Nobel

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry of 2025 is taken by Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi

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The Nobel Prize for Chemistry of 2025 It has been granted to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi for “the development of metalorganic structures.” A great advance that is mostly thought to be able to extract water from the air in arid environments such as desert or extract water pollutants or capture carbon dioxide. All this thanks to the great cavities through which the molecules can flow. The material of the 21st century. The new materials that have created the winners so far have been used on a small scale. But the truth is that it has important applications such as in the electronic industry, where it can be used to contain some of the toxic gases that are necessary to produce semiconductors. Although you can also see its arms application to be able to be used as chemical weapons. But the most striking can undoubtedly be the capacity of capturing carbon dioxide that occurs in industrial and power plants to reduce its carbon footprint and not contribute to the greenhouse effect. The pools. This year the truth is that a lot of doubts about who could take this Nobel was again again. The roads pointed out that the prize would be taken by the catalysis of a single atom, which is a technique that allows the most efficient and sustainable reactions to be made. And this is something that goes very much of what was expected for this year 2025: being as sustainable as possible in the field of science and mobility. This means that other advances such as the development of batteries that have less impacts, work the environment or also materials with energy applications have been in the pool for receiving one of the greatest awards in this field. Chemistry views magazine He also did different surveys To know what the scientific community thinks about the award. In this case, most pointed out that the field of biochemistry would be the award -winning this year and there was a rivalry with each other, it would be European or American. Although where almost all coincided (89%) is that it would be a man the graceful. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This award has been distributed on 116 occasions in which it has fallen to 194 people. As curiosities, it should be noted that the youngest award to date has been Frédéric Joliot with 35 years. But at the other extremes we have John B. Goodenaugh, with 97 years, who was awarded in 2019. The problem we have in this case is that there are very few women who have received this award, being Marie Curie the first to do so in 1911 (which also won the Physics in 1903). It should also be noted that with this recognition the stage of awards for disciplines in Health Sciences closes. Now there is only the turn for literature tomorrow and on Friday the Peace Prize. In addition to these, on Monday the Prize for Economic Sciences will be announced again, which was not established by Alfred Nobel. In Xataka | It costs to see a sponge and think that life on earth began thanks to them. But we are getting clearer every time

Behind this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine there is a whole lesson in scientific policy for Spain and it does not seem that we are going to learn it

