ethical considerations regarding the use of CRISPR in livestock. Van Eenennaam typically uses "germ-line editing" in livestock, which involves targeting sex cells, like eggs and sperm, or fertilized eggs. This makes CRISPR edits heritable between an animal and its offspring. Van Eenennaam's group doesn't insert newly engineered genes into cattle, but rather, they transfer existing, desirable genes from one cow into another.

Related: Gene therapy: What is it and how does it work? 

There is a chance that off-target edits could impair the animals' health. But Van Eenennaam argues these concerns are often exaggerated. "There are going to be literally millions of genetic variations between two bulls" arising from natural mutations, so off-target effects are just a drop in the ocean, she explained.

Still, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says genome-editing of farmed animals requires ample oversight, in part because other DNA sequences often accompany the new gene inserted into the genome. These carryovers should be scrutinized to ensure they aren't hazardous to the animal or to human consumers, the FDA says. If the agency deems an edited animal to be low-risk, they can grant "enforcement discretion" that allows it and its descendants to be commercialized, Van Eenennaam noted.

This type of germ-line editing has rarely been applied to humans, except in the controversial case in which a Chinese scientist infamously generated "CRISPR babies" in violation of regulations. One big reason human germ-line editing has been avoided is that future generations cannot consent to receiving a CRISPR treatment. 

Future generations also cannot consent to the possibility of harmful off-target effects, such as mutations that could predispose one to cancer. Nita Farahany, a bioethicist at Duke University, told the New York Times that editing embryos would be unethical "until we can figure out what the off-target effects are, and how we can control for them."

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine laid out criteria that should be met for germline editing clinical trials to go forward. The group advises restricting human germ-line editing to only genes whose mutations can lead to serious disease for which there are no other therapies.

Currently, gene therapies mainly use a technique called "somatic editing." This applies to Casgevy, for example. Somatic editing works by targeting a subset of non-sex cells in the body and thus doesn't pass any alterations down to additional generations.

"The benefit clearly outweighs any hypothetical risk" in these contexts, Van Eenennaam said, so somatic CRISPR editing is a "no-brainer" when it comes to gene therapy.

Editor's note: A new version of this article was published on July 1, 2024. The previous version had last been updated in March 2023.

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website! 

The 2021 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to two scientists who developed new tools for building mirror-image molecules — enabling new drugs to be created in a more environmentally friendly way.

The researchers Benjamin List, of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, and David MacMillan, of Princeton University, were awarded the prize "because in 2000 they, independent of each other, developed a third type of catalysis," the Nobel Committee wrote in a statement. Catalysts, which are substances that can both control and accelerate chemical reactions, are important tools in chemistry. For a long time scientists believed that there were only two types of catalysts: metals and enzymes. But the researchers created a third process called asymmetric organocatalysis that uses small organic molecules as catalysts, which opened up entirely new avenues for building molecules. 

"Organic catalysts can be used to drive multitudes of chemical reactions," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in the statement. "Using these reactions, researchers can now more efficiently construct anything from new pharmaceuticals to molecules that can capture light in solar cells."

Related: 8 chemical elements you never heard of

Chemists create new molecules by chaining together tiny chemical building blocks, but controlling this bonding process is a tricky task. Catalysts are important in guiding these reactions, but even they have their limitations. For instance, conventional catalysts are often unable to prevent a common situation that arises when a single process to build a desired molecule produces one of two possible molecules — each the mirror image of the other, like left and right hands. These mirror-image, or chiral, molecules can have vastly different properties and interactions with the body. For instance, the mirror-image molecule of levomethamphetamine — which is used in nasal inhalers to relieve a stuffy nose — is dextromethamphetamine, both a therapeutic used for ADHD as well as the illicit and highly addictive street drug. 

But the asymmetric organocatalysis method developed by List and MacMillan — using tiny organic molecules as the catalysts — sidesteps this mirror-image problem, enabling chemists to select the exact "handedness" of the molecule they want to create. This vastly reduces waste, and the subsequent cost, in the production of vital pharmaceuticals.

Organic catalysts are made by attaching common active chemical elements — like oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus — onto a stable framework of carbon atoms. This process is both cheap and environmentally friendly.

"This concept for catalysis is as simple as it is ingenious, and the fact is that many people have wondered why we didn't think of it earlier," Johan Åqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in the statement.

The award comes with a prize of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.15 million) to be shared equally between the two laureates.

Originally published on Live Science.

The 2021 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists whose work laid the foundations for how we understand complex physical systems, including Earth's climate.

Syukuro Manabe, of Princeton University in New Jersey, and Klaus Hasselmann, formerly of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, will share one-half of the prize "for the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming." Giorgio Parisi, of Sapienza University of Rome, will receive the other half "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which is responsible for selecting the Nobel laureates in physics, announced Tuesday (Oct. 5).

Such complex systems are inherently difficult to understand, as they are characterized by both randomness and disorder, according to a statement from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. "This year's Prize recognises new methods for describing them and predicting their long-term behaviour," the statement said.

Related: Images of melt: Earth's vanishing ice

Manabe began this work in the 1960s, as the first person to explore how Earth's energy balance — the difference between the amount of the sun's energy received by Earth compared with the energy sent back to space — could affect atmospheric movements. With this understanding, he demonstrated the link between more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increased temperatures at Earth's surface — work that is used in climate models today. 

Roughly 10 years later, Hasselmann made a model that linked weather with climate, showing how climate models could make reliable long-term predictions in spite of the varied and chaotic nature of short-term weather patterns. This work also allowed him to develop methods that spotted the telltale "fingerprints" of acute events, both natural and human, that impacted the climate. These methods were later used to prove that increases in atmospheric temperatures resulted from carbon dioxide emissions from human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels. 

Around 1980, Parisi followed up this work with a more theoretical look at how hidden patterns could be spotted in complex systems. By investigating a metallic alloy called spin glass — a material in which iron atoms that are dispersed across a grid of copper lead to significant changes to the material's magnetic properties — he described how seemingly small adjustments to large systems can have profound effects. This led to many subsequent insights, not just into the physics of the climate but also in fields as diverse as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.

"The discoveries being recognised this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations," Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in the statement. "This year's Laureates have all contributed to us gaining deeper insight into the properties and evolution of complex physical systems." 

The award comes just before the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November. At the conference, countries are expected to negotiate plans for urgent and radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. 

On Aug. 9, a landmark report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a stark warning that Earth is expected to reach a critical threshold: a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) due to climate change within the next 20 years.

The report, which U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described as a "code red for humanity," warns that increasingly extreme heat waves, droughts and floods will become more common as the planet warms.

"The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk," Guterres said in a statement. "If we combine forces now, we can avert climate catastrophe. But … there is no time for delay and no room for excuses."

The award comes with a prize of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.15 million) one-half of which will be shared equally between Manabe and Hasselmann. The other half will be given to Parisi. 

Originally published on Live Science.

The 2021 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to two U.S. scientists who discovered the microscopic secrets behind the human sense of touch.

David Julius, of the University of California San Francisco, received half of the prize for using "capsaicin, a pungent compound from chili peppers that induces a burning sensation, to identify a sensor in the nerve endings of the skin that responds to heat," while Ardem Patapoutian, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, received the other half for using "pressure-sensitive cells to discover a novel class of sensors that respond to mechanical stimuli in the skin and internal organs," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday (Oct. 4).

Their discoveries "have allowed us to understand how heat, cold and mechanical force can initiate the nerve impulses that allow us to perceive and adapt to the world around us," the Nobel Committee said in a statement. "This knowledge is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of disease conditions, including chronic pain." 

Related: 7 revolutionary Nobel Prizes in medicine 

The award comes with a prize of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.15 million) to be shared equally between the two winners. 

Beginning in the 1990s, the scientists pieced together the molecular pathways that translate heat and pressure detected on the skin into nerve impulses perceived by the brain. Julius and his colleagues started the work by creating a library of millions of DNA segments containing genes found in sensory nerve cells. By adding the genes one by one to cells that did not normally react to capsaicin, they eventually found that a single gene was responsible for the burning sensation associated with capsaicin. The gene they had discovered gave cells the ability to build a protein called TRPV1, which was activated at temperatures hot enough to be considered painful. 

Both Julius and Patapoutian independently went on to use menthol to discover another protein, TPRM8, which was activated by cold temperatures, as well as a number of other proteins that detected a range of different temperatures.

Building on this work, Patapoutian and his colleagues created a library of 72 genes that they suspected encoded blueprints to make receptors for mechanical pressure. By painstakingly deactivating these genes one by one in cells, they discovered that one of the genes produced a protein that spurred cells to produce a tiny electrical signal each time they were prodded. The receptor they had discovered was not only vital for sensing mechanical force, but was also used in various ways to maintain blood vessels, alongside having a proposed role in adjusting the body’s blood pressure.  

Soon after that, they found a second protein receptor that was vital in sensing body position and motion, a sense known as proprioception. They named the two receptors Piezo1 and Piezo2, after the Greek word for pressure.

Not only did the discoveries help explain the mechanisms behind sensory experiences like temperature and pressure, but they also opened up a world of possibilities for new drugs targeting the receptors — from painkillers to drugs that could alleviate blood pressure across blood vessels and organs.

"While we understood the physiology of the senses, what we didn't understand was how we sensed differences in temperature or pressure," Oscar Marin, director of the MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at King’s College London told The Associated Press. "Knowing how our body senses these changes is fundamental because once we know those molecules, they can be targeted. It's like finding a lock and now we know the precise keys that will be necessary to unlock it."

Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser, who shared the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 1944, first discovered specialized nerve cells responsive to both painful and non-painful touch.

Last year's prize went to three scientists for their discovery of hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus that causes chronic liver inflammation. The deadly disease's discovery was a breakthrough that enabled doctors to identify the virus in patients' blood and develop a cure, Live Science previously reported.

Originally published on Live Science.

Two scientists who developed key technology used in the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines have been awarded the 2021 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, which comes with an honorarium of $250,000. Earlier this month, the pair won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. 

Given that many past Lasker winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, could the team be up next for the coveted award? (Moderna co-founder and stem cell biologist Derrick Rossi has said that, at some point, they should certainly be considered for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, Stat News reported.) 

Mary and Albert Lasker founded the Lasker Awards in 1945 to honor scientists whose fundamental biological discoveries and clinical advances have helped to improve human health, according to the Lasker Foundation. This year, Katalin Karikó and Dr. Drew Weissman will share an award for their decades of work with messenger RNA (mRNA), which forms the basis of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. 

Related: 7 revolutionary Nobel Prizes in Medicine

Through their research, the team figured out how to safely deliver custom-made mRNA into our cells, without setting off a harmful immune response in the process, Live Science previously reported. In its natural form, mRNA relays instructions from our DNA to construction sites in our cells, where new proteins are made. mRNA-based vaccines work on the same principle, directing cells to build specific proteins. For example, the COVID-19 vaccines instruct cells to build the spike protein of the coronavirus so that the immune system can learn to recognize the pathogen. 

