Rich Lyons (right), chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, hands a lifetime parking pass to John Clarke, an Emeritus Professor of Physics who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics on October 7, 2025.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Mary E. Brunkow (US), Fred Ramsdell (US) and Shimon Sakaguchi (Japan) win Nobel medicine prize. | Photo Credit: Courtesy: https://www.nobelprize.org/

Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi are awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 6, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Stockholm:

The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded on Monday to Turkish-American Daron Acemoglu and British-Americans Simon Johnson and James Robinson for research into wealth inequality between nations.

By examining the various political and economic systems introduced by European colonisers, the three have been able to demonstrate a relationship between institutions and prosperity, the jury said.

“Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest challenges,” Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said in a statement.

“The laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for achieving this,” Svensson added.

Acemoglu, 57, is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as is Johnson, 61.

Robinson, 64, is a professor at the University of Chicago. 

The jury highlighted the laureates’ work illuminating how societal institutions play a role in explaining why some countries prosper, while others do not.

“I am delighted. It’s just a real shock and amazing news,” Acemoglu told reporters via telephone as the award was announced in Stockholm.

The Economics prize is the only Nobel not among the original five created in the will of Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896.

It was instead created through a donation from the Swedish central bank in 1968, leading detractors to dub it “a false Nobel”.

However, like for the other Nobel science prizes, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decides the winner and follows the same selection process.

The Economics Prize wraps up this year’s Nobel season, which honoured achievements in artificial intelligence for the physics and chemistry prizes, while the Peace Prize went to Japanese group Nihon Hidankyo, committed to fighting nuclear weapons.

South Korea’s Han Kan won the literature prize — the only woman laureate so far this year — while the medicine prize lauded discoveries in understanding gene regulation.

The Nobel Prizes consist of a diploma, a gold medal and a one-million-dollar sum. 

They will be presented at ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

South Korean writer Han Kang, was awarded 2024 the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1970. She comes from a literary background, her father being a reputed novelist. She made her literary debut as a poet by publishing five poems, including “Winter in Seoul”, in the winter issue of Munhak-gwa-sahoe (Literature and Society) in 1993. She began her career as a novelist the next year by winning the 1994 Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest with “Red Anchor”. She published her first short story collection entitled Yeosu (Munji Publishing Company) in 1995. She participated in the University of Iowa International Writing Program for three months in 1998 with support from the Arts Council Korea.

Her publications include a short story collection, Fruits of My Woman (2000), Fire Salamander (2012); novels such as Black Deer (1998), Your Cold Hands (2002), The Vegetarian (2007), Breath Fighting (2010), and Greek Lessons (2011), Human Acts (2014), The White Book (2016), I Do Not Bid Farewell(2021). A poem collection, I Put The Evening in the Drawer (2013) was published as well. Han Kang won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for ‘The Vegetarian’.

Her most recent novel ‘I Do Not Bid Farewell’ was awarded the Medicis prize in France in 2023, the Emile Guimet prize in 2024.

Han Kang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking, the committee said.

Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose, the Nobel Prize committee said.

London:

The award this week of Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics to a small number of artificial intelligence pioneers affiliated with Google has stirred debate over the company’s research dominance and how breakthroughs in computer science ought to be recognised.

Google has been at the forefront of AI research, but has been forced on the defensive as it tackles competitive pressure from Microsoft-backed OpenAI and mounting regulatory scrutiny from the US Department of Justice.

On Wednesday, Demis Hassabis – co-founder of Google’s AI unit DeepMind – and colleague John Jumper were awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry, alongside US biochemist David Baker, for their work decoding the structures of microscopic proteins.

READ | 3 Scientists Get Nobel Prize In Chemistry For Work On Protein Structures

Former Google researcher Geoffrey Hinton, meanwhile, won the Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday, alongside US scientist John Hopfield, for earlier discoveries in machine learning that paved the way for the AI boom.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, a computer scientist and advisor on AI to the United Nations, told Reuters that, while the recipients’ work deserved recognition, the lack of a Nobel prize for mathematics or computer science had distorted the outcome.

“The Nobel prize committee doesn’t want to miss out on this AI stuff, so it’s very creative of them to push Geoffrey through the physics route,” she said. “I would argue both are dubious, but nonetheless worthy of a Nobel prize in terms of the science they’ve done. So how else are you going to reward them?”

READ | Nobel Prize In Physics Goes To 2 Scientists For Work On AI

Noah Giansiracusa, an associate maths professor at Bentley University and author of “How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News”, also argued that Hinton’s win was questionable.

“What he did was phenomenal, but was it physics? I don’t think so. Even if there’s inspiration from physics, they’re not developing a new theory in physics or solving a longstanding problem in physics.”

The Nobel prize categories for achievements in medicine or physiology, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were laid down in the will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895. The prize for economics is a later addition established with an endowment from the Swedish central bank in 1968.

Dominance

Regulators in the US are currently circling Google for a potential break-up, which could force it to divest parts of its business, such as its Chrome browser and Android operating system, which some argue allow it to maintain an illegal monopoly in online search.

The profits derived from its leading position have allowed Google and other Big Tech companies to outpace traditional academia in publishing groundbreaking AI research.

Hinton himself has expressed some regrets about his life’s work, quitting Google last year so that he could speak freely about the dangers of AI, and warning that computers could become smarter than people far sooner than previously expected.

READ | What Are Proteins Again? Nobel-Winning Chemistry Explained

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, he said: “I wish I had a sort of simple recipe that if you do this, everything’s going to be okay, but I don’t, in particular with respect to the existential threat of these things getting out of control and taking over.”

When he quit Google in 2023 over his AI concerns, Hinton said the company itself acted very responsibly.

For some, this week’s Nobel prize wins underscore how hard it is becoming for traditional academia to compete. Giansiracusa told Reuters there was a need for greater public investment in research.

“So much of Big Tech is not oriented towards the next deep-learning breakthrough, but making money by pushing chatbots or putting ads all over the internet,” he said. “There are pockets of innovation, but much of it is very unscientific.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Scientists David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the award-giving body said on Wednesday, for their work on the structure of proteins.

The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).

“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences,” the academy said in a statement.

Half the prize was awarded to Baker “for computational protein design” while the other half was shared by Hassabis and Jumper “for protein structure prediction”, the academy said.

The third award to be handed out every year, the chemistry prize follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.

The Nobel prizes were established in the will of dynamite inventor and wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel and are awarded to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”.

First handed out in 1901, 15 years after Nobel’s death, it is awarded for achievements in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace. Recipients in each category share the prize sum that has been adjusted over the years.

The economics prize is a later addition funded by the Swedish central bank.

Chemistry, close to Alfred Nobel’s heart and the discipline most applicable to his own work as an inventor, may not always be the most headline-grabbing of the prizes, but past recipients include scientific greats such as radioactivity pioneers Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie.

Last year’s chemistry award went to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Aleksey Ekimov for their discovery of tiny clusters of atoms known as quantum dots, widely used today to create colours in flat screens, light emitting diode (LED) lamps and devices that help surgeons see blood vessels in tumours.

Alongside the cash prize, the winners will be presented a medal by the Swedish king on Dec. 10, followed by a lavish banquet in Stockholm city hall.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Paris:

The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded on Monday to two US scientists for discovering microRNA, a previously unknown type of genetic switch which is hoped can pave the way for new medical breakthroughs.

But while several treatments and tests are under development using microRNAs against cancer, heart disease, viruses and other illnesses, none have actually yet reached patients. 

And the world paid little attention when the new Nobel laureates Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun revealed their discovery decades ago, thinking it was just “something weird about worms”, Cambridge University geneticist Eric Miska told AFP.

Here is an explainer about how exactly these tiny genetic switches work inside our bodies. 

– What is microRNA? –

Each cell in the human body has the same set of instructions, called DNA. Some turn into brain cells, while others become muscles.

So how do the cells know what to become? The relevant part of the DNA’s instructions is pointed to via a process called gene regulation.

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) normally serves as a messenger. It delivers the instructions from the DNA to proteins, which are the building blocks of life that turn cells into brains — or muscles.

Miska gave the example of the messenger RNA vaccines rolled out against Covid-19 during the pandemic, which insert a message with new instructions to build proteins that block viruses.

But the two new Nobel winners Ambros and Ruvkun discovered a whole new type of gene regulator that had previously been overlooked by science.

Rather than being the messenger which relays information, microRNA instead acts as a switch to turn other genes off and on.

“This was a whole new level of control that we had totally missed,” said Miska, who has worked on microRNA for two decades, including with the new Nobel laureates.

“The discovery of microRNAs brought an additional level of complexity by revealing that regions that were thought to be non-coding play a role in gene regulation,” French researcher Benoit Ballester told AFP.

– What did the Nobel winners do? –

Back in the 1980s, Ambros and Ruvkun had been working separately on how genes interact in one-millimetre-long roundworms called C.elegans.

When they compared their work, it led to the discovery of microRNA. Ambros revealed the finding in a 1993 paper.

“Nobody really paid much attention,” Miska said, explaining that most scientists at the time thought it only applied to worms.

Then in 2000, Ruvkun published research showing that microRNA is present right across the animal kingdom, including in humans and even some viruses. 

“This was not just something weird that worms do, but in fact all animals and plants are totally dependent for development and normal function on them,” Miska said.

More than a thousand genes that respond to microRNAs are now believed to be in the human body. 

– How could this help us? –

There are numerous new treatments and tests using microRNA that are undergoing trials but none have been made widely available. 

“Though there are no very clear applications available yet in microRNAs, understanding them, knowing that they exist, understanding their counter-regulatory networks, is always the first step,” the Karolinska Institute’s Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam told journalists in Stockholm.

MicroRNAs are particularly promising for fighting cancer because some of these switches “act as a tumour suppressor, so they put a brake on cells dividing inappropriately,” Miska said. 

Others, meanwhile, induce “cells to divide, which can lead to cancer”, he added.

Because many viruses use microRNAs, several antiviral drugs are at varying stages of development, including for hepatitis C.

One complicating factor has been that microRNAs can be unstable.

But scientists also hope they can be used as a test called a “biomarker”, which could reveal what type of cancer a patient could be suffering from, for example.

– What next? –

It also appears probable that microRNAs could be involved in the evolution of our species, Miska said. 

“It seems very likely that microRNAs have important roles in why the human brain is different from the brains of other primates,” Miska said.

While human brains are difficult to study, Miska hoped future research would discover more.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Daniel Kahneman. File photo
| Photo Credit: AP

Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his insights into how ingrained neurological biases influence decision making, died on Wednesday, March 27, 2024. at the age of 90.

Kahneman and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky reshaped the field of economics, which prior to their work mostly assumed that people were “rational actors” capable of clearly evaluating choices such as which car to buy or which job to take. The pair’s research — which Kahneman described for lay audiences in his best-selling 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” — focused on how much decision-making is shaped by subterranean quirks and mental shortcuts that can distort our thoughts in irrational yet predictable ways.

Take, for instance, false confidence in predictions. In an excerpt from his book, Kahneman described a “leaderless group” challenge used by the Israeli army’s Psychology Branch to assess future leadership potential. Eight candidates, all unknowns to one another, had to cross a six-foot wall together using only a long log — without touching the wall or the ground with the log, or touching the wall themselves.

Observers of the test — including Kahneman himself, who was born in Tel Aviv and did his Israeli national service in the 1950s — confidently identified leaders-in-the-making from these challenges, only to learn later that their assessments bore little relation to how the same soldiers performed at officer training school. The kicker: This fact didn’t dent the group’s confidence in its own judgments, which seemed intuitively obvious — and yet also continued to fail at predicting leadership potential.

“It was the first cognitive illusion I discovered,” Kahneman later wrote. He coined the phrase “ the illusion of validity ” to describe the phenomenon.

Kahneman’s partner, Barbara Tversky — the widow of Amos Tversky — confirmed his death to The Associated Press. Tversky, herself a Stanford University emerita professor of psychology, said the family is not disclosing the location or cause of death.

Kahneman’s decades-long partnership with Tversky began in 1969 when the two collaborated on a paper analyzing researcher intuitions about statistical methods in their work. “The experience was magical,” Kahneman later wrote in his Nobel autobiography. “Amos was often described by people who knew him as the smartest person they knew. He was also very funny … and the result was that we could spend hours of solid work in continuous mirth.”

The two worked together so closely that they flipped a coin to determine which of them would be the lead author on their first paper, and thereafter simply alternated that honor for decades.

“Amos and I shared the wonder of together owning a goose that could lay golden eggs -– a joint mind that was better than our separate minds,” Kahneman wrote.

Kahneman and Tversky began studying decision making in 1974 and quickly hit upon the central insight that people react far more intensely to losses than to equivalent gains. This is the now-common notion of “loss aversion,” which among other things helps explain why many people prefer status quo choices when making decisions. Combined with other findings, the pair developed a theory of risky choice they eventually named “prospect theory.”

Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for these and other contributions that ended up underpinning the discipline now known as behavioral economics. Economists say Tversky would certainly have shared the prize had he not died in 1996. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.