British Academy Book Prize

♦ Indian-origin historian Sunil Amrith has won British Academy Book Prize 2025 for his latest work, The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years.

♦ The award, valued at £25,000, recognises outstanding non-fiction books that deepen understanding of our world. 

♦ Amrith, a Yale University history professor, was born in Kenya to South Indian parents, grew up in Singapore and graduated from the University of Cambridge in England.

María Corina Machado

♦ The Nobel Peace Prize 2025 was awarded to María Corina Machado. She got this award “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”, the Swedish Academy announced on10 October 10, 2025.

♦ Maria Corina Machado Parisca is the leader of the Venezuelan opposition party, Vente Venezuela.

♦ Machado – who is known as the “Iron Lady” in Venezuela and is only the 20th woman out of 143 laureats awarded since the start of the prize in 1901.

Nobel Prize in literature

♦ The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature to Hungarian novelist and screenwriter Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

♦ The second Hungarian to win the prestigious literary award, Krasznahorkai was recognised “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. 

♦ In winning the Nobel Prize, now worth $1.2m, he joins an illustrious list of laureates that includes Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway and Kazuo Ishiguro.

♦ In 2024, the award went to South Korean author Han Kang, who was praised “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

♦ Han was the first South Korean writer and 18th woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

♦ The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2025 has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi.

♦ They have developed a new form of molecular architecture.

♦ In their constructions, metal ions function as cornerstones that are linked by long organic (carbon-based) molecules.

♦ Together, the metal ions and molecules are organised to form crystals that contain large cavities.

♦ Kitagawa is a professor at Kyoto University, Japan.

♦ Richard Robson is currently working as a Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

♦ Yaghi is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, US.

♦ The prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor will be shared equally between the laureates.

♦ In 2024, the Nobel Prize for chemistry went to David Baker and John Jumper, together with Briton Demis Hassabis, for work on cracking the code of the structure of proteins through computing and artificial intelligence.

Nobel Prizes Physics

♦ United States based scientists John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for research into quantum mechanical tunneling.

♦ The winners carried out experiments in the mid-1980s with an electronic circuit built of superconductors and demonstrated that quantum mechanical properties could be made concrete on a much larger, macroscopic scale.

♦ British-born Clarke is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.

♦ Devoret, born in France, is a professor at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, also in the United States, where Martinis is also a professor. Martinis, an American, headed Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab up until he resigned in 2020.

♦ The prizes carry priceless prestige and a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).

♦ It is the 119th time the prize has been awarded. Last year (2024), artificial intelligence pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the physics prize for helping create the building blocks of machine learning.

Nobel Prize

♦ The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their work on how immune systems work in determining what should be attacked or protected.

♦ The prize was announced at the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, on 6 October 6, 2025.

♦ Among this Medicine winners, Brunkow and Ramsdell are from the USA, while Sakaguchi is from Japan.

♦ The research by the two Americans proved to be the second chapter of something Sakaguchi had worked on separately some years ago.

♦ After Brunkow and Ramsdell’s findings, Sakaguchi and other scientists managed to stitch their work together.

♦ What have the three winners done?

♦ The human body has a powerful and complex immune system, which not just fights off various bacteria and viruses, but also knows what cells should not be attacked.

♦ According to the Nobel Prize’s official press release, “Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 for their fundamental discoveries relating to peripheral immune tolerance.

♦ The laureates identified the immune system’s security guards, regulatory T cells, which prevent immune cells from attacking our own body.”

♦ Where do the three scientists work?

♦ Mary Brunkow, born in 1961, works at the Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, USA.

♦ Frederick Ramsdell, born in 1960, works at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, San Francisco, USA.

♦ Shimon Sakaguchi, born in 1951, works at Osaka University, Japan.

♦ Nobel Prizes generally follow the same schedule every year, with the Medicine prize coming first, followed by Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, and Economics.

Mansukh Mandaviya

♦ On 3 October 2025, India was conferred with the prestigious International Social Security Association (ISSA) award 2025 for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Social Security’.

♦ Labour and Employment Minister Mansukh Mandaviya received the award at the World Social Security Forum in Malaysia.

♦ India was chosen as the 2025 recipient for expanding social security coverage from 19% in 2015 to 64.3% in 2025, reaching over 940 million citizens, a milestone also recognised by the International Labour Organisation. 

♦ The ISSA award, first introduced in 2013, is presented once every three years.

♦ Brazil was the inaugural recipient, followed by China in 2016, Rwanda in 2019, and Iceland in 2022.