In the future, a wide range of vaccines and therapeutics could be made using this technology. For instance, Weissman, an immunologist and professor of vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, has launched trials of mRNA vaccines designed to prevent genital herpes, influenza and HIV. And Karikó, a senior vice president at BioNTech and an adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, is developing mRNA-based treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis.

"There's huge potential for the future of modified RNA," Weissman told Live Science in early September, when the duo won the prestigious and lucrative Breakthrough Prize. "My lab is currently working with 150 different labs around the world, developing different mRNA vaccines and therapeutics, so the interest in it is growing by the day."

In addition to the Lasker Award and the $3 million Breakthrough Prize, in August Karikó and Weissman received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry, awarded for groundbreaking work in medical science, according to Columbia University. And back in February, the pair won the Rosenstiel Award, which recognizes basic science researchers who have transformed the field of medicine, according to the university magazine BrandeisNOW.

Many recipients of Lasker Awards have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, hinting that Karikó and Weissman may soon earn one as well. In the award's 75-year history, 95 winners later received a Nobel, according to the Foundation. Similarly, 51 of the 106 previous Horwitz Prize winners have won a Nobel, as have 36 of the 93 Rosenstiel Award winners. 

And for what it's worth, in a recent popular poll, the readers of ChemistryViews magazine listed Karikó as one of their top picks for the 2021 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

That said, on average, there's typically a nine-year gap between winning the Rosenstiel Award and earning a Nobel, James Haber, director of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, noted at this year's Rosenstiel ceremony. So we'll have to wait and see if the Nobel Committee will call Karikó and Weissman's names this October, or if the pair might earn a prize at a later date.

In addition to Karikó and Weissman's prize, two Lasker Awards were granted in other categories:

The 2021 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award went to three scientists — Dieter Oesterhelt of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin, and Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University — who discovered light-sensitive proteins now used in optogenetics, a technique that allows scientists to switch specific cells "on" and "off" using light.

And finally, David Baltimore of the California Institute of Technology won the 2021 Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science. Over his 60-year career, Baltimore has made significant contributions to the fields of immunology, cancer research and virology, and he's known for co-chairing a commission during the HIV/AIDS crisis that helped reshape America's approach to the epidemic. 

Editor's note: This story was updated on Sept. 27 to note this year's winners of the Basic Medical Research Award and Special Achievement Award in Medical Science.

Originally published on Live Science.

Physicists are currently in a golden age of new knowledge about black holes. Since 2015, researchers have been able to get signals directly from merging black holes using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), while observatories like the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have produced the first image of a black hole’s shadow. This year was no exception, with a fresh crop of exciting and unique results expanding our black hole horizons. Here, we take a look at some of the most spectacular black hole findings of 2020. 

Nobel Prize in physics goes to black holes

As if to certify that this year was a great one for black hole research, science’s top achievement, the Nobel Prize, was handed in October to three physicists whose work has elucidated the lives of these mysterious cosmic entities. Roger Penrose, of the University of Oxford in the U.K., received one-half of the prize "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity," while Andrea Ghez of UCLA and Reinhard Genzel, of the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, jointly shared the other half "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy," according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Ghez is only the fourth woman to be awarded a Nobel in physics ever, after Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.

Read more: Nobel Prize in physics awarded to 3 scientists for black hole discoveries

LIGO sees its biggest black hole crash yet

LIGO and its European counterpart Virgo observe black holes through gravitational waves, ginormous ripples in the fabric of space-time emitted when massive objects oscillate. The facilities have already racked up a number of impressive discoveries. But in May, the collaboration announced that it had spotted its largest black hole collision ever, with one 85 times the mass of the sun and the other 66 times the sun’s mass smashing together to form a black hole 142 times the mass of the sun. In addition to setting records, the finding was the first in the so-called “forbidden” zone of middleweight black holes. Though astronomers had seen small black holes roughly the size of our sun and know that colossal ones with millions of times the mass of the sun exist in the centers of galaxies, no one had previously found evidence for black holes in this mid range. Exactly how they formed remains a mystery that scientists are now working to unravel. 

Read more: The largest black hole collision ever detected

Primordial black holes made it big

Shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was permeated with hot and turbulent radiation. In some regions the energy was dense enough that it could have theoretically collapsed in on itself and formed a black hole. While physicists still don’t know if these entities, known as primordial black holes (PBHs), exist, they have lately been mulling over what would happen if they did. Several papers, including one published in November, have suggested that these black holes, some of which would be smaller than those formed from dying stars, could conceivably make up dark matter, an unknown substance that exerts an gravitational influence throughout the cosmos. Experiments are underway to search for PBHs in upcoming years and either prove or refute their existence. 

Read more: Swarms of primordial black holes might fill our universe

Super-duper-size black holes could exist

What if you took the incredibly massive black holes sitting in the centers of galaxies and turned them up to 11? That’s what researchers in a paper in September proposed, discussing the possibility of "stupendously large black holes," or SLABs. These entities would weigh at least 1 trillion times the mass of the sun, 10 times more than the largest currently known black hole, a beast with 66 billion solar masses named TON 618. Some of the SLABs could have formed in the early universe, making them another class of primordial black hole, which means we might be able to see their imprint on the cosmic microwave background, a light leftover from when our universe was only 380,000 years old. Others could be spotted by looking for the way they distort the light of distant stars should a SLAB come between us. The concept remains hypothetical for now but is attracting increased attention.

Read more: Black holes so big we didn't know they could form could be hiding in the universe 

LIGO detects a lopsided merger

The majority of the black hole duos detected by the LIGO and Virgo instruments have roughly the same mass as one another. But in April, the collaboration announced that they had observed its most asymmetric crash yet. The objects, which smashed together about 2.4 billion light-years away, had around eight and 30 times the mass of our sun, respectively. "This is roughly equal to the ratio of filling in a regular Oreo to [that] in a Mega Stuf Oreo," Christopher Berry, a gravitational-wave scientist at Northwestern University, wrote in a blog post at the time. Such an unexpected event was thought to be rare enough that the gravitational wave facilities wouldn’t see it after just a few years running. The finding challenges these assumptions and has led researchers to consider the possibility of hierarchical mergers, in which one black hole collides with another and then the resulting remnant goes on to merge with yet another black hole, as an explanation.

Read more: Scientists detect rare crash of two mismatched black holes

Telescopes watch a black hole 'spaghettify' a star

When a massive object comes within a certain distance from a black hole, the extreme gravitational forces present there can shred the object into long strands of material that get strewn all around. This process, known colloquially as spaghettification, has rarely been seen because most black holes are surrounded by an obscuring cloud of gas and dust, the burps of former meals as well as material that escaped being eaten. But in October, astronomers with the European Southern Observatory managed to catch the spaghettification of a star in unprecedented detail using both the Very Large Telescope and New Technology Telescope. The violent event, known blandly as AT 2019qiz, will give researchers insights into these occurrences and help them better understand gravity in extreme environments. 

Read more: Black hole caught turning a poor star into spaghetti

Closest black hole ever spotted

Nobody wants to get too close to a black hole (see the entry on spaghettification). Luckily the cosmic Pac-Man seen in May orbiting with a pair of companion stars known as HR 6819 is at an astronomically safe distance from its partners. Lurking 1,000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Telescopium, the newfound black hole is three times closer than the previous record holder. Astronomers can’t directly observe the black hole itself, but were able to infer its presence based on how it gravitationally influences the other two objects in the system, tugging on their orbits. Skywatchers in the Southern Hemisphere can see the stars in the HR 6819 system for themselves with the unaided eye by consulting a star chart and looking in the constellation Telescopium, near the border with the constellation of Pavo, the peacock.

Read more: Astronomers find closest black hole to Earth

Black holes could be fuzzballs

For a black hole to form, matter and energy must collapse down to a tiny point of infinite density. Since infinities like this should be physically impossible, theorists have long sought a way to get around such a bizarre outcome. According to string theory, which replaces all particles and forces with subatomic, vibrating strings, black holes might actually turn out to be something even weirder — a fuzzy yarn-like ball of fundamental strings. In October, a study showed that if the atoms in neutron stars, a type of stellar remnant not quite dense enough to form a black hole, were actually a bunch of strings, then compressing these strings together would actually form not a black hole but a fuzzball that would look like the aforementioned fundamental yarn ball. The strange idea has yet to be fully fleshed out but is one possible alternative to dealing with infinity.

Read more: Black holes may not exist, but fuzzballs might

Dangerous ‘naked’ black holes could lurk in the universe

According to physicists, every black hole should be surrounded by what’s known as an event horizon — a boundary where once you fall in, you never come out. Yet ever since black holes were first postulated, researchers have wondered if the event horizon is strictly necessary. Could it be possible to have a black hole without one, a so-called ‘naked’ black hole? This might be dangerous since the known laws of physics break down inside a black hole’s event horizon, and a naked black hole wouldn’t offer that barrier's protection. Though most theorists think nudity is forbidden for black holes, a paper in November suggested that there might be a way to check for sure. The trick is to look for differences in the accretion disks, or rings of gas and dust formed when a black hole feeds, that could indicate a visible difference between naked and normal black holes.  

Read more: Do dangerous 'naked' black holes lurk in the universe?

A treasure trove of black holes

Christmas came early this year for black hole scientists. In October, the collaboration overseeing LIGO and its European counterpart Virgo released a bountiful new catalog of dozens of gravitational-wave signals detected between April and September 2019. The 39 events included many intriguing findings, such as the massive black hole merger that resulted in a remnant with 142 solar masses, the extremely lopsided event with masses eight and thirty times the sun and a mysterious object that seemed to either be a small black hole or a large neutron star. Researchers were thrilled with the data, which showed that the facilities were picking up on average one new signal every five days, and plan to use it to better understand the behavior and frequency of black hole mergers. 

Read more: Scientists just found the largest neutron star (or smallest black hole)

Originally published on Live Science.

In 1927, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Philipp Lenard penned a letter to a colleague complaining about recent achievements by Albert Einstein and musing that academia and the sciences were becoming dominated by Jews. 

Lenard, an early supporter of Germany's Nazi Party, remarked that a prestigious appointment for Einstein was undeserved; he then wondered if non-Jews would soon be wiped out entirely. 

The original letter, written in German, is up for auction at Nate D. Sanders Auctions in Los Angeles. Bidding for the item, which also includes an English translation, starts at $16,000 US, according to the auction listing.

Related: 8 ways you can see Einstein's theory of relativity in real life

In the letter — written to physicist Wilhelm Wien, another Nobel Prize Laureate — Lenard bemoaned the "Einstein action," referring to Einstein's recent acceptance into the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich, the auction listing says. The "shallow intellectuality" of academia uplifting Einstein was an "unexpected testimony of its domination by Jews," Lenard wrote.

He went on to wonder how his letter might be viewed in the future, "provided any non-Jewish persons are still alive then," he said. 

But as Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany, it wasn't non-Jews who were threatened with imminent annihilation. From the start of World War II, the Nazis began systematically murdering Jews across Europe, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. By the war's end, an estimated 6 million Jews — more than two-thirds of European Jewry — had been killed. 

Lenard, who was born in Hungary in 1862, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1905 for his work on cathode rays, leading to the discovery of electrons and X-rays, according to The Nobel Foundation. His experiments also explored the photoelectric effect — the ejection of electrons when light shines on metal — and he "never forgave Einstein" for achieving greater recognition regarding this phenomenon, The Nobel Foundation notes in a biography. 

But Lenard's enmity toward Einstein also reflected deep-seated anti-Semitic convictions. Lenard was such a devoted member of Hitler’s National Socialist Party that Nazi officials named him Chief of Aryan Physics, according to the biography.

By 1927, Einstein was already well aware that dangerous anti-Semitic sentiments were overtaking common decency in Germany, alongside a rising tide of fanatical nationalism and fascism. Five years earlier, in 1922, Einstein penned a note to his sister Maja while in hiding; he had fled Berlin after right-wing extremists murdered his friend Walther Rathenau, a fellow Jew and the German foreign minister.

"I am doing quite well, in spite of all the anti-Semites among my German colleagues," Einstein wrote. "Here are brewing economically and politically dark times."

The auction for Lenard's letter ends today (Oct. 29) at 5 p.m. Pacific Time (8 p.m. ET).

Originally published on Live Science.

Three scientists won the 2020 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus that can cause chronic inflammation of the liver, leading to severe scarring and cancer.

The researchers Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice "made seminal discoveries that led to the identification of a novel virus, hepatitis C virus," the Nobel Committee wrote in a statement. Two other forms of viral hepatitis — hepatitis A and B — had already been discovered at the time, but most cases of chronic hepatitis remained unexplained, they noted.

"The discovery of hepatitis C virus revealed the cause of the remaining cases of chronic hepatitis and made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives," the committee wrote. The scientists' award-winning work took place between the 1970s and 1990s, and enabled doctors to screen patients' blood for the virus and cure many of the disease, Science Magazine reported. 

Related: 7 revolutionary Nobel Prizes in medicine 

The word "hepatitis" derives from the Greek words for "liver" and "inflammation," and in addition to hepatitis viruses, the condition can arise from alcohol and drug use, bacterial infections, parasites and autoimmune disorders where the immune system attacks the liver, Live Science previously reported. Hepatitis A and E typically cause short-term illness and are transmitted through food or water contaminated with fecal matter. Hepatitis B and C, on the other hand, can lead to chronic infections and are transmitted through blood and other bodily fluids. 

Physician and geneticist Baruch Blumberg won the 1976 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for first identifying hepatitis B, a discovery that led to both diagnostic tests for the virus and a successful vaccine, the committee wrote. However, even after this discovery, many cases of chronic hepatitis continued to crop up in patients who received blood transfusions, hinting that a second blood-borne virus might also cause the disease.

Alter found that the illness, which he called "non-A, non-B" hepatitis, could be transmitted from humans to chimpanzees through blood and had the characteristics of a virus. Houghton later led work to clone the virus and named it hepatitis C. Rice examined the virus's genetic material, known as RNA, and performed genetic engineering experiments to learn how the pathogen causes hepatitis in chimps and humans. These experiments revealed that some forms of the virus do not cause disease, but an "active" form with specific genetic characteristics does. 

Collectively, the three scientists' discoveries led to the development of highly sensitive blood tests and antiviral drugs for hepatitis C; the new treatments can cure about 95% of hepatitis C patients, Science Magazine reported. "For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world population," the Nobel Committee wrote. 

That said, about 71 million people still live with chronic hepatitis C infections, worldwide, and the World Health Organization estimates that 400,000 people died of the disease in 2016, according to Science Magazine.

A big problem is "getting drugs to people and places where they desperately need them," John McLauchlan, a professor of viral hepatitis at the University of Glasgow, told The Associated Press, noting that the disease primarily affects poor populations and people who use drugs.

Originally published on Live Science. 

The most recent Nobel Prize in Physics was split between Jim Peebles, a cosmologist extraordinaire, and a pair of Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. 

Mayor and Queloz found the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star, which was a landmark discovery for two reasons: it showed conclusively that the sun isn't the only star to host a family of planets (something we had long figured but never demonstrated), and also that the universe is really, really weird.

Related: The Most Fascinating Exoplanets of 2018

Pulsing the start

The careful reader will note in the paragraph above that I was very clear in my wording: Mayor and Queloz discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star, not the first exoplanet itself. That credit goes to Aleksander Wolazczan and Dale Frail in 1992. And in fact, they got a two-for-one deal, finding two planets orbiting the same star.

But that star was completely unlike our sun. It was a pulsar, a rapidly rotating, dense leftover core from a once-giant star. That pulsar would regularly splash a beam of radiation over Earth, like the blinking of a distant lighthouse — hence the name pulsar. As the exoplanets orbited around that dead core, they would gently tug on the pulsar, making it wiggle, which would give rise to subtle changes in the frequencies of pulsar splashes here on Earth.

While this was a major find for astronomy, it wasn't exactly what we were searching for. We wanted to know — and still want to know — if there's another Earth out there. And while the concept of planets surviving a supernova detonation and still orbiting the leftover core is a juicy problem to puzzle over, it doesn't directly help us in our hunt. What's more, the technique used on the pulsar relied on the regular frequencies of its pulses, a trick we couldn't use on regular stars.

Making it mainstream

Instead, we had to watch stars themselves wiggle, and it wasn't until a few years later that astronomers had perfected the technology to deliver that measurement.

The technology relied on a spectrometer, a device for breaking up light from a distant source into its multitude of components (essentially a very scientific rainbow). With that spectrum, astronomers like Mayor and Queloz could find the signatures of known elements, like hydrogen and carbon, from the fingerprints they leave in the spectrum. From there, they could stare at the star day after day, looking for changes in the spectrum.

And those changes in the spectrum could reveal the movement of the star through the Doppler shift. The same shift that causes the wail of an ambulance to change pitch as it passes by you happens to light. When a source is moving towards you, the light gets shifted towards higher, bluer frequencies, and when a source is moving away from you, it goes down to lower, redder frequencies.

This was not a new technique; astronomers have been measuring the Doppler shift of stars for almost two hundred years.

But in 1995 Mayor and Queloz took it one step further, upping the precision of their instrument to new levels, staying on the lookout for even the most minute changes.

If a planet is orbiting a star, the gravity from that planet will pull on the star like a leash on a stubborn dog. The star won't move a lot — stars usually outweigh their planets by several orders of magnitude — but they'll still move, hopefully in a detectable way. And in 1995 the pair of future-Nobel-winners nailed it, confirming the unmistakable back-and-forth wobble in the spectrum of the star 51 Pegasi, a wobble that could only be caused by a relatively small, unseen companion — an exoplanet in orbit. 

Related: 7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets

Boring is best

There's nothing particularly remarkable about 51 Pegasi, and that's what makes the discovery of an exoplanet there so remarkable. It's just a normal, everyday run-of-the-mill star, sitting about 50 light-years away, with a mass about 10% more than the sun and an age just a tad higher, at 6 billion years old.

It's a normal star, living a normal stellar life, with at least one planet in orbit around it. Just like our sun.

The discovery by Mayor and Queloz ushered in a new age of exoplanet hunting, leading to hundreds, and eventually thousands, of confirmed exoplanet detections. They're so commonplace now that announcements rarely even break into the news, and it's only a matter of time before we find an Earth-like twin.

Some like it hot Jupiter

But the planet orbiting 51 Pegasi is nothing like what we see in our solar system, and it was so surprising that one of the first reactions to its discovery was to toss out the result altogether as junk.

But the result of Mayor and Queloz was indisputable, and we had to confront the reality that 51 Pegasi presented us. Its planet, dubbed at the time 51 Pegasi b and now given the name Dimidium by the International Astronomical Union (though some astronomers cling to its informal name of Bellerophon), is a pretty typical gas giant, about half the mass of Jupiter, or 150 times the mass of the Earth.

And it orbits a mere 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) away from its parent star.

For context, that's more than seven times closer than Mercury is to our sun.

How did a massive gas giant, which can only form in the outskirts of a solar system where there's enough raw material to bulk a planet up to such massive proportions, wind up so uncomfortably close to its parent? We're still not exactly sure, but we did come up with a cool name for them: hot Jupiters.

With one dedicated observation, Mayor and Queloz pulled off two tricks. They launched a new era of astronomy research in exoplanets, and they upended decades of understanding of how planets form. No wonder they won a Nobel Prize.

• The Strangest Alien Planets in Pictures
• Extremely Hot and Incredibly Close: How Hot Jupiters Defy Theory
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of "Your Place in the Universe." Sutter contributed this article to Live Science sister site Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 

You can listen to the Ask A Spaceman podcast on iTunes, and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman, or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

This year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded jointly to three scientists who figured out how cells sense and adapt to changes in levels of oxygen, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karlinska Institute announced this morning (Oct. 7).

The three Nobel Laureates, William G. Kaelin Jr, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza, identified the molecular machinery that turns the activity of genes up or down in response to varying levels of oxygen. 

"The seminal discoveries by this year's Nobel Laureates revealed the mechanism for one of life's most essential adaptive processes," according to the Nobel Prize organization.

Related: The 10 Noblest Nobel Prize Winners of All Time

The ability of cells to detect oxygen levels and respond is essential to keeping the body functioning and can play a big role in some diseases. At the most basic level, cells need oxygen to convert food into energy. 

"Cells and tissues are constantly experiencing changes in oxygen availability. As an embryo grows and develops, as muscles work, the oxygen available changes as the tissues themselves change," a member of the Nobel committee, Randall Johnson, said this morning during the announcement in Sweden. "Cells need a way to adjust to the amount of oxygen they have while still doing their important jobs."

For instance, during intense exercise, muscle cells must adapt to higher oxygen demands. Oxygen-sensing machinery is essential for fetal development, as it controls normal blood vessel formation and the development of the placenta, the Nobel Prize organization wrote. The machinery also plays a role in anemia and even cancer — stimulating the formation of blood vessels so cancer cells can spread.

Semenza was born in New York and performed his prize-winning research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he continues to do research. Ratcliffe was born in Lancashire in the U.K., and he is currently at the University of Oxford and the Francis Crick Institute in London, where he also did his prize-winning work. Kaelin was also born in New York and carried out his prize-winning research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, where he is still active.

The three scientists will share equally the Nobel prize of 9 million Swedish kronor (about $909,000).

Originally published on Live Science.

Every living organism on this planet is a sculpture of evolution. Now, evolution is also unfolding in the lab.

This year's Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three scientists for their work in harnessing the power of evolution for a variety of applications that benefit humankind. These new applications helped create biofuels, pharmaceuticals and antibodies that fight disease.

Frances H. Arnold from the California Institute of Technology was awarded half the prize, while George P. Smith from the University of Missouri and Sir Gregory P. Winter from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the U.K. shared the other half. [Nobel Prize in Chemistry: 1901-Present]

In 1993, Arnold was the first to conduct the directed evolution of enzymes — proteins that cause or push forward reactions. This process works by first introducing random mutations or changes into an enzyme's genes. The genes are then inserted into bacteria, which then act as the manufacturing machines and produce randomly mutated enzymes. The scientists then test these generated enzymes and pinpoint which ones are the best at their job — sparking the reaction they're trying to achieve. These "chosen ones" are then mutated and fed through the cycle again.

After just a few cycles of this evolution in a test tube, an enzyme can become a couple thousand times more effective, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Arnold's enzymes allow for more environmentally friendly manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and renewable fuels.

Arnold is only the fifth woman to take home a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

As for Smith, in 1985, he developed the "phage display" method that eventually became a powerful tool to direct the evolution of antibodies. This process works by introducing fragments of an unknown gene into a bacteriophage, or a virus that infects bacteria, which then uses the instructions from the gene to construct a protein building block called a peptide and displays it on its surface. When an antibody, or Y-shaped protein, is added to the mix, it binds to the peptide. 

Winter later used this method to direct the evolution of antibodies to create pharmaceutical drugs. He created bacteriophages with billions of different kinds of antibodies displayed on their surfaces. He then found the ones that bound the best to specific proteins and randomly mutated them. He repeated this process again and again, such that the antibody's attachment increased in strength with each cycle. 

The first such drug created from this method, adalimumab, was approved in 2002 and is now used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel diseases, according to a statement.

This method has been used to create antibodies that can neutralize the toxin that causes anthrax. It also has been shown to slow down an autoimmune disease called lupis, and even cure metastatic cancer. Many other antibodies created in this way are currently in clinical trials, such as those developed to fight Alzheimer's disease, according to the academy.

Editor's Note: This article was updated to clarify that Arnold is the fifth woman to ever receive a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Originally published on Live Science.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is responsible for one of the most important astrophysics discoveries of the 20th century: the radio pulsar. The discovery, which she made as graduate student, earned a Nobel Prize in 1974. And it could one day form the basis of a "galactic positioning system" for navigating outside our solar system.

But Bell Burnell didn't collect the Nobel. Instead, as NPR reported, the award went to her supervisor at the University of Cambridge, Antony Hewish — who had built the necessary radio telescope with her but didn't discover the pulsar.

Now, 44 years later, Bell Burnell has received the much heftier Breakthrough Prize for the same discovery, and for her scientific leadership in the years since. In 1974, the Nobel comittee gave away about $124,000 to winners (about $620,000 adjusted for inflation). Hewish would have recieved half of that, after splitting the prize with another radio astronomer who won the same year. The Breakthrough Prize, funded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, comes with a prize of $3 million, making it the largest scientific award in the world. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics ]

Bell Burnell told the BBC that she plans to give the money away, setting up a scholarship to support women and ethnic minorities interested in science.

"I don't want or need the money myself, and it seemed to me that this was perhaps the best use I could put to it," she said in her BBC interview, adding that she believes unconscious bias keeps such groups out of science and that the fact of her own status as an outsider at Cambridge helped her make her universe-unlocking discovery.

Neutron stars spin rapidly, emitting highly regular flashes of electromagnetism. Scientists call that flashing point in their telescope data a pulsar.

"Jocelyn Bell Burnell's discovery of pulsars will always stand as one of the great surprises in the history of astronomy," Edward Witten, the chair of the Breakthrough Prize selection committee, said in a statement. "Until that moment, no one had any real idea how neutron stars could be observed, if indeed they existed. Suddenly, it turned out that nature has provided an incredibly precise way to observe these objects, something that has led to many later advances."

Originally Published on Live Science.

Yesterday (Aug. 1), University of Cambridge mathematician Caucher Birkar won the Fields Medal — the highest prize in mathematics, awarded every four years to a small group of mathematicians age 40 or younger. The award came with a 14-carat gold medal and 15,000 Canadian dollars (about $11,500). According to the BBC, Birkar put the medal in his briefcase, along with his wallet and phone, and left the briefcase on a table in the Rio de Janeiro conference center where the award was presented.  

When he returned, the briefcase was gone. 

Birkar was one of four mathematicians to recieve a Fields Medal in 2018. He recieved the prize for his work in the field of algebraic geometry.

"As a mathematician," Quanta Magazine explained in a profile published Aug. 1, "Birkar has helped bring order to the infinite variety of polynomial equations — those equations that consist of different variables raised to various powers. No two equations are exactly alike, but Birkar has helped reveal that many can be neatly categorized into a small number of families. In two papers published in 2016 he showed that an infinite number of different polynomials can be defined by a finite number of characteristics — a result which demonstrated that this bewildering array of seemingly unrelated algebraic equations shares something in common." [What Is Topology?]

Birkar, a Kurdish refugee from Iran, is the second person born in Iran to win a Fields Medal in this decade. Maryam Mirzakhani, a Stanford mathematician from Iran, became the first (woman and remains the only one ) to win a Fields Medal in 2014. She died in 2017 at the age of 40.

Originally published on Live Science.

If you've ever taken a biology class, you've probably seen a cell; all you need is an old microscope and a single blob of liquid.

But do those cells you see in a lab behave differently than the trillions of cells swimming naturally through your body? Can a cell get stressed — or even camera shy — when removed from its natural environment? [Tiny Grandeur: Stunning Photos of the Very Small]

"This [question] raises the nagging doubt that we are not seeing cells in their native state, happily ensconced in the organism in which they evolved," Eric Betzig, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, said in a statement.

That concern led Betzig and his colleagues on a quest to obtain the most candid, au naturel footage of living cells ever taken.

By combining two high-tech imaging processes, the team captured unbelievably clear, 3D footage of individual cells going about their microscopic business inside living tissues. The team primarily tested their new microscopy technique by tracking cells inside embryonic zebrafish, but also turned their lenses to nematodes, leaves and organoids derived from human stem cells — and you can see it all now.

In the feast of footage accompanying the researchers' resulting study (published yesterday, April 19, in the journal Science), a human cancer cell slides through blood vessels like a gelatinous John McClane moving through ceiling ducts. An orange immune cell gobbles up blue sugar molecules as it flickers and flames through the inner ear of an embryonic zebrafish. Cells divide, merge and migrate through the innermost canals of living organisms in stunningly crisp, multicolored detail.

For their new study, the researchers built a custom microscope that is like "three microscopes in one," according to a statement released with the paper. The rig relies on two complex microscopy methods. One technique, adaptive optics, involves intentionally deforming the microscope's mirror to compensate for distortions in the incoming picture. (This method is regularly used in telescopes for astronomy.)

The second method is called lattice light-sheet microscopy, which repeatedly swipes a thin sheet of light over the target cell to capture a flurry of 2D images that can be stacked into a high-resolution, 3D composite. Combining these methods results in a "Frankenstein's monster" of microscopy, Betzig said — but the images the approach produces are undeniably cool.

Unfortunately, you won't see a microscope like this in your school science lab anytime soon. According to Betzig, the technology is complicated, expensive and cumbersome (the microscope Betzig's team used fills a table 10 feet, or 3 meters, long). Maybe within 10 years, Betzig said, this type of imaging will be more accessible to biologists. Until then, grab a microscopic bag of popcorn and enjoy the show.

Originally published on Live Science.

Two advice-filled notes Albert Einstein wrote to a bellboy in Japan 95 years ago, including one that advocated for "a calm and modest life," fetched more than $1.5 million at an auction on Tuesday (Oct. 24).  

In October 1922, Einstein was traveling to Japan to deliver a series of lectures when he received a telegraph announcing that he had won the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. The physicist was hardly ever short on groundbreaking theories, but found himself short on cash when he wanted to tip a bellboy who had delivered an item to his room at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

In lieu of a monetary tip, Einstein gave the bellboy two thoughtful notes he had just written on hotel stationary. Einstein told the bellboy to keep the letters, "as their future value may be much higher than a standard tip," according to Winner's Auctions and Exhibitions, in Jerusalem, which auctioned the letters. [8 Ways You Can See Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Real Life]

The longer note, popularly called the "happiness letter," reads: "A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness." (The original German reads, "Stilles bescheidenes Leben gibt mehr Glueck als erfolgreiches Streben, verbunden mit bestaendiger Unruhe.")

A bidding war for the letter lasted 25 minutes, and ended with an anonymous buyer purchasing it for $1,560,000, a price that includes an additional charge known as the buyer's premium.

The other note Einstein gave the bellboy says, "Where there's a will there's a way." (The original German says, "Wo ein Wille ist, da ist auch ein Weg.") Another anonymous buyer purchased that note for $240,000, an amount that also includes the buyer's premium, according to the auction house.

Despite an invitation to the Nobel Prize ceremony, Einstein opted to continue his journey in Japan, which is why he didn't travel to Stockholm that December to receive his award in person, auction officials said.

Original article on Live Science.

Mark your calendars: Some big astronomy news is set to drop today (Oct. 16).

At 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on that day, scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo collaborations, as well as researchers from a number of other institutions, will hold a news conference at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

"The gathering will begin with an overview of new findings from LIGO, Virgo and partners that span the globe, followed by details from telescopes that work with the LIGO and Virgo collaborations to study extreme events in the cosmos," officials with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which is organizing the event, wrote in a media advisory.

The LIGO collaboration famously made the first-ever detection of gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time first predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago. Earlier this month, three of LIGO's founders won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics for that groundbreaking discovery, which came in September 2015. The LIGO group has also announced three other detections.

The most recent detection, which was announced on Sept. 27, was made jointly by LIGO and the Virgo collaboration, which uses a gravitational-wave detector in Italy.

Gravitational waves are generated by the acceleration of massive objects. All four detections to date have involved merging black holes, but LIGO and Virgo could theoretically detect ripples spawned by other objects and events as well.

The NSF's media advisory doesn't give any solid clues about Monday's announcement. But the nature of the press event makes clear that it will be a big deal. The news conference will consist of two separate panel discussions involving a total of 15 scientists. And NSF Director France Córdova will moderate the first panel. (The NSF funds LIGO, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

In addition, related news conferences are taking place at the same time Monday in London and Munich.

What exactly have the LIGO and Virgo teams, and their colleagues, discovered? We'll find out soon enough.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

The photoelectric effect refers to what happens when electrons are emitted from a material that has absorbed electromagnetic radiation. Physicist Albert Einstein was the first to describe the effect fully, and received a Nobel Prize for his work. 

