International Astronautical Federation (IAF) World Space Award 2024

♦ Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman, S Somanath was awarded the prestigious International Astronautical Federation (IAF) World Space Award 2024. The award was given in recognition of ISRO’s successful Chandrayaan-3 mission, a historic milestone in lunar exploration of the South Pole, making India one of the few countries to do so. The award ceremony took place in Milan, Italy  on 14 October 2024.

♦ The IAF World Space Award is presented to individuals for outstanding contributions in space science, space technology, space medicine, space law, or space management that have had exceptional impact on the world’s progress in astronautics.

2024 Nobel Economics Prize

♦ The 2024 Nobel Economics Prize was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson for research into differences in prosperity between nations on 14 October 2024. The three economists “have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

♦ The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.

2024 Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo

♦ The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo on 11 October 2024. It is a Japanese organisation representing survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It got this award “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”

♦ The Nobel Peace Prize 2023 was awarded to Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi.

2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

♦ The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to South Korean author Han Kang on October 10. She got this award "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life."

♦ Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1970. She is widely known for her novel The Vegetarian, which was written in three parts. She is the first South Korean writer to win the award. 

♦ Kang began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society. Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection Love of Yeosu, followed soon afterwards by several other prose works, both novels and short stories.

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

2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

♦ U.S. Scientists David Baker and John Jumper and Britain’s Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on 9 October 2024. They got this award for their work on understanding the protein structures.

♦ 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”, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

♦ Baker is a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, while Hassabis is CEO of Google DeepMind, the AI research subsidiary of Google, where Jumper also works as senior research scientist.

♦ Hassabis and Jumper utilised artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, while Baker learned how to master life’s building blocks and create entirely new proteins.

♦ The prize, widely regarded as among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).

♦ Last year’s (2023) 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.

2024 Nobel Prize

♦ U.S. scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics on 8 October. They got this award for discoveries and inventions that laid the foundation for machine learning, the award-giving body said.

♦ Machine learning based on artificial neural networks is currently revolutionising science, engineering and daily life.

♦ Hopfield, a professor at Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Hinton works as a professor at University of Toronto, invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and carry out tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.

♦ The award comes with a prize sum of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million), which is shared between the winners if there are several. The physics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

♦ Last year’s (2023) Physics prize was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for their work in creating ultra-short pulses of light that can give a snapshot of changes within atoms, potentially improving the detection of diseases.

Nobel Prize for Physiology 2024

♦ The American biologists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology 2024. The Nobel Academy at the Karolinska Institutet announced this on 7 October 2024. They were awarded the prestigious prize for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. 

♦ Victor Ambros was born in 1953 in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. He is currently works at the Programme in Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts in the U.S. Gary Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, USA in 1952. He is a professor of genetics at the Harvard Medical School and researches microRNA and RNA interference mechanisms at the Ruvkun Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital.

♦ Ambros and Ruvkun found the first miRNA gene in C. elegans. It was called lin-4. They confirmed its role by modifying the miRNA to result in different parts of the worm’s developmental process to be thrown out of sync. By studying a second miRNA gene they found seven years later, called let-7, they confirmed miRNAs are actually present across the animal kingdom.

♦ The prize includes a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (around Rs.8.3 crore), part of a bequest from the prize's founder, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

♦ Winners will receive their awards on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.