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The Nobel Prizes arrive and, like every year, the media they are filled with reports on why Spain resists the great scientific awards of the contemporary world. And it is not a lie: the last Spaniard to win one in science, Severo Ochoa, did so 66 years ago. Being a relatively important country internationally, it is a real problem. What we did not suspect is that the Karolisnka Institute was going to make it so clear how ‘real’ this problem is. A little highlighted detail. At this point in the week, the history of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine It has been counted as active and passive; But there is a detail that is worth dwelling on. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Shimon Sakaguchi discovered a subset of T lymphocytes that did not attack anyone or anything. They were a kind of “riot police” of the immune system: they suppressed the activity of other T lymphocytes. The discovery was momentous, but what came next was an enormous silence. Silence? But they just gave him the Nobel Prize! They just gave it to him now, but it was not a bed of roses. Sakaguchi’s idea made sense, but no one was quite clear why that was happening. And, in fact, many people were vehemently against his theses. It took almost a decade for two different teams to reach the same conclusion: the Japanese researcher was right and the key to everything. the problem was in the FOXP3 gene. It seems like a minor issue, but “this double discovery, the cellular discovery of Sakaguchi and the genetic discovery of Brunkow and Ramsdell, has completely changed the paradigm of immunology and has opened two great therapeutic avenues with immense potential.” The relevant question in Spain. This is all very well, but the really relevant question for our country is why in 2020, when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded CRISPR, it did not follow the same logic. Because yes, there are big differences between one discovery and the other: while the former rewarded the technological tool, this one has rewarded the discovery of the fundamental scientific bases. But it is not lost on anyone that the narrative of the award is not just an explanation: it is a framework that justifies inclusions and exclusions. The “forgetfulness” of the 2020 Nobel Prize. Francis Mojica himself he explained to us that “when we discovered CRISPR, I said to myself: “this is going to be crazy in biology” and then absolutely nothing happened.” In fact, that “nothing” lasted for many years. Years in which CRISPR seemed like a scientific curiosity without much importance and working on the subject, as Mojica did, was seen as an eccentricity. And finally, when the award came, it focused on “the development of a gene editing method (CRISPR-Cas9)” and was awarded to the two researchers who discovered that we could use the mechanism to our advantage; but no one remembered the person who discovered this mechanism. And it would be naive not to ask ourselves why. Even if we cannot know what really happened (the prize selection process has been hidden for 50 years), it is a good time to compare the abysmal differences between the research policy of Spain and that of Japan. While in the country of the rising sun, it has been investing in “scientific diplomacy” since the 90s; while Spain has made some isolated effort, yes; but insufficient. This is not about creating intricate conspiracy theories. It is clear that we will not be able to say what would have happened if Francis Mojica were Japanese, but we can ask ourselves what extra-scientific factors intervene in this type of awards and what Spain is doing to value its contribution to current contemporary science. That is, not only what resources are dedicated to research; but what is Spain’s ‘soft-power’, what resources does it put to make our researchers visible, to spread favorable stories or to amplify the work of our teams. The answer to all this, I’m afraid, is “too little.” Image | Ryan Faulkner | Daniel Prado In Xataka | A Nobel with 30 years of history: the discovery of the “peacekeeping gene” that controls our defenses is the 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine

40 years ago three researchers insisted on blurring the borders of quantum physics, today they have won the Nobel

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It was 1935 and Erwin Schrödinger was already tired of reading nonsense. It was not a decade since the birth of modern quantum mechanics, but the world had already filled with delusional pseudophilosophical reflections on what reality really was. It was then that poor Erwin inflated his noses and decided to talk to us about his cat. The happy cat of Schrödinger. Of his cat, of a closed opaque box and, in addition, of a container with a poisonous gas. The container in question is controlled by an opening device that only works if a radioactive particle disintegrates over a certain period of time. After that period, the probability that the cat is dead is 50% and that it is also alive of 50%. “If we do not open the box,” the standard version of this ‘paradox’ tells us, “the cat will be alive and dead at the same time.” Or, in other words, we could be calm: as long as we did not open the box, the cat would not be really dead. According to many interpreters, in fact, it would be the one that opens the box that kills the cat. No one understands poor Erwin. The interesting thing about all this is that, although it has been used to the fed up to illustrate The idea of ​​quantum overlapSchrödinger used it to demonstrate how absurd it was to apply categories of quantum mechanics to the real world (macroscopic). For the Austrian physicist, the happy cat would be alive or dead regardless of the opening of the box or not. But … what if not? However, half a century after all this, there were a group of researchers from the University of Berkeley who did not have it so clear. For some years it was known that we were missing a key piece to understand the process of molecular disintegration. That is, “the ability of individual particles to disintegrate is well known” (this is, for example, the physical fact that there is Behind carbon-14); What happens is that according to what we knew about physics, that could not be. The particles should not disintegrate. Between 1984 and 1985, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis They performed a series of experiments With a closed electrical circuit with superconductors and showed that, well, Schrödinger was wrong. How was it wrong? As I say, the intention of the cat’s mental experiment was “to demonstrate the absurdity of this situation, since the special properties of quantum mechanics usually disappear on a macroscopic scale. The quantum properties of a complete cat cannot be demonstrated in a laboratory experiment.” However, since these researchers were successful in demonstrating that the very strange properties of the quantum world can also be seen in a larger system, none of this is so clear. This explains very well people like Anthony Leggett Because, although “a macroscopic system composed of numerous pairs of Cooper remains many orders of magnitude smaller than a kitten”, the key of the experiment is that “there are phenomena that involve a large number of particles that, together, behave as they predict quantum mechanics.” A Nobel to kill a cat. “It would surprise you very much if the ball suddenly appeared on the other side of the wall. In quantum mechanics, this type of phenomenon is called a tunnel effect and is precisely the type of phenomenon that has given it the reputation of being strange and not very intuitive,” explained the award committee. That is precisely what these researchers showed that it could happen at the macroscopic level. But they did something else. And I do not mean to lay the foundations that have allowed us to create the technological system we know: from the transistors of the computer microchips that we see everywhere to quantum cryptography. No. I mean blurring the wall that separated the world from the very small with the world we know. Along the way, “they killed a cat”; But because of the gap they opened, one of the best science we have was sneaked. Image | Nobel Foundation In Xataka | Don’t call it “Nobel Prize,” call it “how Swedes are dynamiting current science”

