Category: awards and honors

Nobel Peace prize goes to Navi Pillay, promoter of the Israeli genocide blood libel

October 9, 2026 • 9:30 am

Well, the only thing that consoles me about this year’s grotesque award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay is that the same Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat.  But in some ways this Prize is even worse, for Pillay got it for ““for her efforts to promote peace and international law,” or, as the Nobel Prize page notes:

At a time of existential challenges – including more wars and conflicts than the world has seen in a long time – international law is no longer just a supplement to peace and security. It is an absolute necessity.

In historic international court cases, Navi Pillay has shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence. She has also contributed to strengthen the institutions of international law. Her independence, expertise and steadfastness have made her one of the most respected international jurists of our time.

What did she do to prevent acts of war and violence? She promoted the idea that Israel committed genocide, without saying a word about the explicitly outlined genocide of Hamas.  (She did condemn Hamas for war crimes, but, as you see below, that’s not why she got the Nobel Peace Prize.) As the NYT reports:(all bolding henceforth is mine):

Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer and international judge, was announced on Friday as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called her efforts to uphold a system of international law that is increasingly under attack.

The committee said that Ms. Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.” Formerly the United Nations’ top human rights official, and a judge at the International Criminal Court and on an international tribunal investigating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she is “one of the most respected international jurists of our time,” the committee said.

“Let me dedicate this award to all the survivors of international crimes as well as to practitioners and defenders of international justice,” Ms. Pillay said at a news conference in Germany.

Last year, a United Nations commission led by Ms. Pillay determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding that the Israeli government rejected. The decision to honor her added to the growing global blowback against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., told The New York Times that honoring Ms. Pillay “would not only damage the credibility of the Nobel Committee, but also tarnish the legacy of the distinguished laureates who have received this honor throughout history.”

Though the committee did not explicitly mention Gaza in its statement honoring Ms. Pillay, its chairman, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, told reporters that her work on the U.N. commission was “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize.”

There you have it.  But there were some problems with the “determination that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians”. I’ve already discussed the ludicrous “genocide” accusation against Israel as one of the war’s Big Lies, but Maarten Boudry did a better job in his Substack article, “They don’t believe it either.”

And one take from Grok:

What is the problem with the UN’s finding that Israel committed genocide?

The claim is not a finding by “the UN.” It comes from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the Pillay Commission), a body created by the UN Human Rights Council. In a September 2025 report, the three commissioners concluded that Israel had committed four of the five acts listed in the Genocide Convention against Palestinians in Gaza, with the specific intent required for genocide, and that President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and former Defense Minister Gallant had incited it. The UN as an institution has not adopted that conclusion. The International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa remains unresolved on the merits; written pleadings run into 2029, and the Court’s earlier provisional-measures orders found only that certain Palestinian rights under the Convention were “plausible” and at risk—not that genocide had occurred.

The problems with the Commission’s conclusion are structural, methodological, and legal.

The Human Rights Council maintains a permanent agenda item directed solely at Israel and has long produced a disproportionate share of its country-specific resolutions against it. The Commission’s members entered with public records of hostility toward Israel. Miloon Kothari had spoken of the “Jewish lobby” controlling social media; Chris Sidoti had dismissed concerns about antisemitism; Navi Pillay had a documented history of partisan statements on the conflict. Israel has refused to cooperate with the body since 2022 on grounds of bias. The resulting reports rely heavily on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry (which does not separate combatants from civilians), unnamed witnesses, NGOs, and outlets such as Al Jazeera, while giving minimal weight to Israeli operational data or the documented embedding of Hamas forces.

The report largely erases Hamas as a fighting force. It does not seriously engage the scale of the tunnel network, the systematic use of civilian sites, the diversion of aid, or the October 7, 2023 attack that killed roughly 1,200 people and took hostages—the casus belli. Statements by Israeli officials are parsed selectively (“human animals,” biblical allusions) while wartime context and explicit targeting of Hamas are discounted. UN Watch’s detailed rebuttal and other legal analyses describe the evidentiary base as one-sided and the inferences of intent as conjecture.

Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the decisive element is dolus specialis: specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. High civilian casualties in urban warfare against an enemy that operates from within the civilian population do not establish that intent. Reported deaths (Gaza Health Ministry figures in the mid-to-high 70,000s by late 2026, including combatants) have not reduced Gaza’s population to anything approaching destruction; estimates remain around 2.1 million. Demographic breakdowns of identified fatalities show men of fighting age heavily over-represented relative to their share of the pre-war population. Israel issued evacuation warnings, opened corridors, and facilitated large volumes of aid—conduct difficult to reconcile with a policy of physical annihilation. Some advocacy groups that reach a genocide conclusion have acknowledged they are applying a broader standard than the Convention’s text and existing jurisprudence require.

