The Wild

Karl Deisseroth, 54, of Stanford, Peter Hegemann, 71, of Humboldt University in Berlin and Georg Nagel, 73, of the University of Würzburg won the 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for work on light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, a way to turn individual nerve cells on or off with light. The Nobel committee said the method "is now being used in laboratories around the world to reveal the brain's mysteries."

Henri B. Kagan, 95, of France and Kenso Soai, 76, of Japan won the 2026 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Many molecules come in mirror-image versions that behave differently: one form of carvone smells like mint, the other like caraway. In the 1980s Kagan showed reactions might be designed to favor one form; Soai later created the first reaction to efficiently produce only one, now called the Soai reaction. The committee called it a feat never achieved by anyone "other than life itself," and the American Chemical Society's president said today's medicines would not be possible without it.

Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, 76, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in literature "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature," the Swedish Academy said. Her books include Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse built from fragments of a Greek myth, and The Beauty of the Husband, a narrative poem told in 29 tangos. She has also taught translation and the classics.

Francis Halzen, 82, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in physics for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from space. Neutrinos are nearly massless particles that pass through everything; IceCube detects the rare flashes of light when one collides with matter in the ice. Halzen's work on catching neutrinos at the South Pole dates to the 1980s. "It was a great surprise and I obviously didn't expect it," he told the committee.

Astronomers used South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to trace the most distant fast radio burst seen to date, FRB 20240304B, to a galaxy as it was just 3 billion years after the Big Bang, according to a paper published October 8 in Science. Fast radio bursts are millisecond-long flashes of radio emission whose cause is still uncertain. The host galaxy is surprisingly small and young, which suggests galaxies can produce these bursts soon after they start forming stars. "It was not what we were expecting," said co-author Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester.