Nobel Prizes 2026 Explained: Winners, Discoveries and Why They Matter
Ten people won the six Nobel Prizes this year. Between them they found a way to switch brain cells on with light, caught neutrinos in Antarctic ice, made molecules pick a hand, turned Greek classics into new poetry, pushed for war crimes to be prosecuted, and built the economic models central banks rely on. This article explains what each of them actually did, in plain words, and where India fits in.
Where the Nobel Prize comes from
Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and industrialist who got rich from dynamite, which he invented in 1867. On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish–Norwegian Club in Paris, he signed a will leaving most of that money, more than 31 million Swedish kronor, to a fund. The yearly income from the fund was to go to the people who, in the previous year, had done the most good for humankind. He died on 10 December 1896.
It took five years to sort out the legal and organisational side. The first prizes were handed out on 10 December 1901, exactly five years after his death, and the ceremonies are still held on that date.
| Prize | Who decides | Presented in |
|---|---|---|
| Physics | Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences | Stockholm |
| Chemistry | Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences | Stockholm |
| Physiology or Medicine | Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet | Stockholm |
| Literature | The Swedish Academy | Stockholm |
| Peace | Norwegian Nobel Committee, chosen by the Norwegian Parliament | Oslo |
| Economic Sciences | Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences | Stockholm |
Economics is the odd one out. It is not in Nobel’s will. Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, created it in 1968 in his memory, and it was first awarded in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen.
The rules that matter
- At most three people can share a prize. Only the Peace Prize can go to an organisation (the Red Cross has won it three times).
- No posthumous prizes. Nominations and deliberations stay secret for 50 years.
- Prize money: 12 million Swedish kronor per full prize in 2026, up from 11 million in 2025, plus a medal and a diploma.
- Ceremonies are on 10 December, in Stockholm for five prizes and in Oslo for Peace.
- Totals: from 1901 to 2025 the prizes were awarded 633 times to 1,026 people and organisations. 68 of those awards went to women.
The 2026 laureates at a glance
| Prize | Laureate(s) | Country | Awarded for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medicine | Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel | USA, Germany, Germany | Light-gated ion channels and optogenetics: switching nerve cells on and off with light |
| Physics | Francis Halzen | USA | IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin |
| Chemistry | Henri B. Kagan, Kenso Soai | France, Japan | Non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric synthesis: making a reaction give one mirror-image molecule |
| Literature | Anne Carson | Canada | Work that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, created new forms for contemporary literature |
| Peace | Navi Pillay | South Africa | Her efforts to promote peace and international law |
| Economics | Robert E. Hall, Michael Woodford | USA, USA | Microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation |
Quick count
- Ten laureates in all. Two are women: Anne Carson and Navi Pillay. Carson is the 19th woman to win Literature.
- Francis Halzen is the first sole Physics laureate since Georges Charpak in 1992.
- By country: USA 4, Germany 2, and France, Japan, Canada and South Africa 1 each.
- Split of the 12 million kronor: Chemistry and Economics in halves, Medicine in thirds, Physics, Literature and Peace whole.
01Nobel Prize 2026Physiology or Medicine
Optogenetics: controlling the brain with light
“for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics”
In plain words: Hegemann and Nagel found a light-sensitive channel protein in a green alga. Deisseroth put it into nerve cells so that a flash of light could switch them on.
What the prize recognises
For most of the 20th century, brain science could link regions to functions but could not prove cause and effect. Electrodes fire every cell near their tip. Drugs act on the whole brain. Neither can pick out one type of neuron among billions. Francis Crick had guessed that light might do the job, but nobody had a working method. Optogenetics finally gave them one: researchers can now turn chosen cells on or off with light.
- The alga. Chlamydomonas reacts to light within about half a millisecond. The human eye takes about ten. Hegemann suspected that one protein both senses light and acts on it. Isolating it was hard because the proteins became unstable once removed from the eyespot. A lead came when Japanese researchers published the alga’s DNA, which held two genes resembling light-capturing proteins.
- The channel. Nagel placed the two proteins in frog egg cells, which then reacted to light. The working protein was named channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR-2). Blue light opens a pore through it, charged ions flow in and an electrical impulse results. It made every cell type it was placed in light-sensitive.
- The neuron. In 2005 Deisseroth’s group, with Ed Boyden, Feng Zhang, Ernst Bamberg and Nagel, showed that neurons with ChR-2 fire under blue light. Two years later Deisseroth made it work in living mice: light moved their whiskers, woke sleeping mice by activating a type of wakefulness-linked cell, and, in another experiment, reactivating cells that had been active during fear made mice act afraid with no danger present.
- In practice. A harmless virus delivers the gene for a light-sensitive protein (an opsin) into target cells. A fibre-optic cable or tiny LED supplies the light. Depending on the opsin, light either opens channels and activates the cell or pumps ions to silence it.
Applications and impact
| Field | What it is used for |
|---|---|
| Brain research | Finding the circuits behind pain, social behaviour, thirst, food intake, reward and attention, and studying how memories form |
| Disease models | Testing the role of specific cells in Parkinson’s disease, depression, schizophrenia, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease |
| Vision | Clinical trials for retinitis pigmentosa, which destroys the rods and cones. In one reported case a blind patient wearing special light-emitting glasses could find and grasp objects on a table |
| Hearing | Being explored for cochlear implants, which now stimulate the auditory nerve with electricity |
| Other organs | Light has been used to pace the heart, to study how heart rate affects brain states |
It is still mainly a research tool, and treatments are at trial stage. The prize came 21 years after the 2005 paper, and it beat bookmakers’ favourites such as GLP-1 drugs and CAR-T therapy.
India link. Optogenetics is practised in Indian labs. Vidita Vaidya of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research says it has changed the scale at which neuroscience discoveries are made, and Sanjeev Kumar Mehto of IIT (BHU) says it has helped explain brain functions and some conditions. The open question for India, as elsewhere, is how fast lab results reach patients, for example through vision restoration.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Optogenetics | Using light to control genetically modified cells |
| Opsin | A light-sensitive protein that works as an on/off switch for a cell |
| Channelrhodopsin | A light-gated ion channel first found in the green alga Chlamydomonas |
02Nobel Prize 2026Physics
IceCube: catching neutrinos from outside our Galaxy
“for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”
In plain words: Halzen proposed using Antarctic ice as a neutrino detector and led the project that built it. IceCube has since caught neutrinos arriving from beyond our Galaxy.
What the prize recognises
Cosmic rays, mostly protons and nuclei, have bombarded the Earth since at least the early 20th century. Some carry more energy than the Large Hadron Collider can produce. Exploding stars or jets from distant galaxies were suspected, but nobody knew. The problem is that cosmic rays are charged, so magnetic fields bend their paths and their arrival direction says little about their origin.
Neutrinos get around this. They have no charge and almost no mass, and they rarely interact with anything, so trillions pass through your body every second and they travel in straight lines. A high-energy neutrino therefore points back to where it came from. The catch is that to catch even a few, you need a huge amount of matter. Halzen and John G. Learned proposed using South Pole ice in 1987–88, and Halzen then organised the effort, funded mainly by the US National Science Foundation, keeping hundreds of scientists working for decades.
IceCube took full shape in 2011 after seven years of construction. Holes were melted with hot water and cables of sensors lowered before the water refroze. Charged particles that move faster than light does in ice emit Cherenkov radiation, a dull blue glow. IceCube records roughly a lakh neutrinos a year above its energy cutoff, and about a hundred of those come from astrophysical sources.
Three cosmic messengers compared
| Messenger | Strength | Weakness |
|---|---|---|
| Light | Easy to detect, mature technology | Absorbed or scattered by dust and gas, so some sources stay hidden |
| Cosmic rays | Carry energy from the extreme universe | Charged, so magnetic fields scramble their direction |
| Neutrinos | Travel straight, giving an unobstructed view of cosmic accelerators | Almost undetectable, so cubic-kilometre detectors are needed |
What IceCube has found
| When | Finding |
|---|---|
| 2013 | Two neutrinos with about 140 times the energy of a proton accelerated by the LHC. More data showed a whole population of high-energy neutrinos reaching Earth from outside our Galaxy |
| 2017 | A roughly 290 TeV neutrino traced to TXS 0506+056, a distant galaxy whose black hole powers a jet pointed roughly at Earth. Archive data showed the same object had also produced a burst in 2014–15 |
| 2022 | More neutrinos than expected from NGC 1068, a galaxy 46 million light-years away, also with an active central black hole |
| 2023 | First high-energy neutrinos from the plane of our own Milky Way (4.5 sigma) |
Halzen reads the data as pointing to dense regions near supermassive black holes, where gamma rays are absorbed and never escape. The prize arrives 38 years after the 1988 proposal.
Applications and impact
| Field | What it opens up |
|---|---|
| Origin of cosmic rays | Neutrinos form where cosmic rays are accelerated, so they can point to the sources of the highest-energy cosmic rays, a question open for over a century |
| Multimessenger astronomy | Neutrino detections can be matched with light, cosmic rays and gravitational waves from the same event |
| Particle physics | Studying neutrinos themselves, searching for dark matter, watching for supernovae in our Galaxy |
| More telescopes | Similar detectors are being built in the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Baikal |
The gain is knowledge, a new way to observe the universe. There is no direct commercial application.
India link. India’s own neutrino project is the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO). It was planned as an underground detector for atmospheric neutrinos, a different approach from IceCube’s ice, to settle questions such as the ordering of neutrino masses. The site was first chosen near Singara in the Nilgiris and later shifted to the Bodi West Hills in Theni district, Tamil Nadu. Environmental clearances and local opposition have held it up for years, and it has not been built.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Neutrino | Neutral, extremely light particle that very rarely interacts with matter |
| Cherenkov light | Glow emitted when a charged particle moves through a medium faster than light does in that medium |
| Multimessenger astronomy | Studying one cosmic event through light, neutrinos, cosmic rays and gravitational waves |
03Nobel Prize 2026Chemistry
Making molecules one-handed: non-linear effects and autocatalysis
“for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis”
In plain words: Kagan and Soai found ways to make a reaction give mostly one mirror-image form of a molecule instead of a 50:50 mix. Soai’s reaction is almost purely one form, and its product helps make more of itself.
What the prize recognises
Many molecules come in two mirror-image forms, like a left and a right hand. This is chirality, and the two forms are enantiomers. Life uses only one form of each: protein amino acids are all “left” (L), the sugars in DNA all “right” (D). How that one-sidedness began is an open question. An ordinary reaction in a flask gives both forms equally, a 50:50 racemate. Louis Pasteur saw this in 1848, when bacteria consumed one mirror form of tartaric acid and left the other.
In 1953 the physicist Charles Frank worked out what it takes to start a one-sided bias: a substance that catalyses its own production (autocatalysis), a catalyst that favours one hand and an “anti-catalyst” that suppresses the mirror image. With all three, a tiny initial difference snowballs. Asymmetric catalysis had already won Nobel Prizes (2001, 2021) and autocatalysis was known, but nobody had combined them. Kagan (1986) and Soai (1995) are where that happens.
Kagan’s non-linear effect. Chemists believed a purer product needed a purer catalyst. Kagan reasoned that a metal in the catalyst grips two chiral molecules (ligands). Build it from a 75:25 mix and the metal picks partners at random: right-right about 56%, left-left about 6%, mixed right-left about 38%. The matched pairs work well, while the mixed pair barely works and sits idle, taking minority-hand molecules out of play. The reaction is driven almost entirely by right-right catalysts, so the product comes out roughly 90:10, purer than the 75:25 starting mix. That overturned the old assumption.
Soai’s self-copying reaction. Soai built what Frank had imagined: the product is also the catalyst, so each batch seeds the next and comes out more lopsided. Starting from a pyrimidyl alcohol with a 5% excess of one hand, five rounds lifted it to 90%. In a later version an excess of just 0.00005% became over 99.5% in three rounds, an amplification of roughly 630,000 times. Then came the decisive step: starting from ingredients with no handedness at all, the reaction still ended almost entirely one-handed, with the hand chosen by chance. It remains the only known example of its kind.
Does this explain how life began? Not really, and the committee itself says so. Soai ran his reaction with zinc compounds in an organic solvent, which is very different from the watery mix in which life is thought to have started. What it does show is that Frank’s idea works in practice: a tiny imbalance can grow into near-total one-handedness. Think of it as a proof of concept, not a history of life.
Applications and impact
| Field | What it is used for |
|---|---|
| Medicines | Drug makers can make the wanted mirror form directly. Earlier they often made a mixture and separated it, which was expensive and wasteful |
| Flavours and fragrances | The two forms can smell or taste different |
| Agricultural chemicals | Many crop-protection chemicals are chiral. Making only the active form means less waste |
| Origin of life | A laboratory model of how a tiny imbalance can grow into near-pure one-handedness |
A drug works by fitting an enzyme or receptor like a key in a lock, so the wrong mirror form may be useless or harmful. Thalidomide, sold as a sedative, left thousands of children with birth defects in the early 1960s. For a long time one mirror form was blamed, but later analysis shows that is only part of the story. Either way, the lesson is that the two forms can behave very differently.
India link. Ethambutol, a first-line tuberculosis drug, shows why. Its (S,S) form is about 500 times more potent against the TB bacillus than its (R,R) mirror image, yet the drug can damage the optic nerve, a side effect linked to dose and duration. A purer supply of the potent form could allow lower doses and less exposure. India has the world’s highest TB burden and is among the largest generic-medicine producers, so efficient routes to the right mirror form matter to its drug industry.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Chirality | Existence of a molecule in two mirror-image forms |
| Enantiomers | The two mirror-image forms of a chiral molecule |
| Homochirality | Preference for one mirror-image form, as in all living things |
| Non-linear effect | A partly one-handed catalyst giving a product that is far more one-handed |
| Autocatalysis | A reaction whose product also catalyses making more of itself |
04Nobel Prize 2026Literature
Anne Carson: poetry that refuses to stay in one form
“for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”
In plain words: Carson’s poetry, essays and translations often blur into each other. Ancient Greek writing runs through all of it, and the Academy rewarded the new forms she built from it.
What the prize recognises
Carson has written for over four decades. She studied Classics at the University of Toronto, and her 1981 doctoral dissertation was on the Greek poet Sappho. Her books move between poetry, essay, translation, memoir and fiction, sometimes inside a single work. The Swedish Academy said nearly all of it sits where a philologist’s obsession with words meets a poet’s wish for new meaning. She writes about desire, abandonment and grief in a detached tone, and lets feeling in through a fragment of Sappho, a photograph, a mythological figure or a sudden change of form. Her translations include Sappho (If Not, Winter), Euripides and an Oresteia.
Main works
| Year | Work | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1986 | Eros the Bittersweet | Her first book, an essay on desire in ancient Greek literature |
| 1992 | Short Talks | Her first poetry book: brief prose poems that began as drawings |
| 1998 | Autobiography of Red | A novel in verse retelling the myth of Geryon and Herakles as a coming-of-age story |
| 2001 | The Beauty of the Husband | “A fictional essay in 29 tangos”. Made her the first woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize |
| 2010 | Nox | An accordion-fold book of photographs, letters and translation, made after her brother’s death |
| 2024 | Wrong Norma | 25 poetic-prose pieces. Won the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry |
- She is the 19th woman among the 122 individuals to have won Literature.
- She was in Iceland when the news came, and the Academy’s permanent secretary, Ingrid Carlberg, said she was taken by surprise.
- Last year’s winner was the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai.
India link. Writing across forms has a precedent in India’s Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote poems, plays, novels, essays and songs. Gitanjali won him the 1913 prize, and he was the first non-European Nobel laureate in any category.
05Nobel Prize 2026Peace
Navi Pillay: putting international law at the centre
“for her efforts to promote peace and international law”
In plain words: Pillay has spent her career as a judge and UN official working to make sure war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.
What the prize recognises
The Norwegian Nobel Committee honoured a person who, with exceptional courage and integrity, has led towards a more comprehensive global legal order. It tied the choice to Nobel’s will: by advancing the use of tribunals for peace and justice, she strengthens fraternity between nations and gives the will’s “peace conferences” their modern form.
The committee was blunt about the world today. It said international law is no longer just an add-on to peace and security but an absolute necessity. It warned about a shift towards power politics at the cost of legal frameworks, judges being sanctioned while their institutions are attacked, and cases under international law ending differently depending on who the perpetrator and the victim are. The United States has sanctioned ICC officials since 2025. Last year’s Peace laureate was María Corina Machado of Venezuela.
Her career
Pillay grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Durban, the daughter of a bus driver. After law school at the University of Natal she became the first woman to open a law practice in the province (1967) and defended opponents of apartheid. In 1973 she won the Robben Island prisoners, among them Nelson Mandela, the right to legal representation. She later earned a doctorate in law at Harvard and campaigned for the equality clause in South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution. Mandela nominated her to the Rwanda tribunal in 1995, where she served eight years. She remains an ad hoc judge, designated by The Gambia, at the ICJ in the genocide case against Myanmar.
