A (0:00)

Every year, the Nobel Prize Committee awards the Nobel Prize in accordance with the will of Alfred Nobel. Save for the years where there have been world wars, the prize has been given annually since 1901. The 2025 prizes have just been announced and each recipient has made a unique contribution for which they have been recognized. Learn more about the 2025 Nobel Prize recipients and the work that they were recognized for on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Quinn's as the weather cools here in Wisconsin, I'm swapping in the pieces that actually get the job done that are warm, durable and built to last. And Quince delivers every time with wardrobe staples that'll carry you through the season. I've told you before about my duvet cover, my blanket and my black cashmere sweater that I all got on Quince, all of which will be helping me get through this fall and winter. Quince has the kind of staples you'll actually want to wear on repeat, like classic fit denim and real leather and wool outerwear that looks sharp and holes up. By partnering directly with ethical factories and top artisans, Quince cuts out the middleman to deliver premium quality at half the cost of similar brands and sometimes with even bigger discounts. Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they Look. Go to quince.com daily for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quincee.com daily free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com daily. This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. If you're a regular listener, you know that I spent over a decade traveling all over the world. During my travels, I would often get mobile plans from my phone, and I noticed that almost everywhere in the world had much, much cheaper phone plans than what we had in the United States. That all changed with Mint Mobile. With Mint, you can get monthly plans that start at just $15 a month. That's why I recommend Mint Mobile. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your own phone number along with your existing contacts. At Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees and no bs. Ready to say yes to saying no? Make the switch@mintmobile.comeed that's mintmobile.comeed upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month limited time. New customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabits on unlimited plan tax and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. The Nobel Prizes are awarded every year, and each recipient has a unique story behind their recognition. I figured this would be a good annual tradition for the podcast to review the recipients each year and to provide a summary of the work they did to receive their prize. In many cases, especially in the science awards, their work is often not understood by most people, so I figured I would take that job upon myself. So let's start with the Oddball Award in the Nobel Prizes. The Prize for Literature the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature is the Hungarian writer Literature Laszlo Krasna Horkhoi. The reason why the Literature Prize is such an oddball is that the Nobel Committee has to recognize work that's done all over the world. In the case of literature, that's difficult because there are so many different languages that authors write in almost every year. No one has heard of the winner in literature because unless you happen to speak that language, you've probably never heard of them. The Nobel Committee recognized Krasna Horkhoi for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the mid of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art. Krasna Horkhoi is often described as the kind of epic writer in a Central European tradition going back through writers like Franz Kafka, whose style is marked by what critics call absurdism and grotesque excess. His novels frequently follow characters in decaying marginal communities or in circumstances of collapse or disorder. Perhaps his best known work is santantango, written in 1985, which explores a collapsing rural community in Hungary, portraying disintegration, deceit, despair, and the presence of human connection. That novel became a landmark in Hungarian literature and was also adapted into a film. The book was also awarded the International Booker Prize in 2015 for its translation into English. By all accounts, he's a great writer, but not that many people speak Hungarian, so he isn't that well known outside of Hungary. The winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize is Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela. Maria Carina Machado received the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for leading a broad, largely nonviolent movement to restore democratic rights in Venezuela after years of repression under President Nicolas Maduro. The Nobel Committee's press release described her as a brave, committed champion who kept the flame of democracy alive by insisting on free elections, accountable government, and the right of Venezuelans to choose their leaders. It highlights her decision to remain in the country despite threats, legal disqualifications from the 2024 presidential race, active arrest warrant framing her struggle as a push for a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. Peace prizes tend to fall into one of three buckets. The first are diplomats or politicians who bring about a peace or some end to hostilities. This is how Henry Kissinger, Anwar Sadat, Yasser Arafat and Theodore Roosevelt were awarded their peace prizes. However, there aren't a lot of opportunities to give these sort of prizes away. The second bucket is general do gooders. They're usually involved in some international organization, are a global organization or just generally promote something that is considered good. This is how Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Jimmy Carter and the International Red Cross were all awarded prizes. The final category includes people who are fighting against an authoritarian country, and the Nobel committee selects them to send a message. Recent recipients from China, Russia and Iran all fall into this category, as does Maria Carina Machado. This is the Nobel Committee sending a message to Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. The 2025 Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economic Sciences in the memory of Alfred Nobel. Not one of the original Nobel Prizes was awarded to three Yoel Mochil of Northwestern University, Philippe Eguillon of the London School of Economics and and Peter Howitt of Brown University. Collectively, they were awarded for showing from different angles how invention and the spread of new ideas, power long term growth and rising standards of living. The committee split the prize into two parts. Mochile received one half for explaining the historical conditions that allow science and practical know how to reinforce each other and keep progress going. He used evidence from events like the Industrial Revolution to argue that growth is not automatic it depends on a culture that tolerates new ideas, open exchange of knowledge and institutions that do not punish change. In short, he identified the preconditions that make continuous technical advancement possible rather than rare. Aiguillon and Hawat shared the other half for building a formal theory of what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. In their model, researchers and firms invest in new technologies that replace older ones. That replacement raises productivity and incomes over time, yet also creates disruption that policy must manage. Their work shows why competition, entry of new firms and incentive for research and development matter, and why policies that block rivals or protect outdated production methods can slow economic growth. The model helps explain real world patterns like why countries that invest in education and research, keep markets open to newcomers and regulate monopolies carefully can tend to grow faster in the long run. The 2025 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology was awarded to Mary Brucknow and Fred Ramsdahl of the Celtech Corporation and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University. Their work had to do with bettering our understanding of the human immune system. Our immune system has a big job. It has to fight off infections without damaging our own tissues. If that balance fails, the immune system might attack the body itself, leading to autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and so on. Before this work, scientists knew that some immune cells are eliminated early in life through a process called central tolerance, which removes immune cells that strongly target the body's own proteins. But that did not fully explain why many people never develop autoimmunity and how the immune system restrains itself later in the body's tissues. The concept of peripheral tolerance is that even after immune cells mature, there must be checks that prevent them from attacking the body. Sakaguchi was the first to propose and experimentally show that a special class of immune cells act like internal peacekeepers in the body. In the mid-1990s, he found that in mice, when certain subsets of T cells were missing or removed, the mice developed autoimmune disease. But if he gave those mice the missing cells from healthy animals, the disease went away. That led him to postulate the existence of regulatory T cells, which suppress or restrain other immune cells from attacking the body. Later, Brunkow and Ramsdell made a key advance by identifying the genetic control behind those regulatory T cells in mice with a lethal autoimmune disorder known as Scurfy. Brunkow and Ramsdell found a mutation in an X chromosome gene encoding a prote called SCRFEN and later named FOXP3. So why is this important? Well, it brings us a step closer to understanding autoimmune diseases and how possibly to cure them. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, and Omar Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley. The three laureates developed and refined a new type of molecular architecture called metal. Organic frameworks often abbreviate as MOFs. These are crystalline materials built by combining metallic atoms and organic molecules in a repeating lattice like pattern. What is special is that these frameworks contain internal cavities or empty pores through which other molecules, like gases or water vapors, can flow, enter, exit, or even be stored. The outer shape of the material may look solid, but inside it's a huge internal surface area filled with space. The idea is that by picking which metal and which organic linker molecules to Use, you can control the size, shape, and chemical properties of those pores. So the MOFs can selectively trap or release certain molecules. In that sense, an MOF is like a highly customized sponge or network of tunnels at the molecular scale. So why is this important? Because MOFs have huge internal surface areas and controllable pores. They can interact with many molecules in waves that conventional solids cannot. They could potentially capture CO2 molecules, particulate pollutants, or even water directly from the atmosphere. They can also potentially be used as catalysts in chemical reactions. The final prize I'll be covering, which was actually the one awarded first, is the prize for physics. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clark of the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Deverett of Yale University, and John Martinez of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The prize committee said the award was given for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit. Okay, so what does that mean? Particles at the quantum level behave very differently from things that we're used to dealing with at the macroscopic level. In particular, in quantum physics, a particle sometimes tunnels through a barrier that it shouldn't be able to cross. In classical physics, what Clarke, Deverett, and Martinez showed is that under the right conditions, this behavior can manifest at scales larger than the quantum level. The setting for their experiments was a superconducting circuit. If you recall from a previous episode on the subject, a superconductor is a material that, when cooled to extremely low temperatures, allows electric current to flow without any resistance. In their design, they used a special element called a Josephson junction, which is two superconductors separated by a very thin insulating barrier. Normally, current can't flow through an insulator, but in quantum mechanics, tunneling can occur. The experimenters took a superconducting circuit, then measured how it behaved under different electrical biases and under microwaves. The circuit was small, but big enough to be seen in a microscope and still much larger than the quantum level. They observed two major things. First, the circuit sometimes jumped from one side to the other by tunneling through the barrier, something that should be impossible in classical physics. Second, when they applied microwaves of certain frequencies, the circuit absorbed energy only in discrete amounts, showing quantized energy levels. And if you remember back to my episode on the ultraviolet catastrophe, discrete amounts of energy means it can be at one level or another, but nothing in between. So why is this important? First, they bridge the gap between the quantum world and the larger macroscopic world. Before these experiments, many Physicists assumed that quantum effects like tunneling or discrete energy levels would be unobservable in large systems because of all the noise and interaction. Their work proved that, at least in carefully engineered systems, and it was possible to preserve quantum behavior even at scales large enough to be used in devices. Second, their experiments laid foundational groundwork for quantum technologies, especially quantum computing, quantum sensors, and quantum cryptography. The circuits they studied are closely related to superconducting qubits used in many of today's quantum computer designs. And third, this work helps to improve ultra sensitive measurement devices. The ability to observe quantum effects in circuits helps build sensors that can detect extremely weak signals or changes. Because quantum systems can be extremely sensitive, this has implications in fields like magnetic resonance imaging, precision measurement devices, and possibly new kinds of detectors. There's often been controversies in the awarding of Nobel Prizes. However, I think the 2025 selections are pretty good. Some of the awards, especially in the sciences, might actually have a role to play in shaping our future in the years to come. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible, and I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast, and links to those are available in the show Notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read on the show.