All the news and science from the 2026 Nobel prizes

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:12Nobel Prize Week, when scientists briefly become celebrities and the world recognises the science behind today's innovations. This year's prizes, as always, honoured some fascinating science with big implications. We'll be explaining it all.

0:35From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay, and this is Science Weekly.

0:45Nicola Davis, our science correspondent, you're here kicking off Nobel's Week for us. It's Monday afternoon, and the prize for physiology or medicine was announced earlier on. So who did it go to and what did they win it for? Absolutely. So not the people I expected it for the second year running, but very worthy winners nonetheless. So this year it's gone to a trio of researchers, Carl Dizeroth, Peter Hageman and Jörg Nagel. And they've won equal share of a 12 million kroner prize. That's about in UK money, 300 ,000 each. So I think that's a pretty good start to the week. Good Monday for them.

1:24The official citation, I'm going to just read this so I get this right, is for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. Now that sounds pretty knotty. But in a nutshell, what their work has led to is just a very, very cool tool which allows researchers to study the brain like it's never before. And basically what it is is that they discovered a way to switch nerve cells on and off using light. And that means that you could then map what was going on in the brain in different situations. So this tool is what we now call optogenetics. It really has changed neuroscience.

2:03Yeah, the citation kind of hides quite how cool this idea, this tool is. So tell me about each of the researchers' contributions, how this discovery came about. So it very much is a case of sort of one thing leading into the other. And in some cases, they've all worked together. So they know each other very well. But it started with Peter Hederman and he was very interested in how single-celled algae, certain kind of single-celled algae, swim towards light. How do they work out where to go? And so he started looking at this kind of tiny little spot on the surface of the cell, the single-celled alga, which has got some kind of light-detecting molecule in it.

2:43And he was looking at that. And he worked out that there's some kind of protein there that allows the cell to detect and respond to light. And he then worked with Jörg Nagel. And together, they were able to identify that protein. So they were able to take the gene that gave rise to that protein, put it into fog eggs. And they were able to show that when you illuminated that protein with light, you got an electrical signal in the cell. which was pretty amazing and then you've got kyle dies off who comes in and he then starts to do things like putting the gene for this protein into the cells within the brains of living mice and showed that if you shine some light on them by these tiny little optic fibers that you put through the skull of the mice and you shine light on these cells that have been genetically tweaked to produce this protein, then you can get electrical signals in those cells.

3:41And this is an amazing revelation, the fact that you can turn cells essentially on and off, the electrical signals on and off, using light. It really is the most incredible science. So you're able to genetically edit so that you're putting in something that produces this protein that responds to light so that, as you say, you can essentially turn cells on and off. And it's really important because the way that cells communicate with each other, a key way they do this is through electrical signals. So you can then see how cells talk to each other, which is really important. And I can imagine that this tool would be very, very useful for scientists.

4:23So maybe you can tell me about some of the impact that it's had so far. So, I mean, like I said, because you can turn things on and off at will using lights, you can map all sorts of things like how memories are produced or which circuits are involved in different kinds of emotions, that kind of thing. but I think perhaps the one which has gained the most interest sort of outside of basic science outside of just understanding things is that this technique has been used in trials to help to restore vision partially restore I should say to people who are blind as a result of a particular condition and what they basically do is that you insert genes for one of these proteins these of light-sense to proteins into cells in the eye and then using special goggles which sort of captures images of the real world and then turns it into pulses of light delivered into the eyes you can then stimulate those cells and give back a kind of ability to to see it to a degree which is I think absolutely amazing.

5:33I mean you can see why this has won a Nobel Prize absolutely and it's funny that you mention memory and emotions as well because actually on our last episode of this podcast we were talking to a neuroscientist about exactly this using optogenetics to search for memories in the brain and so this clearly has so many potential applications so what are the things the scientists looking at using this for sure so i think fundamentally it helps us to understand the brain it helps us to understand which circuits are involved in which processes And that's fascinating and could lead to lots of other developments in and of itself.