Impact and controversy
- Akayesu case (1998). The first genocide conviction by an international court. It held that rape and sexual violence can constitute genocide.
- Media case. Those who spread hate propaganda against the Tutsis by radio and print were guilty of incitement to genocide. Later courts rely on both rulings.
- Gaza inquiry. In September 2025 the UN commission she chaired concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, finding reasonable grounds that four of the five acts listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention had occurred since October 2023. Israel rejects the finding and called the award a “grotesque weaponisation” of the prize. Asked about the finding, the committee’s chair said the Nobel Committee is not a court.
India link. Pillay’s grandparents were brought from India in the 1890s as indentured labourers for Natal’s sugar plantations, the province where Gandhi had practised law and begun his campaigns. India raised the treatment of Indians in South Africa at the UN in 1946 and cut trade ties with the Pretoria government. India is not a party to the Rome Statute, so the ICC has no automatic jurisdiction over its territory or citizens. Her ICJ case is nearer home: it concerns the Rohingya of Myanmar, and India hosts Rohingya refugees.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| International Criminal Court (ICC) | Permanent court in The Hague that tries individuals for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Created by the Rome Statute |
| International Court of Justice (ICJ) | The UN’s principal judicial organ, which settles disputes between states |
| Rwanda tribunal (ICTR) | Temporary UN tribunal for those responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide |
| UN High Commissioner for Human Rights | Head of the UN human rights office (OHCHR) |
06Nobel Prize 2026Economic Sciences
Rebuilding the models that steady the economy
“for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation”
In plain words: Hall and Woodford rebuilt the models that guide governments and central banks, starting from how households and firms decide, so that well-timed policy can shrink the economy’s peaks and troughs.
What the prize recognises
Economies swing between booms and slumps. Ever since Keynes, the usual answer has been stabilisation policy: in a recession, cut interest rates and run a bigger deficit; in a boom, do the opposite. The 1970s shook that faith. After the oil crises, the Keynesian models seemed to stop working. Instead of lower unemployment there was runaway inflation, a decade of weak growth, high unemployment and high inflation, and many concluded that stabilisation had done more harm than good.
The older models rested on statistical links between totals such as inflation, output and consumption, and those links can break the moment policy changes. Hall and Woodford built models on a microeconomic foundation instead, adding up the individual decisions of all households and firms. A key feature is that people look forward when deciding how much to save or what price to charge. That gives policy a second channel: when a government or central bank announces its plans, expectations change, and expectations move spending and prices today. The committee says such models have been very helpful in the downturns since, and its chair John Hassler described them as a stable foundation for the models central banks and governments now use worldwide.
The two bodies of work
| Robert E. Hall | Michael Woodford | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Households, workers and firms: how they spend, save and hire | Monetary policy: how central banks should set interest rates |
| Key idea | In 1978 he showed that if people look ahead rationally, changes in consumption cannot be predicted. Later work looked at why hiring and wages respond slowly in downturns | With Julio Rotemberg he built one of the first New Keynesian models with sticky prices on microeconomic foundations, then used it to study how interest-rate rules should be designed |
| Landmark | Chairs the NBER committee that dates US recessions (since 1978) | Interest and Prices (2003), a leading advanced text on monetary theory |
- Hall’s random-walk result. If people use all they know, today’s consumption already reflects their expectations, so the next change can only come from news nobody foresaw. This became the baseline against which later consumption work was measured.
- Woodford’s sticky prices. Firms cannot reprice every day. When prices adjust slowly, an interest-rate decision changes real activity. His framework is called neo-Wicksellian, after the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell.
Applications and impact
| Area | What it is used for |
|---|---|
| Central banks | Working tools for studying how interest-rate decisions affect inflation and output |
| Governments | Timing and sizing fiscal measures such as a larger recession deficit |
| Communication | Announcing the likely path of policy shapes borrowing and spending today, because people look forward |
| Shocks | The committee names energy crises and sudden shifts in household consumption as shocks the models help handle |
| Recession dating | Hall’s committee gives the official US dates for when recessions start and end |
- Last year’s prize went to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for innovation-driven growth.
- Both 2026 laureates are American, as are most Economics laureates. Only three women have won the prize, the latest being Claudia Goldin in 2023.