The same bodies have not applied comparable scrutiny to Hamas’s charter language and explicit aims, or to far larger death tolls in other recent conflicts. The Commission’s finding therefore functions more as an amplification of a pre-existing political narrative than as an impartial legal determination. The only forum that can issue a binding ruling on the state responsibility question is the ICJ, and it has not done so.
As for some of Pillay’s statements on Israel before she was even appointed to the committee, much less before October of 1983, Grok says this:

Before [Pillay] was named to investigate Israel, she had already applied the apartheid label and backed sanctions:

  • In a November 2017 interview she said apartheid means enforced segregation on racial lines “and that is what is happening in Israel.”
  • In June 2020 she signed a South African BDS Coalition petition titled “Sanction Apartheid Israel!,” which called for an arms embargo, an end to military-security cooperation, and suspension of free-trade agreements, and equated Israeli policy with South African apartheid.
  • In May 2021 she described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “inhuman” and again compared it to apartheid South Africa.
  • On 14 June 2021, weeks after the May 2021 Israel–Hamas fighting, she signed a joint letter to President Biden decrying Israel’s “domination and oppression of the Palestinian people” and “ever-expanding discrimination and systemic oppression,” and characterizing clashes at Al-Aqsa as aggressive actions against peaceful protesters amounting to forced dispossession.

As for the 2026 Nobel Prize contest , we have a winner, but not for the Peace Prize, as nobody was dumb enough to guess Pillay. The winner is Renée Szostek, who guessed Carson for the literature prize. If you are Szostek, please get in touch with me so we can get you your boook.

Finally, a tweet from Maarten Boudry; you can see the letter, signed by U.S. military personnel, here.

Anne Carson nabs Nobel for literature

October 8, 2026 • 8:15 am

Just about an hour ago, the Nobel folks gave the 2026 Literature Prize to Canadian writer and poet Anne Carson, and I admit I’d never heard of her.  I should have: as Wikipedia notes,

With more than twenty books of writings and translations published to date, Carson has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters. In 2026, she was awarded the 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.”

She’s produced over twenty books, including translations.

The official award by the Nobel Foundation gives this rationale:

“for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.

And the Nobel’s “biobibliography” adds this:

Carson once described boredom as her arch-enemy, and it is a state she confronts with drastic humour and wit. The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, published in 2001, tells of a cutting and sardonic row with a deceitful husband, its twenty-nine episodes each opening with lines of verse by the romantic poet John Keats. Keats’s sublime words about beauty being truth are, in brutal yet playful fashion, juxtaposed with this exhausting relationship drama.

An unforgettable work of Carson’s is Nox (2010), written in memory of her brother Michael, who was mysteriously absent prior to his death in Denmark in 2000. Palpable here is a deep sense of loss that works its way up from below. The result is a creation as sculptural as it is literary, an epitaph in the form of a box containing an accordion-fold-out of pictures, letters and other written texts dedicated to her dead brother. There is moreover a third voice that provides temporal depth in the shape of the Roman poet Catullus, with his famous elegy 101 in honour of his own departed brother, who like Michael died on foreign soil. Present also is Carson’s moving translation of the poem.

Throughout her entire authorship, Carson with a light touch explores the possibilities of writing, a process by which the literary sketch has become of particular value to her. Bearing witness to this is Float (2016), a work consisting of twenty-two chapbooks on different subjects, capable of being read in any order. Another is Wrong Norma from 2024, a diverse combination of texts with a strongly performative aspect in which Carson crosses over into various artistic and academic fields. Her collaborations with visual artists and choreographers and with opera and theatre directors demonstrate the freedom with which she relates to literary expectations and rule systems. It is this that lies behind the outstanding importance her work since the 1990s has had for the international art and literature scene.

Renée Szostek guessed Carson in our contest, and if there’s no earlier winner for the Peace Prize, awarded tomorrow, Szostak will be the winner.

Here’s an interview with Carson two years ago:

Two nab Chemistry Nobel for producing asymmetric molecules

October 7, 2026 • 7:45 am

Just recently we were talking about chirality (“handedness”) in the molecules of life: organisms use only L amino acids in proteins and D sugars in the DNA ladder, although opposite-handed molecules exist. Why is this? For a while chemists have been trying to create a preference in “one handed” molecules via chemical reactions. And the two who just won the Chemistry Nobel Prize, Kenso Soai and Henri Kagan, succeeded. The Nobel Prize site gives a brief explanation:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.”

Henri Kagan discovered a new way of manipulating chemical reactions, allowing a greater excess of one of the mirror images to be created than was previously assumed possible. His discovery has been revolutionary for chemists who develop reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, flavours, scents and new materials.

Kenso Soai designed the first chemical reaction in which only one of the potential mirror images was formed. Other than life itself, no one had ever achieved this feat. The Soai reaction is one of the most spectacular chemical experiments ever conducted.

And Science gives a bit more explanation:

Molecules can exist in mirror images of themselves—left- and right-handed versions. Yet the stuff of life, from the amino acids in our proteins to the sugars in DNA, has evolved a preference for one-handedness, or chirality. Why this asymmetry arose has long been a mystery, because ordinary chemical reactions tend to produce equal amounts of the two mirror images.

Today’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors Henri Kagan of the University of Paris-Sud and Kenso Soai of the Tokyo University of Science for discovering how chemistry can break that symmetry—and for providing clues to how life’s one-handed chemistry might have emerged.

“Their discoveries led to a chemical reaction that spontaneously, without the involvement of other chiral molecules, creates only one mirror image,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Prize Committee for Chemistry, said at a press conference this morning where the award was announced. “This is the first time this had happened since the processes that led to the chirality of life billions of years ago.”

For decades, drugmakers had struggled to create chemical reactions that would produce a one-handed form of a drug—a problem because mirror-image forms of the same drug molecule can have very different biological effects. For example, the right-handed drug Darvon is an opioid painkiller, whereas its left-handed form, Novrad, is a cough medicine. (The names are mirror images of each other as well.)

Chemists had long assumed that the handedness of a catalyst—a compound that speeds up a chemical reaction—would be transferred linearly to the molecules it produced. But in 1986, Kagan showed that wasn’t necessarily so. When left- and right-handed versions of a catalyst were mixed, he found, they formed combinations that behaved differently: Some barely drove the reaction at all. As a result, a small imbalance in the catalyst could produce a much larger imbalance in the product—a phenomenon known as a nonlinear effect. The discovery gave chemists a new way to drive reactions with a preference for one particular molecular handedness.

Soai put the idea into practice. In 1995, he showed that a reaction could amplify a tiny initial excess of one mirror image. Starting with just 2% excess, he ended with 87%. He continued to look for ways to improve, and in 2003, he demonstrated a reaction that could snowball on itself, amplifying a tiny, chance imbalance between the two mirror images, until more than 99% of the product had the same handedness.

“Taken together, the groundbreaking discoveries by Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have reshaped our understanding of molecular chirality, how it is created, amplified, and transmitted,” prize committee member Peter Somfai said at the press conference.

We don’t yet have a theory why, say, L-amino acids predominate in life, but it could have been due to an initial tiny asymmetry that was amplified in the way described above, making one kind of amino acid more available for protein synthesis. As we discussed recently, “mirror life” made of opposite-handed molecules, like D amino acids, might pose dangers to the planet.

Here are the two mirror-image forms (called “isomers”) of the amino acid alanine, which cannot be superimposed on each other.

By the way, we don’t yet have 20 entries in our guess-the-Nobels-in-Literature-and-Peace prize, and if we don’t get to that limit before the deadline (5 p.m. Chicago time today), the contest is canceled. What a sad site this has become!

The 2026 Nobel Prize Contest

October 6, 2026 • 9:30 am

In the past few years these contests often lacked winners, so I’m increasing your chances this year by eliminating the sciences and economics from the guesses (two science prizes have already been awarded). The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced Thursday, October 8, and the Peace Prize on the next day. I’m asking you to guess the winners of both, to wit:

Guess the names of the winners of the Nobel Prizes for Literature and for Peace

Here are the Roolz:

a.) One guess per person in each category. If you name more than one person or group for each prize, your vote will be summarily discarded.

b.) Remember that organizations can be awarded the Peace Prize.

c.) To win, you must guess both correctly. But since the Literature Prize is almost never guessed correctly, if nobody gets both I will name as winner the first person to correctly guesses either of the two winners. If there are ties, the first guesser wins.

d.) DEADLINE: Wednesday, October 7 (tomorrow) at 5 p.m. Chicago time.

THE PRIZE: A mint paperback copy of either WEIT or Faith Versus Fact, autographed by the author and with a cat drawn in it to your specifications. (There is some flexibility here if you prefer another animals, but remember that I’m not an artist.) Since I cannot mail books internationally, they will be sent to a U.S. address of your choosing.

Note: if there are fewer than 20 people guessing, the contest is null and void due to lack of interest.

