Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026

♦ 14-year-old British photographer Oscar Whitfield was named Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026. He lives in Zimbabwe and won with a black-and-white photograph titled “Labour of Love”, which captures a dung beetle pushing a ball of dung. Whitfield made the photograph in Zimbabwe by lying on the ground to photograph the beetle at eye level.

♦ The Natural History Museum in London runs the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The competition received 65,403 entries from 121 countries and territories in 2026, a record total. It includes an overall young photographer award as well as an adult overall award. The 2026 edition marked the competition’s 62nd year.

Sunil Bharti Mittal

Bharti Enterprises founder and chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal has been conferred the highest civilian award in France, Chevalier de l'Ordre national de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honour), by French President Emmanuel Macron. He has been conferred the distinction in recognition of his longstanding commitment to deepening economic ties between India and France and his outstanding achievements in telecommunications and digital infrastructure.

• The insignia will be conferred at a ceremony to be held on October 28, 2026, at the Ambassade de France (Embassy of France in India), New Delhi.

• Established in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Légion d'Honneur is the highest civilian award bestowed by the French Republic.

Nobel economics prize

Americans Robert Hall and Michael Woodford won the 2026 Nobel economics prize for “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on October 12. The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the final prize to be given out this year and is worth 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million).

• The economics prize, first awarded in 1969, is not one of the original five awards created in the 1895 will of industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, but was established by Sweden’s central bank.

• The majority of previous laureates have been from the United States. Only three women have ever won, most recently Claudia Goldin in 2023 for work on how gender has affected pay and employment over time in the United States.

• Analysis by the Institute for Scientific Information, part of Clarivate, had picked researchers working on monetary policy, the economics of information technology and evolutionary economic theory as possible recipients.

• Last year’s (2025) winners, Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, won for work on “creative destruction” and how new technology and production methods can boost growth and living standards.

Presidential Award for Civil Heroism

♦ Israeli President Isaac Herzog announced that Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar will receive the Presidential Award for Civil Heroism. The award recognises his actions during an incident aboard Flydubai Flight FZ1073, which was bound for Tel Aviv. On 30 September 2026, Machchhar was allegedly attacked with an axe by his co-pilot inside the aircraft’s cockpit. Despite severe injuries, he opened the cockpit door, allowing passengers and off-duty crew members to enter and overpower the attacker. Machchhar is recovering in a hospital in Abu Dhabi.

♦ The Presidential Medal for Civilian Heroism was established by President Herzog after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. It recognises civilians for extraordinary courage in saving others. Herzog said he would personally present the award to Machchhar in Israel once he had recovered sufficiently to travel.

♦ Six Israeli passengers were also honoured with the medal for their roles in stopping the attack on Flight FZ1073: Tali Manes, Zvika Manes, Yaniv Hayoun, Dr Shota Musayev, Asaf Rajuan and Or Pardilov.

2026 Nobel Peace Prize

♦ Navanethem (Navi) Pillay was awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on 9 October 2026. The South African jurist was recognised for efforts to promote peace and international law. Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, announced the award in Oslo. The 2026 prize carries a gold medal and 12 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to approximately US$1.2 million. The ceremony is scheduled to take place in Oslo on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

♦ Pillay served as a judge of the International Criminal Court and as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. The International Criminal Court, established by the Rome Statute, is a permanent court that prosecutes individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. Pillay’s early legal work included defending Nelson Mandela and other opponents of apartheid. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation and discrimination enforced in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s.

♦ The Nobel Peace Prize is one of six Nobel Prizes established under the will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. It is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, whose five members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901.

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature

♦ The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Canadian author Anne Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”, the Swedish Academy announced on 8 October 2026. The writer will receive a 12 million-krona ($1.2 million) award.

♦ Carson was born in Toronto on June 21, 1950. She was introduced to Hellenic literature, which deeply influenced her writings, by a Latin instructor in high school who agreed to tutor her during lunch hours. Her publishing career began in 1986 with Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, which charts the concept of “eros” in ancient Greek poetry and showcases her unique approach.

♦ There have been just 19 women laureates out of 122 since the Nobel Literature Prize was first awarded in 1901. A 2018 sex assault scandal left the Academy in tatters, and more than half of its 18 members were replaced. Since then, every other literature laureate has been a woman.

♦ Hungarian novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish Academy described as his "compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art".

Mahesh Kakde

Professor Mahesh Kakde of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, received the Ramanujan Prize 2026 for his contributions to algebraic number theory. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the International Mathematical Union (IMU) announced the award on 7 October 2026.

• The Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from Developing Countries has been awarded annually since 2005. ICTP and IMU jointly administer the prize, which carries a cash award of US$10,000. It is awarded to a researcher under 45 from a developing country for outstanding research conducted under difficult conditions in a developing country.

• Kakde’s research includes fundamental results in noncommutative Iwasawa theory and work on the Gross-Stark and Brumer-Stark conjectures. Algebraic number theory uses structures such as fields and groups to study integers and their generalisations.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Scientists Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving a long-standing riddle of how to form a single molecular mirror image, a discovery hugely important for pharmaceutical manufacturing, the award-giving body said on 7 October 2026.

• This year’s (2026) prize was awarded for discoveries that showed how chemical reactions can be driven to favour a single molecular mirror image, work that has been key for chemists who design reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.

• Kagan (95 years) of the Université Paris-Sud in France, and Soai (76 years) of Tokyo University of Science in Japan, solved a chemical mystery: Some molecules exist in the world that are mirror images of one another. This is a phenomenon known as chirality, from the Greek word for hand (as hands are mirror images of one another). Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are among chiral molecules, and a living organism can only contain one of the versions. The other mirror molecule is found rarely elsewhere in nature. More than half of clinically employed drugs are chiral, so understanding how this imbalance of two mirrored molecules occurs had crucial relevance for pharmacology.

Francis Halzen

Belgian-American Particle physicist Francis Halzen won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for “decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”, the award-giving body said on 6 October 2026. Born in Belgium, the 82-year-old scientist is affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S. Efforts by The Associated Press to reach him were not immediately successful. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a research facility located at the South Pole in Antarctica, according to its website, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison is its lead institution. Halzen's research into capturing neutrinos at the South Pole dates back to the 1980s.

• The winners of the Nobel physics prize are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and receive a prize sum totalling 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million), which is shared among the winners if there are several.

• Last year’s (2025) physics prize was awarded to US-based scientists John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for experiments that demonstrated the principles of quantum physics in action, research seen as helping to advance the next generation of computing and other digital technologies.

Nobel Prize

Scientists Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics,” the award-giving body said on 5 October 2026. Karl Deisseroth, American, Hegemann, German, and Georg Nagel, German, were selected by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute medical university and receive a prize sum amounting to 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million), which is shared if there are multiple winners.

• The physiology or medicine prize traditionally opens the annual Nobel announcements, with awards in physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics to follow over the coming days.

• The five original Nobel Prizes were created under the terms of Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel’s will and have been awarded since 1901, with only limited interruptions, chiefly during the World War One and World War Two.

• A sixth award, the economics prize, was established in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank.

• The medicine prize has honoured some of the most influential scientific discoveries of the past century, including Alexander Fleming’s work on penicillin, recognised in 1945, and Karl Landsteiner, who won in 1930 for his discovery of human blood groups.

• Last year (2025), American scientists Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and Japan’s Shimon Sakaguchi won the prize for work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells, creating openings for possible new treatments of diseases such as cancer.