2012 Nobel Prize Announcements <Prev Next>

The 2012 Nobel Prizes in Peace, Literature, Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine and Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and Ig-Nobel Prizes have been announced!

While you're here, why not also read about past winners.

N.B. The time of the announcement is given in Stockholm time (Central European Time); subtract 6 hours to get the US Eastern Daylight Time).

Date: Monday, October 15, 2012 (13:00 CEST at the earliest) Prize: ECONOMICS Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences And the prize goes to... Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. Date: Friday, October 12, 2012 (11:00 a.m. CEST) Prize: PEACE Awarding institution: The Norwegian Nobel Institute And the prize go to... European Union (EU) for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe. Date: Thursday, October 11, 2012 (13:00 p.m. CEST) Prize: LITERATURE Awarding institution: The Swedish Academy And the prize goes to... Mo Yan who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary. Date: Wednesday, October 10, 2012 (11:45 a.m. CEST at the earliest) Prize: CHEMISTRY Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences And the prize goes to... Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian K. Kobilka for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors. Date: Tuesday, October 9, 2012 (11:45 a.m. CEST at the earliest) Prize: PHYSICS Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences And the prize go to... Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems. Date: Monday, October 8, 2012 (11:30 a.m. CEST at the earliest) Prize: PHYSIOLOGY or MEDICINE Awarding institution: The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute And the prize go to... John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent. Date: Thursday, September 20, 2012 (7:30 pm EDT) Prize: IG NOBEL PRIZES Awarding institution: The Annals of Improbable Research And the winners are: PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan [THE NETHERLANDS] and Tulio Guadalupe [PERU, RUSSIA, and THE NETHERLANDS] for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller" REFERENCE: "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation," Anita Eerland, Tulio M. Guadalupe and Rolf A. Zwaan, Psychological Science, vol. 22 no. 12, December 2011, pp. 1511-14. ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Tulio Guadalupe. [NOTE: Two days after the ceremony, Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan will marry each other, in the Netherlands.] PEACE PRIZE: The SKN Company [RUSSIA], for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds. ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Igor Petrov ACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating SpeechJammer the a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay. REFERENCE:"SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback", Kazutaka Kurihara, Koji Tsukada, arxiv.org/abs/1202.6106. February 28, 2012. ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain anywhere activity even in a dead salmon. REFERENCE:"Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction," Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, 2009. REFERENCE:"Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Multiple Comparisons Correction," Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-5. ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Johan Pettersson [SWEDEN and RWANDA], for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people's hair turned green. ATTENDING THE CEREMONY:Johan Pettersson LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports. REFERENCE:"Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies," US Government General Accountability Office report GAO-12-480R, May 10, 2012. PHYSICS PRIZE: Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail. REFERENCE: "Shape of a Ponytail and the Statistical Physics of Hair Fiber Bundles." Raymond E. Goldstein, Patrick B. Warren, and Robin C. Ball, Physical Review Letters, vol. 198, no. 7, 2012. REFERENCE: "Ponytail Motion," Joseph B. Keller, SIAM [Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics] Journal of Applied Mathematics, vol. 70, no. 7, 2010, pp. 2667 ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren, Robin Ball FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE: Rouslan Krechetnikov [USA, RUSSIA, CANADA] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee. REFERENCE: "Walking With Coffee: Why Does It Spill?" Hans C. Mayer and Rouslan Krechetnikov, Physical Review E, vol. 85, 2012. ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Rouslan Krechetnikov ANATOMY PRIZE: Frans de Waal [The Netherlands and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. REFERENCE:"Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception" Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science Letters, vol. 1, 99-103, 2008. ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny MEDICINE PRIZE: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode. REFERENCE:"Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with Electrocautery," Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, World Journal of Gastroenterology, vol. 13, no. 40, October 2007, pp. 5295-8. REFERENCE: "Argon Plasma Coagulation in the Treatment of Hemorrhagic Radiation Proctitis is Efficient But Requires a Perfect Colonic Cleansing to Be Safe," E. Ben-Soussan, M. Antonietti, G. Savoye, S. Herve, P. Ducrotte and E. Lerebours, European Journal of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, vol. 16, no. 12, December 2004, pp 1315-8. ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan