This year’s Nobel Prizes honored scientific achievements that dedicated Science News readers (with good memories) would have found familiar. A dive into our archives revealed some interesting results.
The physiology or medicine prize recognized autophagy, the cellular process by which living cells dispose of — or recycle — their biochemical garbage. Molecular biology writer Tina Hesman Saey identified the importance of this field years ago, writing an in-depth take in 2011 (SN: 3/26/11, p. 18).
The Nobel physics prize honored three researchers for their use of the math of shapes to describe matter in exotic states. Turns out that topology, which describes shifting shapes and spatial relationships (illustrated at the Nobel news conference by bagels and pretzels), helped elucidate some weird properties of matter at low temperatures, including superconductivity and various quantum phenomena. In 2010, contributing correspondent Alexandra Witze reported on one of the many fruits of such research in a feature on topological insulators (SN: 5/22/10, p. 22). These new materials could have applications in everything from detecting new basic particles to building quantum computers.