It’s that time of the year again when I do the roundup of the scientific Nobel Prizes because I feel they don’t get the attention they deserve. Here they are in the order that they were announced this year.

The physiology or medicine prize is awarded for optogenetics which studies how nerve cells respond to light. It started with Peter Hegemann wondering how the single-celled alga Chlamydomonas is able to swim towards a light source. Together with Georg Nagel, they discovered channel-rhodopsin, an algal protein with unique properties. When illuminated by blue light, a channel opens through the protein which allows charged ions to flow through, creating an electric impulse. When they inserted genes for a similar protein into other cells, such as kidney cells, they found that those cells became light sensitive too.

Karl Deisseroth then inserted the gene into nerve cells from rats and found that these neurons were not only activated by light but could also pass on the signals to neighboring neurons. In this way, they established a method to activate individual types of nerve cells and thereby trace the neural circuitry. The technique can be used to reveal the circuits for the sense of pain, social behaviors, thirst, food consumption and so on.

Much of the time, the Nobel Prizes for the sciences are awarded to more than one person at a time, reflecting the collaborative nature of modern scientific work. This year the physics prize goes to one person alone Francis Halzen that the work is a huge project that involves hundreds of researchers from over a dozen countries.

The project in question is called the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. As its name implies, its purpose is to detect the most elusive particle of all, neutrinos. Though abundant, their electrically neutral nature means that electromagnetic forces don’t affect them and their extremely tiny mass means that they are barely affected by gravity. The only way to detect them is to make use of their interaction with the weak nuclear force. Previous detectors used large vats of liquids and sensors to detect the rare occasions of a neutrino collision.

Halzen proposed instead of use the ice naturally present on Earth, specifically that below the surface of Antarctica. The project involved burying thousands of light sensors about 2 kilometers below the surface. It was only in 2011 that construction was complete after more than a decade of work and in 2013, 28 high-energy cosmic neutrinos were picked up.

Every news article about the award for the chemistry category starts by explaining the concept of chirality, that is the fact that molecules can exist in distinct left and right-handed mirror-image versions. These different configurations of the same molecules have different physical properties. This applies to the molecules that make up life as well and scientists have established that life is asymmetrical, that is organisms use only one mirror image of for example amino acids, and are therefore homochiral.

Since then scientists have since worked out that chiral catalysts boost the formation of one mirror image more than the other and learned to design chemical reactions that are asymmetric. These discoveries have been the subjects of past chemistry Nobel Prizes. One of this year’s winners Henri B. Kagan discovered a way to vastly improve the asymmetricity of reactions by mixing catalysts of different sides, or enantiomers, rather than aiming to be as pure as possible. The other winner Kenso Soai made the final step of making the process self-reinforcing and self-sustaining. Starting with only a two percent excess of one enantiomer, he was able to achieve first an excess of at first 87 percent and after years of more work 99.99 percent. This has given chemists a tool to achieve the kind of homochirality that is present in life itself.

Finally the economics prize goes to two winners as well. They both contributed to the tools available to policy makers to stabilize the economy by basing them on microeconomics and are thus known as the New Keynesians.

Robert E. Hall improved traditional Keynesian models of private consumption by pointing out that household decisions on consumption are an indicator of their expectations of the future. As new information cannot be predicted, Hall’s insight is that changes in consumption that depend on changing expectations of the future cannot be forecast. However when consumption can be predicted, it must mean that they are not forward-looking and are living hand-to-mouth and this is information that is itself useful.

Michael Woodford showed that central banks can stimulate or suppress economic activity by adjusting interest rates, rather than by the amount of money in circulation. Building on the concept of the natural rate of interest introduced by Knut Wicksell, he claims that if central banks set rates before the natural rate, businesses would keep borrowing leading to inflation whereas if they raised rates, it would cause deflation. He also showed that prices can be sticky in that it is too expensive to frequently change prices quickly each time demand or production costs change, and so they can attempt to set prices based on their expectations of their future to avoid doing so.