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics is for John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis

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The Nobel Prize in Physics of 2024 has been awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum tunnelization and the quantification of energy in an electrical circuit.” The Nobel Committee He has decided Highlight the important advance that has been seen in the quantum field and that today are the basis of all the digital technology that we use practically daily. Quantum mechanics. Those awarded this Nobel did experiments in 1984 and 1985 with a closed electrical circuit with superconductors. The key in this case was that among the drivers there was an area that was not a conductor. Thanks to this, both the typing tunnel effect and “quantized energy levels in a system large enough to hold it in hand were allowed to demonstrate.” Something that could be wonderful on paper, but that had to be carried out with the aim of being fully functional and had a real application in our day to day. Applications. Thanks to this work we know the technology as it is, because its applications are many today. One of the clearest examples is in the transistors of computer microchips that is in almost everything around us. But beyond this he has also given quantum cryptography or quantum computers. Tunnel effect A concept that can be very difficult to understand, but that from the Nobel committee have wanted to exemplify with an example: It would surprise you very much if the ball suddenly appeared on the other side of the wall. In quantum mechanics, this type of phenomenon is called a tunnel effect and is precisely the type of phenomenon that has given it the reputation of being strange and not very intuitive. In this case, the winners were able to demonstrate with a series of experiments that the (very strange) properties of the quantum world can be sustained in their hand in a sufficiently large system. In this way, the electrical system they have designed allows you to pass from one state to another through a tunnel as if the ball crossed the wall, when a priori seems impossible. And it is precisely what has been awarded: to take the tunnel effect on a macroscopic scale in a centimeter chip. The pools. As every year, there are many candidates who can come to mind when thinking about this award, and that ‘the shots’ go to roads that are very different. On the one hand, it points to the moment of boiling and the enthusiasm around the quantum information that is fundamental for the security of communications or in problem solving. On the other hand, the pools also point to the physics of materials that always give us some kind of surprise throughout the year. But if we change completely, we could also have gone to the field of astrophysics and the advances that have been made in the study of the cosmos and that in recent years has always given many surprises. The prize. The Nobel Prize in Physics has a wide history since the first recognition was granted in 1901 to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. In its long history it has been granted on 117 occasions and 225 people have been recognized with the most distinctive prize. On the ‘bad’ side is that this is the award that has less women has awarded: only five. As a striking history, Marie Curie is one of the few people who has received two Nobel noise throughout her life: that of Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911. And if we talk about ‘double awards’, we must also highlight John Bardeen who is the only person who has won this Nobel twice: in 1956 and 1972. In Xataka | Exactly 100 years ago we began to understand how the world works. Quantum physics has radically changed our lives

In 1995 some researchers discovered the “peaceful gene” of our body. Today their finding has earned them a Nobel

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The Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm has done it again. He has rewarded one of those investigations that, for years, seemed like a page note in textbooks, but today are the basis of revolutionary treatments. He Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine of 2025 He has been granted jointly to Japanese Shimon Sakaguchi and Americans Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell for “their discoveries about Regulatory T cells And the role of Foxp3 gene In the immune function “ The beginning. Already in the previous decade, Sakaguchi had identified a subset of T lymphocytes that did not attack, but did the opposite: they suppressed the activity of other T lymphocytes. They were pacifying cells, a kind of riot police of the immune system. In 1995, He published a job Key that characterized these cells, today known as regulatory T cells (TREGS). The finding was transcendental. Sakaguchi showed that without these tregs, The immune system went crazy and began to attack the tissues of the body itself, causing devastating autoimmune diseases. He had discovered the natural mechanism of the body to maintain tolerance and avoid self -destruction. But the key piece of the puzzle was missing: what made a T cell become a peacemaker and not a soldier? Brunkow and Ramsdell. Although this discovery was transcendental, the reality is that there was a lot of skeptic that he did not believe in his theory. But the answer to the big question that stayed in the air came in 2001 (still far from the year 2025 and the delivery of this award). Here, on the one hand, Mary E. Brunkow’s team investigated a rare and deadly disease Autoimmune in children called IPEX syndrome. The investigation pointed to a gene as a cause of this disease: Foxp3. On the other hand, Fred Ramsdell’s team was studying a mouse model with very similar symptoms and reached the same conclusion: The defective gene was Foxp3. The connection. The connection was immediate and explosive: Foxp3 was the “master switch”. It is the gene that, when activated in a T lymphocyte, gives you the instructions to become a TREG. Without functional FOXP3, there are no regulatory T cells, and the immune system is uncontrolled. Sakaguchi’s discovery finally found his genetic explanation and already gave him enough weight so that the scientific community saw that he had sat a great precedent. A revolution. This double discovery, Sakaguchi’s cell phone and Brunkow and Ramsdell’s genetic, has completely changed the immunology paradigm and has opened two great therapeutic pathways with immense potential. On the one hand, the door opens up to the fight against autoimmune diseases since with the lack of tregs the body attacks itself. The solution in this case is to increase this type of cells, and there are already different clinical trials to extract patient T cells, “convert” them into the laboratory and re -inject them to the patient. Something we now know as ‘immunotherapy’. But it also serves for the fight against cancer. In these cases it has been seen how tumors are ‘intelligent’ and surround themselves with tregs to protect themselves to the immune system that tries to end these cells. These pacifying cells prevent “soldier” T lymphocytes from attacking cancer. The new immunotherapies seek precisely to temporarily deactivate these tregs or block the action of Foxp3 in the tumor environment, eliminating the protective coat of cancer so that the immune system can destroy it. This has been especially promising in tumors such as lymphoma. Time has passed. The most surprising of all this is the large amount of time between the initial discovery and recognition with a Nobel. If it is true that it has been expected to have a crucial relevance within the clinical aspect, with trials that give very good results for diseases that are really serious. Images | Wikipedia (2, 3) In Xataka | A Spanish team has taken a giant step in a hopeful cancer treatment: chemoinmunotherapy

The Nobel Prize Physiology and Medicine 2025 is for Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi

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The first 2024 Nobel Prize, the one awarded in Physiology and Medicine, has been awarded to three people: Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for his discoveries related to peripheral immune tolerance that prevents the immune system from damaging the body. The discovery. The Committee has recognized the important role of the identification of the Guardians of the Immune System, the regulatory T cells, which feels a great investigation in the field of autoimmune diseases. The fact of knowing much more of this type of cell has opened the way to develop new treatments that are now in the clinical trial phase. What did the pools say? This year the truth is that many names arose around this award. Keep in mind that for 2025 drugs GLP-1 recipient agonists how are the famous Ozempic or the Mounjaro They are still in the mouth of many, and one more year they were very present in the pools in the scientific world after not having received the award the previous year. An award that in 2024 I fell to Ambros and Ruvkun for the discovery of RNA. There were also people who directly pointed to the New studies focused on cancer or in which it allows us to understand what happens in our brain so that neurodegenerative diseases occur. In Spain we had also two possible candidates to take an award that is undoubtedly desired by many members of the scientific community. In this case, our country does not have a Nobel since Camilo José Cela got it in 1989, and this year Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain They pointed out that we were going to get a new award. First Nobel of the year. The prize in Physiology and Medicine is that the Great Nobel Week has traditionally opened. From this moment on, those awarded in the different disciplines where this Nobel is distributed will begin to emerge: Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Economic Sciences. If we focus on the prize in physiology and medicine, it should be noted that until today They have been distributed 115 awarded among 230 winners and winners since this celebration began in 1901 when Emil Von Behring premiered the category for its development of therapeutic sera to treat diphtheria. As a curiosity, the average age of the winners is 58 years, with Frederick Banting as the youngest person to receive him for the discovery of insulin in 1923. At the other extreme we have the longest with Peyton Rous, 87, who received the award for the discovery of the ability of a virus to induce a tumor (Like HPV) in 1966. Images | Undeferti sun In Xataka | The 21 grams experiment: when in 1907 a doctor tried to demonstrate the existence of the soul using a scale

In 2026 the AI ​​will be as powerful as “10 million Nobel Awards” (and that raises a terrible dilemma)

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The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has marked in red in 2026 in its calendar, as explained in a long interview with the Podcast China Talk. For then, The technological gap between the United States and China in artificial intelligence It could close, and that would lead to having to make a critical decision: to advance with prudence or accelerate without regard. Why it is important. The arrival of AI models equivalent to “10 million Nobel awards working tirelessly,” says Amodei, will propose an existential dilemma: if China reaches the US in capacity, no country can afford to stop the development to make it safer . “If things are matched, we will have to worry about what they build and at the same time because they dominate us with technology. That puts us in a terrible dilemma where there are no options,” says Amodei. Between the lines. True fear is not competition with China in itself, but it derives in an uncontrolled career that forces us to deploy potentially dangerous technology before being prepared to handle it safely. Some examples that Amodei points out: The development of biological weapons: Deepseek It has already demonstrated the ability to generate information about Bioarmas “that is not easily found in Google or in textbooks.” Although today the models are not “literally dangerous”, this could change “later this year or next.” The lack of restrictions: Amodei points out that The Deepseek model “He had the worst performance of any model that we have tested, without absolutely any blockage” against the generation of dangerous information. The argument against regulation: “If we stop, China will simply ahead us.” This mentality, warns amodei, makes it impossible to implement effective safety regulations. Military capacity: Advanced models will have implications “to control dwarfs or analyze intelligence information,” says the CEO of Anthropic as an example of technologies that could be deployed prematurely by competitive pressure. By the way, Google has just eliminated mention not to develop weapons with AI. In detail. Amodei proposes a strategy with two legs: Maintain a two -year advantage over China through export controls. Use part of that temporary margin to implement security safeguards. “My concern is that if the United States and China are matched in this technology, elbow with an elbow at each stage, there will be nothing that prevents both sides from continuing the technology forward,” explains the CEO of Anthropic. Deepen. The technological career raises a paradoxical scenario: American success in containing China could be the only guarantee to develop a safer AI. But that same success could accelerate an escalation that makes more dangerous technology. The main loser? International cooperation. Although Amodei does not rule out agreements with China, he acknowledges that “there has not been much interest on China” in the security initiatives proposed by the USA. Only a “really convincing danger for human civilization” could change this dynamic. The big question. Is this dilemma inevitable? Amodei suggests that no, but warns that avoiding it would require irrefutable evidence that AI is an existential risk. For now, he says, “the arguments are suggestive enough to worry and take it seriously, but not enough for two competitive superpowers to say ‘okay, let’s stop’”. Indeed, it seems unlikely. In Xataka | I have tried Deepseek on the web and in my Mac. Chatgpt, Claude and Gemini have a problem Outstanding image | Techcrunch, Wikipedia

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