What is the photoelectric effect?

Light with energy above a certain point can be used to knock electrons loose, freeing them from a solid metal surface, according to Scientific American. Each particle of light, called a photon, collides with an electron and uses some of its energy to dislodge the electron. The rest of the photon's energy transfers to the free negative charge, called a photoelectron.

Understanding how this works revolutionized modern physics. Applications of the photoelectric effect brought us "electric eye" door openers, light meters used in photography, solar panels and photostatic copying.

Discovery

Before Einstein, the effect had been observed by scientists, but they were confused by the behavior because they didn't fully understand the nature of light. In the late 1800s, physicists James Clerk Maxwell in Scotland and Hendrik Lorentz in the Netherlands determined that light appears to behave as a wave. This was proven by seeing how light waves demonstrate interference, diffraction and scattering, which are common to all sorts of waves (including waves in water.)

So Einstein's argument in 1905 that light can also behave as sets of particles was revolutionary because it did not fit with the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation. Other scientists had postulated the theory before him, but Einstein was the first to fully elaborate on why the phenomenon occurred – and the implications.

For example, Heinrich Hertz of Germany was the first person to see the photoelectric effect, in 1887. He discovered that if he shone ultraviolet light onto metal electrodes, he lowered the voltage needed to make a spark move behind the electrodes, according to English astronomer David Darling. 

Then in 1899, in England, J.J. Thompson demonstrated that ultraviolet light hitting a metal surface caused the ejection of electrons. A quantitative measure of the photoelectric effect came in 1902, with work by Philipp Lenard (a former assistant to Hertz.) It was clear that light had electrical properties, but what was going on was unclear.

According to Einstein, light is made up of little packets, at first called quanta and later photons. How quanta behave under the photoelectric effect can be understood through a thought experiment. Imagine a marble circling in a well, which would be like a bound electron to an atom. When a photon comes in, it hits the marble (or electron), giving it enough energy to escape from the well. This explains the behavior of light striking metal surfaces.

While Einstein, then a young patent clerk in Switzerland, explained the phenomenon in 1905, it took 16 more years for the Nobel Prize to be awarded for his work. This came after American physicist Robert Millikan not only verified the work, but also found a relation between one of Einstein's constants and Planck's constant. The latter constant describes how particles and waves behave in the atomic world. 

Further early theoretical studies on the photoelectric effect were performed by Arthur Compton in 1922 (who showed that X-rays also could be treated as photons and earned the Nobel Prize in 1927), as well as Ralph Howard Fowler in 1931 (who looked at the relationship between metal temperatures and photoelectric currents.)

Applications

While the description of the photoelectric effect sounds highly theoretical, there are many practical applications of its work. Britannica describes a few:

Photoelectric cells were originally used to detect light, using a vacuum tube containing a cathode, to emit electrons, and an anode, to gather the resulting current. Today, these "phototubes" have advanced to semiconductor-based photodiodes that are used in applications such as solar cells and fiber optics telecommunications.

Photomultiplier tubes are a variation of the phototube, but they have several metal plates called dynodes. Electrons are released after light strikes the cathodes. The electrons then fall onto the first dynode, which releases more electrons that fall on the second dynode, then on to the third, fourth, and so forth. Each dynode amplifies the current; after about 10 dynodes, the current is strong enough for the photomultipliers to detect even single photons. Examples of this are used in spectroscopy (which breaks apart light into different wavelengths to learn more about the chemical compositions of star, for example), and computerized axial tomography (CAT) scans that examine the body.

Other applications of photodiodes and photomultipliers include:

• imaging technology, including (older) television camera tubes or image intensifiers;
• studying nuclear processes;
• chemically analyzing materials based on their emitted electrons;
• giving theoretical information about how electrons in atoms transition between different energy states.

But perhaps the most important application of the photoelectric effect was setting off the quantum revolution, according to

Scientific American. It led physicists to think about the nature of light and the structure of atoms in an entirely new way.

Additional resources

• Physics Hypertextbook: Photoelectric Effect
• Khan Academy: Photoelectric Effect

For illuminating the weird cellular phenomenon of "self-eating," Yoshinori Ohsumi has won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Nobel Foundation announced this morning (Oct. 3).

Called autophagy — from the Greek words "auto" and "phagein," meaning self and to eat — the process allows cells to destroy their own guts and essentially recycle them.

Little was known about the odd behavior until Ohsumi's "brilliant experiments" in the early 1990s, according to a statement by the Nobel Foundation. In these experiments, the Fukuoka, Japan-born scientist identified genes in yeast that were crucial to autophagy, revealing the underlying mechanisms of the process in yeast and showing that similar mechanisms were used in human cells. [The 10 Noblest Nobel Prize Winners of All Time]

Discoveries by Ohsumi, who is at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, led to a new understanding of how cells recycle their contents, revealing how autophagy is key in other physiological processes, such as a cell's response to infection or starvation.

The discovery can be traced back to the 1950s, when scientists discovered a specialized compartment, or organelle, inside cells that digested proteins, carbs and lipids (fats). Researchers later found, surprisingly, that whole other organelles were sometimes found inside this specialized compartment, called a lisosome. They knew there must be a transport system to get these relatively large cellular parts to the compartment. These travel vehicles, now called autophagosomes, transported "cellular cargo" to the lysosome to be broken down, researchers found, according to the Nobel statement.

One mystery that remained, however, was how the cell ditched and recycled larger protein complexes and wearied organelles. That's where Ohsumi's experiments come into play.

"The vacuole was thought to be just a garbage can in the cell, and not very many people were interested in its physiology," Ohsumi told The Journal of Cell Biology in a Q&A in 2012. "So I thought it would be good to study transport in the vacuole because I would not have much competition." (In addition, he said, an advancement in the lab he was working in also nudged his research.)

Ohsumi was interested in understanding autophagy in the human counterpart of the lisosome, called the vacuole. Yeast is often used as a model for human cells, but yeast is tiny. So, he had to figure out a way to actually see the inner workings of yeast cells.  

"Ohsumi reasoned that if he could disrupt the degradation process in the vacuole while the process of autophagy was active, then autophagosomes should accumulate within the vacuole and become visible under the microscope," according to the statement.

By culturing mutated yeast that lacked enzymes used for degradation in the vacuole, while simultaneously starving the cells to trigger autophagy, Ohsumi was able to observe vacuoles filled with small vesicles that hadn't been degraded. He proved that autophagy occurs in yeast cells and went on to identify the genes involved in the process.

As for why he entered the research field in the first place, Ohsumi credits his father: "I was probably influenced by my father, who was a professor of engineering at Kyushu University. I was familiar with academic life while I was growing up. But whereas my father worked in a very industrially oriented field, I was more interested in the natural sciences," he told The Journal of Cell Biology.

Ohsumi will receive this year's Nobel Prize amount of 8 million Swedish krona (about $937,000).

Original article on Live Science.

Female Firsts

Hillary Clinton made history on June 7 when she became the first woman to claim the presidential nomination of a major political party in the U.S. 

To note this historic achievement, Live Science has rounded up some of the famous "firsts" for women in science, technology and medicine.

Read on to learn about seven other history-making women.

Valentina Tereshkova

Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space when she piloted the Soviet mission Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963.

Tereshkova's mission lasted three days, during which she performed various tests on herself to collect data on how the female body reacted to spaceflight.

Sally Ride, who flew on the Challenger space shuttle in 1983, was the first American woman in space. 

Marie Curie

Chemist and physicist Marie Curie claims several firsts: In 1903, Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, which was awarded to her for her physics research on radiation. Curie shared the prize with her husband, Pierre Curie, and French physicist Henri Becquerel. 

Then, in 1911, Curie won her second Nobel Prize — this time, for her work in chemistry. Curie had discovered two elements: radium and polonium.

Curie is the only woman to have ever won two Nobel Prizes, as well as the only person to have ever won the prize in two different fields. [Marie Curie: Facts & Biography]

Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell

Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to earn an M.D. from a medical school in the United States.

Before Blackwell applied to medical school, several physicians told her that such an education was not available to women. She applied to over a dozen schools, and was accepted to Geneva Medical College in New York after the faculty voted on it. Blackwell graduated in 1849 and went on to practice obstetrics and gynecology.

Blackwell's younger sister, Emily, followed in her footsteps, earning her M.D. from Western Reserve University's medical school in Ohio in 1854.   

Jacqueline Cochran

In 1953, Jacqueline Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier when she piloted an F-86 Sabre jet to speeds that exceeded Mach 1 (the speed of sound, which is 761.2 mph, or 1,225 km/h). Eleven years later, Cochran doubled her speed, flying a jet at Mach 2 in 1964.

Cochran learned to fly planes while she was working as a cosmetics saleswoman.

In addition to flying faster than the speed of sound, Cochran set a number of other records in her lifetime, including altitude and distance records. [Image Gallery: Breaking the Sound Barrier]

Ellen Swallow Richards

Ellen Swallow Richards was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1870, when Richards was admitted, the school noted that "her admission did not establish a precedent for the general admission of females," according to MIT's library archives. 

Richards studied chemistry and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1873.

Two years after graduating, Richards helped to establish a laboratory at the school dedicated to educating women in chemistry. The Women's Laboratory was opened in 1876, and Richards held the position of instructor in chemistry and mineralogy.

Dana Ulery

Dana Ulery became the first female engineer at NASA when she started working at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, in 1961.

Ulery studied computer science, and worked to develop algorithms for NASA's Deep Space Network while at JPL. The Deep Space Network uses antennas around the world to communicate with spacecraft.

Later, she went on to work at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, where she was one of the first female managers.  

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart was the first woman, and second person overall, to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She took off on May 20, 1932, from Newfoundland and landed 15 hours later, in Ireland. (She originally planned to fly to Paris, but due to bad weather, she decided to cut the flight short.)

Earhart went on to set seven women's speed and distance aviation records.

Earhart disappeared in 1937 during an attempt to fly around the world. The unsolved mystery of her disappearance continues to intrigue people today.

Originally published on Live Science.

This story was updated at 10:00 a.m. ET on Nov. 4.

In 1963, a British biophysicist won a shiny Nobel Prize medal for discovering how the nerve cells of squid generate an electrical pulse when stimulated. His hard-earned hunk of gold recently sold at auction for nearly $800,000.

The Nobel Prize medal, sold by Nate D. Sanders Auctions in Los Angeles, belonged to Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, who helped pioneer research on the central nervous system. Hodgkin was awarded the prize in physiology or medicine along with his colleagues Andrew Fielding Huxley and John Eccles. The laureates conducted their research on the giant axon of squid because these animals have a single thick axon that was easy to manipulate with the scientific tools of the time. But the scientists' work helped explain how the central nervous systems of most animals function.

Specifically, Hodgkin and his colleagues discovered the chemical processes that occur in cells that allow the passage of electrical impulses along individual nerve fibers. These electrical impulses, or "action potentials," as Hodgkin and Huxley dubbed them (Eccles was involved with different, but complementary, research from that of his fellow laureates), are what enable a central nervous system to coordinate an organism's activities. [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]

Hodgkin died in 1998 in Cambridge, England, where he had long served as a professor in the physiology department at Trinity College, Cambridge.

The laureate's 23-karat-gold prize medal was auctioned off on Oct. 29, alongside a few related pieces of memorabilia. The other items included a New York Times clipping from 1963 that details the scientist's award-winning research, and photographs of Hodgkin from the 1963 Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway.

While the $795,614 that Hodgkin's medal brought in at auction is no small sum, this price pales in comparison to the $4.76 million paid by the bidder who took home James Watson's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014.  Watson, who was awarded his Nobel Prize in 1962, is one of the scientists credited with discovering the structure of DNA.

However, Hodgkin's medal was the most expensive one to sell so far this year. Five other Nobel Prize medals have been auctioned off in 2015. The cheapest, Simon Kuznets' 1971 Nobel Prize in economics, went for just under $400,000.

The first-ever Nobel Prize medal to be sold at auction belonged to William Randal Cremer, who won the Peace Prize in 1903. Sold in 1985, the prestigious award garnered $17,000 at auction.

Editor's Note: This story was updated to correct a statement about the research conducted by Hodgkin and his colleagues. The scientists conducted their research using the giant axons of normal-sized squid — not axons from giant squid, as the article originally stated.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

I’m sure I’m not the only one surprised by the announcement that half of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has gone to a researcher who spent her entire career researching traditional Chinese medicine. Based at the Chinese Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing (now the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences) since 1965, scientist Youyou Tu, her colleagues, and home institution may well be just as stunned today as I am.

Being granted the Lasker Award is often a good predictor of Nobel Prize prospects. Tu received one in 2011 for her discovery of Artemisinin as an alternative malaria cure to the standard chloroquine, which was quickly losing ground in the 1960s due to increasingly drug-resistant parasites. Scientific research on the pharmaceutically active properties of traditional Chinese medicinals, however, has never been a predictor for such widespread international recognition.

Traditional medical knowledge anywhere in the world has not even been on the radar for Nobel Prize prospects. Until now, that is. So how should we interpret this arguably seismic shift in international attention on traditional Chinese medicine?

Watch the announcement of the winners and the following Q&A.

Discoveries to be made in historical record

In the question-and-answer session after the announcement at the Karolinska Institute, which awards the Nobels, one of the panelists emphasized not just the quality of Tu’s scientific research, but also the value of recorded empirical experience in the past.

The antifebrile effect of the Chinese herb Artemisia annua (qinghaosu 青蒿素), or sweet wormwood, was known 1,700 years ago, he noted. Tu was the first to extract the biologically active component of the herb – called Artemisinin – and clarify how it worked. The result was a paradigm shift in the medical field that allowed for Artemisinin to be both clinically studied and produced on a large scale.

Tu has always maintained that she drew her inspiration from the medical text of a fourth-century Chinese physician and alchemist named Ge Hong 葛洪 (circa 283-343).

His Emergency Formulas To Keep at Hand (Zhouhou beijifang 肘後備急方) can best be understood as a practical handbook of drug formulas for emergencies. It was a book light enough to keep “behind the elbow” (zhouhou), namely, in one’s sleeve, where Chinese men sometimes carried their belongings. We can discern from Ge’s astute description of his patients' symptoms that people then suffered not only from malaria but also from other deadly diseases including smallpox, typhoid and dysentery.

Beyond recording the fever-fighting qualities of Artemisia annua, Physician Ge also wrote about how Ephedra sinica (mahuang 麻黃) effectively treated respiratory problems and how arsenic sulphide (“red Realgar,” xionghuang 雄黃) helped control some dermatological problems.

Traditional ingredients, modern drugs

Just because a compound has natural roots and has long been used in traditional medicine is no reason to take it lightly.

You might remember that in 2004, the FDA actually banned ephedra-containing dietary and performance-enhancing supplements. They’d been the cause not only of serious side effects but also several deaths. The ban remains in effect in the US despite a court challenge from ephedra manufacturers. Related drug ephedrine, however, is used to treat low blood pressure and is a common ingredient in over-the-counter asthma medicines.

As for Realgar, its toxicity was well-known in both ancient Greece and Chinese antiquity. In Chinese medical thought, though, skillfully administered toxins may also be powerful antidotes for other toxins. Realgar thus continues to be used in Chinese medicine as a drug that relieves toxicity and kills parasites. Applied topically, it treats scabies, ringworm and rashes on the skin’s surface; taken internally, it expels intestinal parasites, particularly roundworms.

Although biomedicine does not currently use Realgar or its related mineral arsenicals in treatments, Chinese researchers have been studying their anticancer properties for some time now. In 2011, a Chinese researcher at Johns Hopkins University, Jun Liu (with other colleagues), also discovered that the Chinese medicinal plant Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F (lei gong teng 雷公藤 “Thunder God Vine”) is effective against cancer, arthritis and skin graft rejection.

Tu’s groundbreaking work on artemisinin, in fact, can be seen as the tip of the iceberg of the extensive and global scientific study of pharmacologically active Chinese medicinals, including another successful antimalarial Dichroa febrifuga (changshan 常山) that has roots in the new scientific research on Chinese medicinals in 1940s mainland China.

It was validation of this traditional drug as an antimalarial in the 1940s, in fact, that set the foundation for Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung’s directive two decades later in the late 1960s to find a cure for malaria. Indeed, Tu’s research is best understood within the complex politics and history of top-down support from the Chinese government of Chinese medicine in mainland China during the long durée of the 20th century, and not just in the Maoist period.

Even outside mainland China, though, such research has yielded results. In the 1970s, for example, US and Japanese researchers developed the statin drugs used to lower cholesterol from studying the mold Monascus purpureus that makes red yeast rice, well, “red.”

Empirical evidence of the medical efficacy in the rich Chinese medical archive from centuries earlier similarly influenced the initial direction of this research.

Medically bilingual

So is this Nobel Prize for Tu’s discovery a signal that Western science has changed how it perceives alternative systems of medicine? Perhaps, but only slightly.

One of the Karolinska Institute panelists acknowledged that there are many sources from which scientists draw inspiration to develop drugs. Among them, we should not ignore the long history of experiences from the past. As he clarified, such sources may be inspirational, but the old herbs found there cannot be used just as they are. Don’t underestimate the sophisticated methods Tu used to extract the active Artemisinin compound from Artemesia annua, another one of the panelists concluded.

So the Nobel Prize is not only acknowledging this complete transformation of a Chinese herb through modern biomedical science into something powerfully efficacious, but also the millions of lives saved because of its successful application worldwide, particularly in the developing world.

But there’s something else that marks Tu as extraordinary vis-à-vis both her two fellow Nobel Laureates for medicine, William C Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura, and her more Western medically oriented colleagues in pharmacology. She embodies, in both her history and her research, what I call medical bilingualism – the ability not only to read in two different medical languages but to understand their different histories, conceptual differences, and, most importantly for this unexpected news, potential value for therapeutic interventions in the present.

This medical bilingualism is a quality that current researchers mining the same fine line between the empirical knowledge of traditional medical traditions and the highest level of modern biomedical science would be lucky to share with Nobel Laureate Youyou Tu.

Marta Hanson, Associate Professor of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on LiveScience .

This year's Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three scientists whose research helps to explain how human beings continue to thrive despite an invisible disadvantage — their totally unstable DNA.

Each of the three recipients of the prestigious award — Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar —  has researched a different way that cells repair damaged DNA to safeguard genetic information. Their research not only helps to explain how human cells function, but it could also be used to develop new techniques for fighting diseases like cancer.

Human DNA can be damaged by sunlight (UV radiation), environmental toxins, carcinogenic substances (like those in cigarette smoke) and various other factors. But even if people aren't exposed to these harms, their DNA is still unstable, as cell genomes undergo spontaneous changes many times every day. In some cases, the constant division of cells inside the body can go haywire, resulting in defective copies of DNA. [Nobel Prize in Chemistry: 1901 – Present]

So how do humans go on living with all of these unpredictable strands of genetic material? Luckily for humankind, many molecular systems are in place inside the body that monitor and repair DNA, and keep total chaos at bay. The recipients of this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry discovered a few of those repair systems.

Tomas Lindahl, an emeritus scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in the United Kingdom, was one of the first scientists to ask an important question about DNA: How stable is it, really? In the 1970s, most scientists thought the answer to this question was straightforward — DNA is really stable. If it weren't stable, complex life on Earth (including human beings) would never have evolved in the first place.

But by experimenting with RNA (DNA's cousin) and, eventually, with DNA itself, Lindahl came to conclude that DNA isn't stable at all. In fact, it's constantly decaying. But he also discovered that there's a very important molecular mechanism at work that keeps DNA from collapsing completely: base excision repair, in which special enzymes remove damage in DNA.

Lindahl's breakthrough finding opened a whole new field of research into other ways that cells repair DNA. Aziz Sancar, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, discovered how cells repair DNA that's damaged by UV radiation. This molecular process, known as nucleotide excision repair, has led to a better understanding of why some people develop skin cancer — their nucleotide excision repair system is defective.

Paul Modrich, a professor of biochemistry at Duke University in North Carolina, discovered yet another molecular repair system called mismatched repair. During cell division, DNA replication mistakes can be made, leading to mismatched nucleotides (the pairs of bases that make up the rungs of the DNA "ladder"). These mismatches can lead to all kinds of cellular problems if left uncorrected (including certain cancers). But the mismatched repair mechanism corrects many of these bad pairings between nucleotides, reducing the error frequency during DNA replication by about a thousand times.

The research conducted by all three Nobel recipients has advanced the field of chemistry, and will help in the development of new tools for fighting diseases like cancer that affect human cells, representatives with the Nobel Foundation said in a statement.

The pioneering chemists will share the Nobel Prize amount of 8 million Swedish krona (about $960,000). You can read more about their research in biochemistry and genetics on the Nobel Prize website.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

James Watson, one of the scientists credited with discovering the structure of DNA, recently made history when he became the first-ever living Nobel laureate to put his prize medal up for auction. And now, Watson has a new claim to fame: Yesterday (Dec. 4), his little gold medal sold for a record-breaking $4.76 million.

The astonishing price tag makes Watson's Nobel the most expensive Nobel Prize medal ever sold in a world auction, according to Christie's New York, the auction house that conducted the sale. Watson was awarded the medal in 1962 for co-discovering the twisted-ladder structure of DNA. His colleagues, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, were also honored with Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine.

Last year, the Nobel Prize medal belonging to Crick was sold at auction by the late biologist's family. The medal garnered about $2 million, but another piece of paraphernalia related to the landmark discovery — a handwritten letter to Crick's son explaining the double-helix structure of a DNA molecule — sold for more than $6 million in April 2013. [Code of Life: Photos of DNA Structure]

Bidding for Watson's Nobel Prize medal started at $1.5 million, but the price jumped steadily upward as three Christie's clients battled for the scientific artifact, according to Christie's Books and Manuscripts Director Francis Wahlgren.

"One bidder dropped out at the $3.8 million mark. The remaining two phone bidders battled on, in increments of $100,000, until the final, record-setting price of $4.76 million was achieved – more than double the previous price realized for a Nobel Prize medal at auction," Wahlgren said in a statement.

In addition to the medal, Christie's also auctioned off a draft of Watson's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Penned by the scientist on hotel stationary before the Nobel Prize banquet in Stockholm, the handwritten notes were sold for $365,000.

A handwritten draft of Watson's Nobel lecture — delivered on Dec. 11, 1962, a few days after he received his prize medal — was also sold at yesterday's auction. The notes for the lecture, titled "The Involvement of RNA in the Synthesis of Proteins," sold for $245,000.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

You may never actually win a Nobel Prize, but that doesn't mean you can't take one of these prestigious awards home with you. Next week, the Nobel Prize gold medal that was awarded to James Watson in 1962 for the discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA hits the auction block in New York City.

The medal will be sold on Dec. 4, and Christie's New York, the auction house conducting the sale, said this piece of scientific memorabilia could fetch between $2.5 million and $3.5 million.

Also included in the upcoming auction are the handwritten notes that Watson wrote for his acceptance speech at the Nobel Prize banquet ceremony on Dec. 10, 1962, in Stockholm, Sweden. A draft of the lecture he gave the day after the ceremony is also up for auction, and is expected to sell for at least $200,000. [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Watson, as well as his colleagues Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Widely considered to be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century, the finding gave rise to the science of molecular biology and greatly advanced the field of medicine.

This is the first time in history that a living Nobel Prize recipient (Watson is now 86 years old) has elected to auction off his or her prize medal, according to Christie's. Watson intends to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale to organizations that support scientific research, as well as academic and charitable institutions.

Just last year, Christie's auctioned off another, related piece of memorabilia— a letter penned by Watson's colleague Crick in 1953. The seven-page, handwritten letter, which was sent to Crick's then-12-year-old son, sold for an astounding $6,059,650. The note outlined the discovery that would eventually earn Crick, Watson and Wilkins the coveted Nobel Prize.

Not long after Christie's sold Crick's so-called "secret of life" letter, another New York auction house, Heritage Auction, sold the scientist's Nobel Prize gold medal. Crick's medal was sold to a Chinese biotech executive for $2 million. The buyer said he planned to use the medal to promote science in China. Portions of the proceeds from that sale were also donated to research institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom, according to Heritage Auction.

With the sale of both Watson and Crick's Nobel Prize medals, only one of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine medals remains in the possession of its original owner. Though Wilkins died in 2004, it does not appear that his family ever put the medal up for sale.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists for developing a microscopy method that could reach the nanodimension and reveal the inner workings of living cells at work, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today (Oct. 8).

The work of the Nobel Laureates, Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner, was "groundbreaking," according to the Swedish Academy, as it surpassed what was thought to be a physical limit in optical microscopy. In 1873, microscopist Ernst Abbe said light microscopes could never visualize with any resolution anything smaller than 0.2 micrometers, or half the wavelength of light. For comparison, an E. coli bacterial cell is about 3 micrometers long, while the influenza virus is 0.13 micrometers (130 nanometers), and the hemoglobin inside red blood cells is just 0.006 micrometers (6.5 nm) in size, according to the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center.

Because of the trio's achievements, scientists can now use light microscopy that relies on fluorescent molecules to peer into the nanoworld, or objects (and living things) that are on the order of just billionths of a meter in size. [Bioscapes: See Award-Winning Microscope Images]

In 2000, Hell developed what is called stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, in which one laser beam makes fluorescent molecules glow and another "cancels out all fluorescence except for that in a nanometer-sized volume," according to a statement by the Swedish Academy. The result is a resolution greater than that put forth by Abbe's calculation.

Working separately, Betzig and Moerner came up with single-molecule microscopy, which images the same area of a sample several times, letting just a few molecules glow each time. By superimposing these images, the method can produce a super-image with nanolevel resolution. Betzig used the method for the first time in 2006.

Asked today how he felt when he received the call from Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, about his award, Hell said, "I was totally surprised. I couldn't believe it." Hell added that he then recognized the voice of Normark and so knew the call was real.

Betzig is now at the Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia; Hell is at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, and German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg; and Moerner is at Stanford University.

The three scientists will split this year's Nobel Prize amount of 8 Swedish Krona or $1.1 million.

So far this week, the Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the brain's "inner GPS," the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of blue LEDs, and now the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Academy will announce the Nobel Prize in Literature tomorrow (Oct. 9) at 7 a.m. EDT (1 p.m. local time in Sweden) at the earliest, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday (Oct. 10) at 5:00 a.m. EDT (11 a.m. local time in Sweden) at the earliest, and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday (Oct. 13) at 7:00 a.m. EDT (1 p.m. local time in Sweden) at the earliest. You can watch a live webcast on Live Science of the announcements.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Continuing a 113-year-old tradition, the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm will award the 2014 Nobel Prizes beginning Monday (Oct. 6) to the best and brightest minds in their fields — or, as the prizes' founder, Alfred Nobel, described it, those who have bestowed the "greatest benefit on mankind."

You can watch a live webcast on Live Science of the Nobel Prize announcements beginning at 5:30 a.m. EDT (11:30 a.m. local time in Sweden), when Göran Hansson, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, will announce the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Each day will bring new Nobel Prize recipients. Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, will announce the Nobel Prize in physics at 5:45 a.m. EDT at the earliest (11:45 a.m. Swedish time) on Tuesday (Oct. 7). [Watch Live: This Year's Nobel Prize Announcements]

The prizes for chemistry, peace and economics will be announced Wednesday (Oct. 8), Friday (Oct. 10) and Monday (Oct. 13), respectively. Per tradition, the Swedish Academy will set the date for the Nobel Prize in literature at a later time.

Through the years, some Nobel laureates have stood out more than others. For instance, Nobel winners are typically in their 50s and 60s, but the youngest winner, Lawrence Bragg, was just 25 when he received the 1915 Nobel Prize in physics for his work examining crystal structures with X-rays. The oldest person to win the award, Leonid Hurwicz, won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in 2007 at age 90.

Iconic and instrumental people and organizations have won Nobel prizes. Last year, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons won a peace prize for its work in eliminating chemical weapons in Syria. In 1962, Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins won the physiology or medicine Nobel for discovering the molecular structure of DNA. (Famously, Rosalind Franklin, who helped with the discovery, did not posthumously receive the award.)

For all their pomp and circumstance, Nobel Prize selections are sometimes controversial. For example, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz won the 1949 physiology prize for developing the prefrontal lobotomy. In the procedure, now considered deeply unethical, doctors once operated on the mentally ill, depressed or learning-disabled, cutting a key connection in the prefrontal region of the brain that can lead to a vegetative state.

Last year was a big one for physics, as Peter Higgs, of the United Kingdom, and François Englert, of Belgium, snagged the physics prize for predicting the existence of the elusive Higgs boson particle, which is thought to explain how other particles get their mass. The particle was finally detected at the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, in 2012.

The prizes have a storied history. Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, was dismayed when a newspaper mistakenly published his obituary and called him the "merchant of death" for his creation. To brighten his legacy, Nobel left the vast majority of his fortune to fund prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. His predecessors awarded the first Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1969.

Nominating a contender is a lengthy process that begins in September, more than a year before the prizes are announced. Only people who have an official invitation or the proper qualifications can nominate a person for the prizes. Then, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Norwegian Nobel Committee pick a winner based on recommendations from experts in each field.

The prizes are given to each Nobel winner, called a Nobel laureate, in December.

The Nobel Prizes aren't the only awards in town. In September, an annual parody of the awards, called the Ig Nobel Prizes, gave recognition to a number of doozies, including researchers who examined the slipperiness of banana peels and the psychopathic tendencies of night owls.

Check out discussions on social media at #NobelPrize2014.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Walter Gilbert won the Nobel Prize in 1980 in Chemistry for his contribution to sequence DNA, or “determination of base sequences in a nucleic acid”. Mohit Kumar Jolly, researcher at Rice University and contributor to The Conversation, interviewed him at the 2014 Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting.

You received the Nobel Prize for DNA sequencing. When do you think we will be able to get our genomes sequenced cheaply?

Sequencing is definitely becoming cheaper and more accessible. One can sequence a couple of full genomes today for less than US$50,000. In 1985, human DNA sequencing cost was thought to be around US$3 billion. I hope that by 2020, drug stores can do genome sequencing for a few hundred dollars.

But, one must be careful – whole genome sequencing is not at all accurate for medical diagnosis. I got my own genome sequenced, but they missed the local rearrangements in my genome – it was not well-curated.

Also, it is common belief that once we can sequence the genome, we can edit it to have babies with higher IQ for example. This is a myth, because it is very rare that one gene corresponds to one property.

What do you think about the prospects of personalised medicine?

I support the cause of personalised medicine. I believe that it has two underlying themes – each one of us has different metabolism and each one of us has a different manifestation of the same disease. My cancer is not the same as your cancer, so the only way one can categorise ultimately is to have a limited number of subtypes and then develop drugs against those subtypes.

But as you can see, big pharma companies of course do not want people to believe in personalised medicine. Otherwise how would they sell their generic drugs? I don’t understand why they don’t realise that clinical trials get easier and much cheaper with subtyping – they do not play this market game well.

What are your views on “big data”?

Big data promises to collect large sets of data and find associations between genes and diseases. There’s definitely something useful in the data collected, but the danger is that we have no clue how to interpret it. Also, you must remember that all statistically significant things are not biologically significant. So, it is definitely not a panacea.

There was a recent controversy about patenting genes. What did you make of that?

I agree with the US Supreme Court decision that one cannot patent anything that exists naturally. Since a gene is a part of the genome, I don’t think one should be allowed to patent it. But companies are allowed to patent some genetic tests that identify risks for certain diseases based on one’s genes.

What problems does science face today?

We are spending money on problems that can have immediate outcomes. Then we are forced to use only our current level of understanding. There is a lot that what we don’t know. Imagine that if we had asked Benjamin Franklin to justify the importance of the “spark” he had found, would we have had electricity today?

Another major problem is the explosion in scientific manpower that has not necessarily led to the betterment of science, especially in biology. In fact, bad material that gets published has increased. In biology, the top journals – Cell, Science and Nature – have created a mess. They tell the authors “give me the headline, not the data”. And then we see retractions and shattered careers and dreams.