6:13But also, if you can study a healthy brain, and this is often done in model organisms, by which we normally mean a mouse. So lots of mouse studies looking at healthy brains. And then you can look at diseased models. So for example, mouse models of Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia or addiction or other situations. And you can see how those circuits may be different. so that again very exciting could lead to some developments for human disease and then one thing that I really liked which came out of the press conference was the idea that this could help us with brain machine interfaces so if you can understand better which circuits are involved with which processes you can then use that information to help to build better interfaces to you know there are all sorts of ways that this this is used often like for prosthetics or all sorts of other things so you be able to get at what are the processes in the brain and then harness that much better so a very worthy win not the one i was expecting but nonetheless maybe next year nicola maybe next year thank you so much no problem thanks for having me

7:26ian thanks for joining us to talk about the physics prize today now it's currently tuesday afternoon and I know it's always a very busy day for you but this was one of the quirkier Nobel announcements that I've seen. Here's a little clip of them explaining what this research was about. So this Nobel Prize is about a giant ice cube positioned at the south pole of our globe. The ice cube enables the detection of neutrinos. The neutrinos are captured in the ice. And when they enter the ice, they interact with the ice and light is emitted. OK, so in that clip, the Swedish physicist Eva Olsson got out a globe and a fake plastic ice cube.

8:24It looked a lot like a Rubik's cube. And it lit up when she placed it near the South Pole. So you're going to have to clarify quite a lot here for me. Who and what did the physics prize go to this year?

8:39Madeleine Finlay: So this was one of those sort of, they seem quite unusual now, these Nobel Prizes that go to one individual, at least in the sciences anyway. And it went to a guy called Francis Housen, a scientist called Francis Housen, who is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US. and he was involved in setting up this it's a crazy project in a sense it was a project called ice cube which is a cosmic neutrino detector and the idea was that you you basically turn a cubic kilometer of the antarctic ice into a neutrino detector and he led the project to do that and they detected high energy neutrinos from space right let's get into the science because What are neutrinos?

9:23Why are they so interesting?

9:25Madeleine Finlay: So neutrinos are probably the most mysterious particles that we know of. I mean, they have no charge. They have almost no mass. And they are ubiquitous. They're passing through us right now. I mean, a lovely figure is that about 65 billion of these neutrinos will pass through your little fingernail every second, obviously without you knowing. Those are neutrinos from the sun. And where do neutrinos fit in the story of physics? Well, they were predicted in 1930 by Wolfgang Paoli. And then the name itself really comes from Enrico Fermi, who's the Italian-American scientist who's very heavily involved in the Manhattan Project, having that sort of Italian birth.

10:11Madeleine Finlay: He called them neutrinos, meaning little neutral one. So the particles themselves only showed up in experiments in the 1950s, but those neutrinos were what we call terrestrial neutrinos. They're the neutrinos that come out of radioactive materials and things like that. They're not particularly high energy. And the ones that this experiment focuses on are cosmic neutrinos, extraterrestrial neutrinos that are coming from way out in space. And they are whipped up by sort of processes known and unknown to insane energies. and then they go everywhere and some of them hit and pass through the Earth.

10:47And that takes us on to the experiment at the Ice Cube Observatory, sadly not named after the American rapper. Instead, it's quite a descriptive title. So tell me about how this laboratory came about.

10:59Madeleine Finlay: It was really in the 80s that Halsen had this idea that you could basically put a bunch of very sensitive light detectors into glacial ice if it was clear enough and if it was sort of bubble free enough and you could turn a huge volume of ice into a detector because what you need to do is although neutrinos pass through everything incredibly well they don't really interact with with mass very much occasionally they will hit an atomic nucleus and produce a little flash of light okay obviously there's so many of them streaming around all the time that if you can catch a few of these little collisions going on and you can detect the light and where it's coming from, you can kind of piece together, you know, what direction those neutrinos came from, what sort of energy they had.