Three scientists nab Nobel for Physiology or Medicine for work on optogenetics, one physicist wins for work on neutrinos

October 6, 2026 • 8:15 am

I completely missed the Nobel award in biology yesterday, but I see that one has been awarded this morning in physics. The former involves three scientists, the latter a lone physicist.

The Medicine or Physiology prize release is here. It describes advances in “optogenetics,” the use of optical signals to detect how neurons work. It’s very clever, based on an algal protein, rhodopsin, that is activated by light and, when put in a nerve cell, will create an impulse when the cell is illuminated by blue light.

There’s a clear discussion of the Prize-winning research at The Conversation (click below to read):

A summary:

Scientists who worked out how to control brain cells with light have won this year’s Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were honoured for their research into “light-gated ion channels and optogenetics”.

Peter Hegemann, at Humboldt University of Berlin, and Georg Nagel, at the University of Würzburg, wanted to understand how a tiny, single-celled alga called Chlamydomonas senses light. Light-sensing is not unique to animals with eyes: organisms throughout the living world use light to detect their surroundings and respond to changes in their environment. Even single-cell organisms have proteins that respond to light. These proteins are used to move towards or away from light, to generate energy and to respond to the various demands of a 24-hour day.

Hegemann and Nagel discovered that Chlamydomonas has a beautifully ingenious mechanism of light detection that relies on a single protein called channelrhodopsin.

Channelrhodopsin is built into the outer membrane of the algal cell. Part of the protein faces the water outside the cell and part faces the inside. The protein also contains a small molecule called retinaldehyde, which is able to absorb light.

When light hits the retinaldehyde inside channelrhodopsin, it changes shape. This makes the channelrhodopsin protein change shape too. That change opens a tiny passage through the cell membrane. Positively charged particles, including sodium, can then flow from the water outside the alga into the cell. This movement of charged particles sends a signal inside the alga that helps it swim.

The researchers realised that if they could put channelrhodopsin into nerve cells, they might be able to switch those cells on simply by shining a light on them. That is exactly what Hegemann, Nagel and the third Nobel-prize winner, Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and bioengineer at Stanford University in California, went on to do.

. . . and how it’s used, with a cool example:

The ability to control nerve cells with light is called optogenetics. It has become a powerful research tool because scientists can use it to switch specific groups of nerve cells on and off and see what happens.

First, scientists deliver the gene for channelrhodopsin to the nerve cells they want to study. The gene is usually carried into the cells by a virus that has been altered so that it cannot cause disease. The cells then make the channelrhodopsin protein, which makes them respond to light.

In animals such as mice, scientists can shine light into the brain through a thin optical fibre. When the light reaches the cells, channelrhodopsin opens and the cells become active. Nearby nerve cells that do not contain the protein are unaffected.

Light can be aimed at a very small part of the brain and switched on and off extremely quickly. This makes optogenetics a powerful way to investigate how the brain works. For example, if scientists want to know whether a particular group of nerve cells is involved in memory, sleep, sensation or movement, say, they can switch those cells on with light and see what happens.

In one experiment in 2012, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave mice a mild electric shock in a particular cage. They used optogenetics to tag the nerve cells in the brain’s memory centre that were active during that the fear-conditioning experiment. Days later, in a different cage, they switched those cells on with light. The mice froze in fear, as if they remembered the shock.

Mice that were not shocked did not freeze, which showed that the light was reactivating a specific memory. Deisseroth was one of the study’s authors.

***************************************

And the press release for the physics prize is here. An excerpt:

Francis Halzen realised that ice at the South Pole could be used to track particles known as neutrinos. His vision and scientific leadership have been fundamental for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory – a cubic kilometre of ice that is equipped with light sensors. Using IceCube, researchers can capture neutrinos from extremely energy-rich processes in the distant universe.

Neutrinos are everywhere, but they do not make themselves known. They pass all the way through the Earth and through our bodies without us noticing. Very rarely, a single neutrino will interact with an atomic nucleus, which makes it possible for someone with the right equipment to discover them.

Scientists have long known that the cosmos contains natural particle accelerators, which fire out particles with energies up to a million times more than can be achieved in laboratories on Earth. Much about these sources is mysterious: what are they, where are they, and what are the main processes inside them?

Neutrinos with extremely high energies are created in the same environments as other types of particles. However, unlike other particles, neutrinos reach us without changing direction or losing energy. This means they can provide information that is not available in any other way.

Francis Halzen first presented his vision for capturing neutrinos at the South Pole in 1988. When a neutrino collides with an atomic nucleus, it produces a flash of light that can be tracked by sensors in the clear glacial ice. The South Pole’s ice has many advantages, as it is free from various types of interference and the area is geologically stable, with no earthquakes. Halzen and his idea soon gained the support of other researchers and, just a few years later, preliminary testing was conducted on sensors in ice.

Cosmic neutrinos with extremely high energies are very rare, so an enormous volume of ice is needed to observe an adequate number of collisions. IceCube covers an entire cubic kilometre and was finished in 2011. Researchers soon discovered the first high-energy neutrinos and, a few years later, could publish their discovery of neutrinos that must originate far outside our solar system. The search for the universe’s neutrino sources could begin in earnest.

“Francis Halzen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a fantastic instrument. His tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy,” says Mark Pearce, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

The neutrino interactions that are continuously collected by IceCube will provide researchers with novel knowledge about the violent settings in which high-energy neutrinos can be created – and could even reveal previously unknown cosmic phenomena.

Here’s the apparatus and how it works, taken from the Nobel Prize press release. See if you can read it by clicking to enlarge. The observed ice and detectors are buried way underground. Just getting this damn thing set up at the South Pole would merit a prize by itself!

Now perhaps some reader with expertise can tell us in the comments why high-energy neutrinos from outside the solar system are so important compared to lower-energy neutrinos from, say, the Sun.

Matthew Cobb wins big prize for his Crick biography

March 6, 2026 • 9:45 am

I told you that Matthew’s new biography of Francis Crick was good! Now Crick: A Mind in Motion has been given the imprimatur of quality by winning a big book prize in England.  Matthew sent me his Bluehair post below, and when I asked him what prize he won, he replied:

Hatchard’s First Biography Prize. Hatchards is a posh bookshop on Piccadilly where the King buys his books. I will get a proper cheque. £2.5k! 

It is a big check—in both senses:

I won! I have a big cheque!

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-03-05T19:23:03.888Z

Below is the site for the prize (click to go there). Note, too that Matthew’s book beat out the John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, a book about Lennon and McCartney and Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealisme, a kiss-and-tell memoirSarah Wynn-Williams, who used to work for Facebook and who has been clobbered with lawsuits by that company and other people. 

And the site’s announcement:

Hatchards has teamed up with The Biographers’ Club to support the Best First Biography Prize.

The prize awards £2,500 to the best biography or memoir published that year, and has been won in recent years by Daniel Finkelstein, Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada, Lea Ypi, Heather Clark, Jonathan Phillips, Bart van Es, Edmund Gordon and Hisham Matar.

This year’s winner is Crick by Matthew Cobb.

Go buy it, or take it out from the library to read it. (This advice is for people who are interested in science, but if you’re not, you shouldn’t be reading here.)

Congratulations to Matthew! I told him to use the £2500 prize to treat himself to something nice, like a vacation.

Matthew’s Bernal Prize Lecture on Francis Crick

June 19, 2025 • 1:31 pm

The Royal Society has announced the winner of the 2024 Bernal Prize, which happens to be our own Matthew Cobb:

Scientists don’t often admit it to themselves, but most scientific discoveries are over-determined. If Watson or Crick had fallen under a bus in 1952, then Franklin, or Wilkins, or Pauling, or someone would soon have discovered the double helix in their place. Furthermore, as Crick put it in 2000, ‘Discoveries and inventions are more important than the people who make them.’ But sometimes the individual does matter. After the double helix was discovered, none of the clever people involved – not Watson, nor Franklin, nor Wilkins, nor Pauling – sought to draw out the deep implications of the structure. Only Crick did that, and his ideas, and the way he proceeded, influenced the course of discovery and the way we now think about genes and cells and evolution. Had Crick fallen under a bus in 1954, the course of science would have been different.

Having spent three intensive years immersed in writing a biography of Crick, Professor Cobb will use his life and work (not just the double helix!) to explore the role of individuals in scientific discovery and the importance of recent attempts to diversify the pool of scientists, something that is currently under attack.

About the award:

The Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture 2024 is awarded to Professor Matthew Cobb for his work documenting the history of biology as both an author and broadcaster.

The Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture is given for excellence in a subject relating to the history of science, philosophy of science or the social function of science. The Wilkins, Bernal and Medawar lectures were originally delivered as three separate lectures, each given triennially. Since 2007, they have been combined under the one title of the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Lecture. The medal is of bronze, is awarded annually and is accompanied by a gift of £2,000.

I was going to put this up earlier but forgot, and the lecture is just winding up. The good news is that it’s on YouTube and you can see the whole thing.  I’ll watch it this evening, but put your comments below.

There’s quite a lot about consciousness in here, too, as the lecture is supposed to incorporate philosophy, and there’s a 15-minute discussion/Q&A session at the end.

Congratulations to Matthew.