Nobel Prize 2021: These are all the scientific discoveries awarded this year | Technique

This week all the Nobel laureates in this year’s scientific disciplines gathered. There were a total of seven researchers whose contributions to physics, chemistry and medicine were honored with the world’s highest award.

Look: Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 | What is “asymmetric organic catalysis”, this year’s award-winning discovery

Here is a summary of his contributions to science:

Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a new tool for building molecules

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry This Wednesday was attributed to the list of German and Scottish Benjamin installed in the United States David Macmillan for its development New molecular building tool has made chemistry ‘cleaner’Pharmaceutical research has improved.

Look: The last 10 winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The two scientists, both 53 years old, received a prestigious award for their development of asymmetric (or organic) stimulation in 2000, a revolutionary new type of stimulus that has advanced “at an astonishing speed” since then, explained the jury in Nobel.

Catalysts—substances that control and speed up chemical reactions, but are not part of the end product—are basic mechanisms for chemists.

Look: The last 10 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics

But for a long time, scientists believed that there were only two types of stimuli available: minerals and enzymes.

Independently of each other, List and MacMillan released a third, using “small organic molecules” such as proline, and they remain at the forefront of the field, the jury said.

In contrast to minerals and enzymes, proline is the dream mechanism of chemists: It is a very simple, cheap and environmentally friendly molecule.

Thanks to organic catalysis, pharmaceutical researchers can synthesize large quantities of various molecules in a relatively simple way, for example, synthetically.

Nobel Prize in Physics for understanding complex systems, such as climate

The an award Nobel from Physics He rewarded the work of three scientists seeking to predict The long-term evolution of a complex system, Such as climate, thanks to the modeling of variables that create imbalances, such as weather conditions or human action.

Half of the prize was awarded to Japanese-American artist Seokuro Manabe and German Klaus Haselmann on modeling global warming. The other corresponds to the Italian Giorgio Baresi for his search for Imbalances inherent in this case.

By studying anomalous fluctuations, the three physicists were able to find simple behaviors that would allow them to perform them. reliable predictions.

“Finding a phenomenon sometimes requires examining all the individual complex physical mechanisms, and putting them together to make a prediction”, John Wetlofer, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, commented announcing the award in Stockholm.

Climate “is the complex system par excellence”, Explains to AFP physicist Freddy Bouchet, researcher at the French Institute CNRS. Primarily, because there are a large number of interacting elements (atmosphere, oceans, soil, vegetation …) and because meteorological dynamics are chaotic, it is very difficult to predict until a few weeks in advance.

However, along with this chaos that can be observed on a daily basis, clear and systematic trends are drawn, and this can be attributed to unspecified causes: for example, long-term global warming, caused by human activity.

“In climatology, random and systematic overlap. Mathematical tools developed by Klaus Hesselmann made it possible to separate the two Better understanding of climate evolutionAnd Bouchet said.

For this scientist, this disintegration is essential to understanding extreme weather events such as heat waves, storms, hurricanes…

The digital models developed by Syukuro Manabe allowed the integration of climate subsystems. They are the first models that made it possible to calculate the effect of an increase in carbon dioxide of (human) origin on global warming. Something central to the contemporary climate model.”And Used, for example, by experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Boucher celebrates.

In this field, Giorgio Baresi studied behaviors of the same complexity.

“Everything we see around us is complex, including ourselves. I began to develop the foundations of this science, which did not even exist in the early 1980s, as it was studying nature through mathematics”, This Italian scientist told the Corriere della Sera newspaper last February.

The billions of atoms that make up matter can cause chaotic dynamics that we can’t see on our scale.

How do we understand that atoms of glass are as disordered as atoms of a liquid, for example, when glass is widely arranged as a solid, in a simpler way?

Parisi was able to demonstrate these behaviors using statistics used today in biology, neuroscience, or artificial intelligence.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine for her findings on how we feel about the world

The an award Nobel from medicine On Monday it fell to American David Julius, American of Lebanese descent and Armenian Erdem Patabutian for their discoveries about The way the nervous system transmits temperature and touch.

Our “revolutionary discoveries” “It allows us to understand how heat, cold and mechanical force can stimulate the nerve impulses that allow us to perceive and adapt to the world,” The Nobel Jury reported in Stockholm.

David Julius, 65, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, used capsaicin (or capsaicin), the active compound in hot peppers that causes a burning sensation, Identification of a sensor in the nerve endings of the skin that responds to heat.

Ardem Patapoutian, Scripps Research Professor at California in 1967 used pressure-sensitive cells to discover you.A new type of sensor that responds to mechanical stimuli on the skin and internal organs.

“We knew that [esos sensores] It was there, we knew it did something very different from most other cells that communicate with each other chemically. But it was difficult to give the answer ”, Erdem Patabutian noted.

His work is instrumental in researching many treatments, especially for chronic pain.

But David Julius warned that those treatments should be Preventing Chronic Pain but without “Elimination of preemptive or acute pain sensation.”

“We must be in a position to feel the pain,” to explain, “Well, this prevents us from harming ourselves or allows us to realize that we are about to harm ourselves.”

Thomas Perelman, director of the Nobel Committee for Medicine, said so “They are both great researchers who opened doors Sensual sensations in a completely unique way“.

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