11:51Madeleine Finlay: And he thought, well, you know, we could do this with a chunk of the South Pole. And obviously it seemed a bit crazy, but it really gathered steam and a lot of decent scientists joined it. It took them a bunch of years to build. But once it was up and running, they started doing detection pretty quickly. And I know that you actually reported on IceCube way back when it was being built. I did. I was over at a lab in the US, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where they were building the optical sensors that they drop down these holes. What you have to do in Antarctica is you can't just drill a hole as deep as you need these detectors to go, these sensors to go.

12:29Madeleine Finlay: So you almost use like a hot showerhead type thing where you're melting as you go down and you create this huge sort of channel down into the ice. And then you drop these, it looks like a string of beads. You get about 60 of these optical sensors and they're like the size of a melon. I've held one of these things. And then you just wait for the water to freeze over and they're locked in place. And so these sensors, just to be clear, sensors go down into the ice and then the neutrinos are coming in from space and they're being detected. Yeah, but you know what's brilliant about this? It's my favourite fact about the IceCube experiment.

13:03Madeleine Finlay: These detectors, when they're put into the ice, they're all facing downwards. And I remember when I was told this 15 years ago or so, I thought, why are you facing downwards? Surely you're looking up for the neutrinos coming down from out of space. But no, because the best thing is they use the rest of the planet as a shield to shield out the noise that you get from cosmic rays coming in. So the neutrinos that these optical sensors are detecting are not from sort of above the ice. They're from through the Earth and out the other side. These neutrinos arrive in the northern hemisphere. A lot of particles, other particles, get filtered out on the way.

13:43Madeleine Finlay: The neutrinos make it through to the ice at the South Pole on the other side of the planet. And that is how the detector works. And you just think all of this is actually happening under the ice when you're, you know, looking at the South Pole. It's extraordinary. So really an incredible observatory. And then just two years after they first go online, they make a detection of high energy neutrinos from outer space. What happens next? What does this mean for astronomy? This is not just about it being fun to detect neutrinos that are extremely high energy from outer space, as fun as that is, right?

14:22Madeleine Finlay: This is about, can you use those high energy neutrinos to have a new kind of astronomy, to give you a new window on the universe? Because these particles come from an awfully long way away with an awful lot of energy from processes that, you know, let's say we understand. Some of them, some of them will be whipped up by a lot of the processes around like black holes and so on, and then flung in our direction. and you know you want to use these neutrinos to build up essentially images of the cosmos we're not there yet it's going to come and it will be that that new way of looking at the the universe because if you think pretty much everything we know about the universe comes from looking at light or other electromagnetic waves right you know we have radio telescopes we have optical telescopes infrared telescopes we're also looking at gravitational waves as well to be fair but that's still, you know, very, very early stages.

15:16Madeleine Finlay: So this is, you know, another tool to look at what Earth is going on out there. I cannot wait to see where this all goes for astronomy. And Science Weekly will be back tomorrow covering the chemistry prize. So join us then.

15:37Coming up, performing a chemical feat that only life itself had previously managed.

15:50We understand fascism to be a response to crises, and it always is. It always emerges in moments of systemic crisis. Are we really living through end times fascism? Naomi Klein and Astrid Taylor think so. And they can see it coming for them and the rest of us. The fact that you can have a president who says, well, maybe I have to annihilate Iran. but you also have tech executives saying, yeah, there's a 25 % chance we're going to wipe out humanity. Yet they haven't given up hope of a fight back. It suddenly felt like instead of racing to keep up with all of the terrible things, we're racing to keep up with the resistance.

16:27So how dangerous is Trump and his coalition of billionaires, evangelicals and MAGA diehards? This is Radical Thinking, a new series from The Guardian with me, Adit Chakroti. Out Saturday in your Politics Weekly feeds.

16:45Linda Geddes, welcome back to Science Weekly. It is always nice to have you on the podcast. Now, it is Wednesday afternoon, so you've been covering the chemistry prize today. This went to two scientists for some very clever chemical reactions that they devised. Tell me more. Okay, so this year's Chemistry Nobel Prize went to Henry Kagan and Ken So Soai, who made this discovery about chirality. Many molecules, particularly molecules that are found in the human body, like the sugars that make up the backbone of DNA and RNA, have this property called chirality. And it's a bit like, if you imagine, you know, I've got two hands.

17:29If these were molecules, they'd be made of the same atoms, but one is a mirror image of the other. And all this really began with a scientist lots of people will have heard of, Louis Pasteur, and one of my personal favourite substances, wine. Now, Pasteur discovered that an acid that you use to produce wine existed in these two variants that you've described. molecules that aren't identical but are mirror images of each other but where else does this chirality come into play? Well it's not all molecules but there are certain molecules where chirality is really important and living organisms or you know life is a really good example of this so within our bodies we're made up of lots and lots of different types of molecules but there are things like amino acids which are you know the fundamental building blocks of proteins and they, for some reason, almost exclusively exist in a left-handed form.

18:27And then you have sugars, which are the basis of the backbone of DNA and RNA and they almost exclusively seem to be in this right-handed or D form and it was a bit of a mystery as to why these forms came to predominate. OK, so there's this big question that's puzzling chemists about life's asymmetry. why is it that nature makes one form and not another something that's known as homochirality and this is important right because the version that you have matters because these two mirror image molecules they might have different properties right okay so an example of this is not an amino acid or a sugar but but a fragrance called carvone and in one form this molecule has a kind of spearminty flavour and in the other form it has a kind of caraway smell.

19:23But Linda this goes way beyond how we might say perceive a molecule because in cases like drug manufacturing chirality is super super critical because you might have a molecule which in one form is an effective drug and then in its mirror form it's either useless or maybe even harmful, sort of like having an evil twin. So clearly, which you have is very important. And this takes us on to the work of the Nobel Prize winners. So what question or problem were they looking at? Well, chemists were trying to synthesise molecules, drug molecules, pesticides, herbicides. But when they did so, they were finding that they were ending up with kind of similar amounts of the left-handed and right-handed version of those molecules in their reactors when what they really wanted was a way of steering their reactions to just producing one or the other.

20:21But at a more fundamental level, researchers were interested in this homochoreality which exists in life and how that might have emerged. So what exactly did the winners do? What discoveries did they make? Henri Cagin laid the foundations of this. He discovered that a small excess of one form of a catalyst, a catalyst is a substance that drives a chemical reaction, could produce a disproportionately large amount of a mirror image form of the product. And that kind of helped chemists to steer their reactions towards the desired mirror image product that they were after. Kenso Soai then subsequently discovered that the products of chemical reactions could themselves actually further perpetuate this cycle.

21:12So if you produced a kind of L form of a product, it would then drive far more copies of that L form to be produced. I see. So to get this desired asymmetry, first they work out that you can use more of a particular catalyst, sort of like putting a weight on a metaphorical scale to produce more of your desired product and then they build on this so that they can do this in a way that it produces basically only the desired product just like life does I mean it's amazing stuff but what impact has it had on chemistry I mean it's laid the foundations for for chemists manufacturers to be able to synthesize the things they're trying to synthesize so I spoke to one of the members of the Chemistry Nobel panel who said that this is like at the back of our heads whenever we're thinking about reactions now.

22:09Chorality is like it's fundamental to particularly the pharmaceutical industry, but also agrochemicals, things like pesticides, fertilizers, fungicides, but also the flavouring and fragrance industry. So, you know, it's really enables chemists to manufacture the things they're trying to manufacture with a lot more efficiency and precision. Well, as always, seriously worthy winners. Linda, thank you so much. Yeah, you're welcome. A huge thanks to Nicola Davis, Linda Geddes, and of course, Ian Sample. You can read their coverage of the Nobel Prizes on theguardian.com.

22:55And that's it for today. This episode was produced by me, Madeleine Finlay. It was sound designed by Joel Cox. And the executive producer is Ellie Bury. We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then.

23:13Madeleine Finlay: This is The Guardian.