India link. India’s monetary policy follows this tradition. Since 2016 the Reserve Bank of India has worked under a flexible inflation-targeting framework in which a Monetary Policy Committee sets the repo rate to keep consumer-price inflation around 4 per cent, within a band of 2 to 6 per cent. The committee’s rate decisions, and what it signals about future rates, are exactly the kind of policy and communication these models analyse.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Stabilisation policy | Fiscal and monetary measures to reduce swings in output, jobs and inflation |
| Microeconomic foundations | Building economy-wide models from the decisions of households and firms |
| New Keynesian model | A model where prices or wages adjust slowly, so monetary policy can affect real output |
| Stagflation | High inflation together with high unemployment and low growth, as in the 1970s |
| Random walk | A series whose next change cannot be predicted from its past |
In short
This year’s prizes mostly went to work that gave scientists a new tool or a new way of looking. Optogenetics lets neuroscientists switch one type of brain cell on or off. IceCube turned a block of Antarctic ice into a telescope for the most violent places in the universe. Kagan and Soai showed that a tiny imbalance in a reaction can grow into almost pure one-handedness. Carson built new forms out of old Greek, Pillay kept international law at the centre of the peace debate, and Hall and Woodford gave policymakers models in which people plan ahead.
Practice questions
Tap Show answer after attempting each question.
Q1. Consider the following statements about the Nobel Prizes:
1. A Nobel Prize can be shared by at most three people.
2. Only the Peace Prize can be awarded to an organisation.
3. Prizes can be awarded posthumously.
Which of the statements given above are correct?
- (a) 1 only
- (b) 1 and 2 only
- (c) 2 and 3 only
- (d) 1, 2 and 3
Show answer
Answer: (b)
Prizes are not awarded posthumously, so statement 3 is wrong.
Q2. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for optogenetics. Consider the following statements:
1. Channelrhodopsin was first found in a green alga.
2. Hegemann and Nagel showed that the protein could control neurons in living mice.
3. Optogenetics uses light to control genetically modified cells.
Which of the statements given above are correct?
- (a) 1 and 2 only
- (b) 1 and 3 only
- (c) 2 and 3 only
- (d) 1, 2 and 3
Show answer
Answer: (b)
It was Deisseroth who made the switch work in living mice, in 2007.
Q3. Assertion (A): Neutrinos can point back to the sources of high-energy cosmic radiation.
Reason (R): Neutrinos have no electric charge, so magnetic fields do not bend their paths.
- (a) Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- (b) Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- (c) A is true, but R is false
- (d) A is false, but R is true
Show answer
Answer: (a)
Cosmic rays are charged and get scrambled by magnetic fields. Neutrinos travel straight.
Q4. Which one of the following is true of Kagan’s “non-linear effect” in asymmetric synthesis?
- (a) A product can be purer in one mirror form than the catalyst used to make it
- (b) A catalyst must be 100% pure to give a one-handed product
- (c) The product always contains equal amounts of both mirror forms
- (d) It explains the origin of life in the prebiotic soup
Show answer
Answer: (a)
A 75:25 catalyst mix gave a product of roughly 90:10.
Q5. Match the 2026 laureate with the work.
| A. Francis Halzen | 1. Light-gated ion channels |
| B. Navi Pillay | 2. IceCube Neutrino Observatory |
| C. Michael Woodford | 3. International law and prosecution of war crimes |
| D. Peter Hegemann | 4. New Keynesian models with sticky prices |
- (a) A-2, B-3, C-4, D-1
- (b) A-2, B-1, C-4, D-3
- (c) A-3, B-2, C-1, D-4
- (d) A-4, B-3, C-2, D-1
Show answer
Answer: (a)
Halzen with IceCube, Pillay with international law, Woodford with sticky-price models and Hegemann with the light-gated channel.
Q6. Consider the following statements about the 2026 Nobel Prizes:
1. Economic Sciences was one of the five prizes named in Alfred Nobel’s will.
2. The Peace Prize is presented in Oslo.
3. Anne Carson is the 19th woman to win the Literature prize.
Which of the statements given above are correct?
- (a) 1 and 2 only
- (b) 2 and 3 only
- (c) 1 and 3 only
- (d) 1, 2 and 3
Show answer
Answer: (b)
Economics was added by Sveriges Riksbank in 1968 and is not in the will.