What advice would you like to give to young scientists?

Do not blindly believe whatever you read. I often used to give my students papers that said opposite things and then tell them to explain to me how they were consistent, if at all. Also, do not continue science if it does not excite you. Science cannot be a nine-to-five job.

Walter Gilbert does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Science lovers with a sense of humor take note: it's time for the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

A parody of the prestigious Nobel Prize ceremony, the 24th annual Ig Nobel Prize event, will honor the men and women whose contributions to science are both thought provoking and kind of funny.

You can watch a live webcast on Live Science of the evening's tomfooleries, beginning at 5:40 p.m. ET today (Sept. 18). The ceremony will officially begin at 6 p.m. ET.

Ten prizes will be awarded at the ceremony to scientists and other academics in fields as diverse as physics and environmental protectionto economics and literature. As in years past, audience members and online viewers can expect a slew of intellectually stimulating shenanigans over the course of the evening. [Watch Live @ 6 p.m. ET: Ig Nobel Awards]

The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded to researchers (or a group of researchers) whose work "makes people laugh and then think," according to Improbable Research, the organization that hosts the annual ceremony.

While the organization does not give any clues as to who might be receiving this year's prizes, it's likely that the lucky winners will not disappoint in terms of amusing research subjects. Last year, Ig Nobel recipients included a team of researchers from China and Japan that assessed how listening to opera music affected mice that had recently received heart transplants. The 2013 Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology went to a group of researchers whose work confirmed that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.

Some of the other highlights of this year's ceremony will likely be a remarkably short series of educational talks, known as the 24/7 lectures, in which some of the world's most respected thinkers have 24 seconds to explain a subject related to their fields of study. When the 24 seconds are up, the speaker will then be asked to summarize his or her lecture in just seven words. 

For example, last year, Melissa Franklin, a professor of physics at Harvard University, was called upon to educate the audience on the topic of force. Her 24-second poem on the subject was well received, but it was her concluding summary, "Equal opposite attractive repulsive bang ding crash ow," that really brought the message home for non-physicists (even though it was one word over the allotted seven-word maximum).

This year, three Nobel laureates will be participating in the 24/7 lectures, including Carol Greider, a geneticist who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for her work on chromosome-protecting nucleotide sequences known as telomeres.

In addition to these brief lectures, the ceremony will also feature a mini-opera about food, which is the theme of this year's event. The opera, titled "What's Eating You," is about "people who stop eating food and nourish themselves exclusively with pills," according to Improbable Research. The opera will be performed in part by the ten Nobel laureates that are expected to attend this year's ceremony.

The ten lucky recipients of the 2014 Ig Nobel Prizes will be invited to a gala ceremony held in their honor at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. Prize winners will also be invited to speak at a series of informal lectures held Saturday (Sept. 20) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), also in Cambridge, Mass.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Science doesn't always have to be serious. In fact, sometimes it can be quite funny. Not convinced? You can see for yourself on Thursday (Sept. 18) at the 24th annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, an event that honors the hilarious (and sometimes ridiculous) side of scientific research and discovery.

Much like its slightly more famous counterpart, the Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Prize is bestowed upon those who have recently made significant contributions in such fields as chemistry, physics and biology. However, Ig Nobels tend to go to scientists whose research is as funny as it is thought-provoking.

"The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think," according to a statement from Improbable Research, the organization behind the award ceremony. "The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology." [Silly (and Serious) Science: The 10 Ig Noble Prize Winners of 2013]

Ten Ig Nobels are awarded each year at Harvard's Sanders Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and this year's ceremony will be webcast live on Live Science.

The ceremony is notoriously light-hearted, with a slew of entertaining acts interspersed between acceptance speeches. Each year sees the premiere of an original "mini-opera," with themes that run the gamut from silly to strange. In keeping with the theme of this year's ceremony, which is "food," the latest opera is entitled "What's Eating You," and tells the tale of characters who stop eating food and instead consume only pills.

Though the awards are certainly tongue in cheek, they are presided over by well-respected academics and researchers, including several Nobel laureates. This year's ceremony will feature several 24-second lectures, including one from Martin Chalfie, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, who will speak about bioluminescence. Two other Nobel laureates will also be sharing their wisdom with audience members and viewers of Thursday's ceremony.

Of course, the real stars of the show are the Ig Noble Prize winners themselves. Improbable Research doesn't publish any information regarding who might be present at this year's ceremony, but the organization does keep a full list of every prize winner since the award's inception in 1991.

Some of the most hilarious research lauded in years past includes work done by a team of Italian researchers that led to the discovery that people are capable of walking on water, but only if those people — and the water they're walking on — are located on the moon. The finding earned the scientists last year's Ig Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 2013, the Biology Prize was awarded to two scientists who discovered that there is a kind of Australian beetle that continuously tries to mate with empty beer bottles. And in 1999, a Norwegian doctor was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in medicine for "carefully collecting, classifying and contemplating which kinds of containers his patients chose when submitting urine samples," according to Improbable Research.

In addition to the Ig Nobel ceremony, Improbable Research also hosts a series of informal lectures in the days following the event. These lectures give new prize winners an opportunity to explain why they decided to conduct their strange, obscure or just plain funny scientific research.

When they're not preparing for their annual awards ceremony, the organization also publishes its own magazine, called the Annals of Improbable Research, as well as a series of newsletters and a monthly newspaper column in The Guardian.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

For the first time in history, the Fields Medal — the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics — will be awarded to a woman. The award will go to Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician and professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

Mirzakhani and three other mathematicians will be honored for their original contributions to the field, at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) today (Aug. 13) in Seoul, South Korea. The Fields Medal is the most prestigious international award for mathematics, a field that is missing from Nobel Prize categories. The award is given every four years to accomplished mathematicians under age 40. The first Fields Medal was awarded in 1936, and none of the recipients have been female until now.

"This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians," Mirzakhani said in a statement. "I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years." [The 11 Most Beautiful Mathematical Equations]

Mirzakhani is being awarded the Fields Medal for her outstanding contributions to the understanding the dynamics and geometry of "Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces," according to the International Mathematical Union.

Riemann surfaces are geometric objects whose points each represent a different surface. They are mostly theoretical, but some examples include amoebaes and doughnuts, according to a Stanford statement.

"Perhaps Maryam's most important achievement is her work on dynamics," Curtis McMullen of Harvard University, who was Mirzakhani's doctoral adviser, told the New York Times. There are no exact mathematical solutions for many dynamical systems, which involve surfaces with many handles, like pretzels, McMullen added. "What Maryam discovered is that in another regime, the dynamical orbits are tightly constrained to follow algebraic laws." Mirzakhani was born in 1977 in Tehran, and grew up thinking she would become a writer one day. But she later became interested in mathematics in high school and chose it as her field of study at one of Iran's top schools, Sharif University of Technology. Mirzakhani received her doctoral degree in 2004 from Harvard University and became a professor at Stanford University in 2008.

The other recipients of 2014 Fields Medal are Artur Avila of Denis Diderot University in Paris, Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick, and Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University. To see how Mirzakhani and other awardees explain their work, check out their profiles in Quanta Magazine.

Email Bahar Gholipour. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

The 1935 Nobel Prize in physics that was awarded to English scientist James Chadwick for his discovery of the neutron was sold at auction this week for $329,000.

Sotheby's auction house, which handled the sale yesterday (June 3) in New York, estimated that the Nobel gold medal and its accompanying diploma would sell for between $200,000 and $400,000. Sotheby's did not release any information about the buyer. The seller was a collector of medals and coins, who bought Chadwick's Nobel gold medal and diploma from the famed physicist about 20 years ago. 

With this week's auction, the seller may have been trying to strike the same fortune as Francis Crick's family. The medal awarded to Crick in 1953 for the discovery of DNA's twisted ladder shape was offered at auction last year, marking the first public sale of a Nobel Prize. With little precedent for the sale, Heritage Auctions had valued Crick's medal and diploma at $500,000. It far exceeded expectations, selling for more than $2 million.

Chadwick studied under British scientist Ernest Rutherford, who is considered the father of nuclear physics, and whose model of the atom (which was the first to show that much of its charge was concentrated in a nucleus) earned him a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1908.

Decades later, Chadwick proved the theoretically predicted existence of neutrons — electrically neutral particles in the nucleus of an atom that have slightly more mass than protons. Scientists soon understood that neutrons could be used in nuclear chain reactions to release massive amounts of energy. Chadwick, who was knighted in 1945, was involved in developing the first atomic bombs during World War II, as head of the British contingent of the Manhattan Project. He even witnessed the Trinity bomb test — the world's first nuclear explosion — on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

There's more than one way to get your hands on a Nobel gold medal.

The 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to English physicist James Chadwick for his discovery of the neutron will be offered this morning (June 3).

Sotheby's, which is handling the sale in New York, has estimated that the Nobel medal and its accompanying diploma will sell for $200,000-$400,000. [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]

Selby Kiffer, Sotheby's international senior books specialist, sees the medal as a tangible piece of memorabilia for the discovery of something almost incomprehensibly small. (Neutrons are the uncharged particles found within the nucleus of an atom.)

"It's hard sometimes to get a feel for scientific discovery," Kiffer told Live Science. "How do you collect something as nebulous as the discovery of the neutron? The Nobel Prize gives you that physical artifact that memorializes that great discovery."

Chadwick's research played an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project; in fact, he led the British committee of the Allies' project to develop the first atomic bombs during World War II and was present during the Trinity bomb test in New Mexico. Chadwick, who was knighted in 1945, also foresaw that the discovery of neutrons would have implications for cancer treatment. 

"It is very true that he had hoped the discovery might be put to use in medicine, and he invested his Nobel Prize money in bringing a cyclotron machine to Liverpool to work on a neutron therapy to combat cancer," Kiffer said.

Chadwick's family sold his Nobel medal and diploma about 20 years ago to a collector of metals and numismatics. Kiffer said the collector might have been motivated to sell the Chadwick medal now after an expectation-shattering sale of the Nobel Prize medal and diploma that was awarded to Francis Crick in 1953 for the discovery of DNA's twisted ladder shape.

Last year, Crick's Nobel medal was auctioned off for more than $2 million. Nobel medals have rarely changed hands publicly and this 2013 sale marked the first time one was publicly sold at auction.

Heritage Auctions had valued Crick's Nobel medal and diploma at $500,000. It was ultimately purchased by the CEO of a Chinese biomedical firm for a whopping $2,270,500. During a separate sale last year, a letter penned by Crick set the world record for any letter ever sold at auction when an anonymous bidder paid just over $6 million for the note Crick wrote to his 12-year-old son explaining the DNA discovery.

The Sotheby's auction lot containing Chadwick's Nobel and diploma will start at 10 a.m. ET.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This March, in honor of Women's History Month, LiveScience is taking a look at the accomplishments of some of the most inspirational women in science.