The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi for their work in the development of metal organic frameworks (MOF). The three scientists, who won the award on Wednesday, come from the universities of Kyoto in Japan, Melbourne in Australia and Berkeley in the United States, respectively. Such constructions can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or break down traces of pharmaceuticals in the environment. "Metal organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. According to Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, the new form of molecular architecture can be compared with the handbag of the fictional Harry Potter character Hermione Granger: small on the outside but very large on the inside.

A day after recognizing former Google vice president and engineering fellow Geoffrey Hinton for his contributions to the field of physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has honored a pair of current Google employees. On Wednesday, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior research scientist John Jumper won half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with the other half going to David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington. Baker, Hassabis and Jumper all advanced our understanding of those essential building blocks of life that are responsible for functions both inside and outside the human body. The Nobel Committee cited Baker's seminal work in computational protein design. Since 2003, Baker and his research team have been using amino acids and computers to design entirely new proteins.

The 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work on understanding the structure of proteins, which play vital roles in all living organisms. Hassabis and Jumper, of Google DeepMind, developed an artificial intelligence that predicts the structure of proteins. Baker, at the University of Washington in Seattle, has been recognised for his work on designing new proteins. Proteins are the molecules that make life happen. All of the key machinery of life is made of proteins, from the muscles that power us and the molecules that read and copy DNA to the antibodies that protect us from infections.

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the Nobel Prize in physics Oct. 8 for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said. Mr. Hinton, who is known as the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Mr. Hopfield is an American working at Princeton. "This year's two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today's powerful machine learning," the Nobel committee said in a press release. Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates "used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets." She said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and "have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation. Mr. Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a "huge influence" on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care. "It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution," he said in the open call with reporters and the officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. "Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it's going to exceed people in intellectual ability.

Alex Galvagni, CEO of Age of Learning and a former artificial intelligence researcher with NASA, says advances in AI now make it possible to deliver to children "a personalized and supportive" experience in education. Two pioneers of artificial intelligence -- John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton -- won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity. Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton. "These two gentlemen were really the pioneers," said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. "They ... did the fundamental work, based on physical understanding which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence."

Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for climate models and the understanding of physical systems. The Nobel committee said it was sending a message with its prize announcement just weeks before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, as the rate of global warming sets off alarm bells around the world. "The world leaders that haven't got the message yet, I'm not sure they will get it because we are saying it," said Thor Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. "But … what we are saying is that the modeling of climate is solidly based in physics theory." Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, will share half of the 10 million kronor ($1.1 million) prize for their research on climate models.

Editor's note: This year What If?, our annual collection of scenarios, considers the future of health. Each of these stories is fiction, but grounded in historical fact, current speculation and real science. IT WAS A scene that the Nobel committee had dearly hoped to avoid. As the recipients of this year's prizes filed into the Stockholm Concert Hall to take their seats, dozens of protesters, including several former laureates, clashed with police in the streets outside. They had gathered to express their opposition to the unprecedented decision to award the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine to an artificial intelligence.

Three scientists won this year's Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for advancing our understanding of black holes, the all-consuming monsters that lurk in the darkest parts of the universe. Briton Roger Penrose received half of this year's prize "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity," the Nobel Committee said. German Reinhard Genzel and American Andrea Ghez received the second half of the prize "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy." The prize celebrates "one of the most exotic objects in the universe," black holes, which have become a staple of science fact and science fiction and where time seems to stand still, according to the committee. Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious and powerful objects in astronomy.