The year 2024 is behind us, and it is time to assess the situation and look at the outlook for 2025.
Solid catalysts, often nanoscale materials, are at the heart of many technologies. Due to their unique structure, they play a crucial role in accelerating chemical reactions, which is essential in industrial processes such as fuel production, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and environmental protection.
The winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden are three American economists working on the impact of social organization on the wealth of nations. The awardees are Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson. Why are some countries unexpectedly successful and others unexpectedly unsuccessful? Why is it that countries with such rich cultures as India and Mexico have consistently struggled economically, while Australia or Canada have been successful?
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded half to David Baker ‘for the design of proteins using computational techniques’ and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper ‘for the prediction of protein structure’.
On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to American physicist John Joseph Hopfield and Canadian-British computer scientist Geoffrey Everest Hinton. Although the prize was awarded in physics, the justification reads that it was based on ‘discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning through artificial neural networks’, which is clearly associated with computer science.
When it seemed that all functions of ribonucleic acids (RNA) had been studied and described, scientists discovered new types of RNA at the end of the 20th century that influence inheritance, development, and diseases. This year, the Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of one of these new RNAs. According to the Nobel Committee's decision, two American biologists, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, received the award in Physiology and Medicine for their "discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation".