Every year I write a summary of the Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and in economics. Sometimes however the achievements in the sciences may be so esoteric that I struggle to understand what the prize is for. That isn’t the case this year are the winners are either very famous discoveries or quite straightforward to make sense of.

We start with the prize for physics for discoveries that most of us have already heard about one way or another but are so badly explained even in respectable publications. This refers to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in which particles can be entangled with one another such that what happens to one particle can determine what happens to another no matter how far they are apart. Albert Einstein was notoriously skeptical that this could seemingly violate the speed of light limit.

Building on the ideas of John Stewart Bell to tell the difference between whether the strange entanglement effect truly exists or if there are hidden variables that determine what happens, John Clauser built a practical experiment that showed that such hidden variables probably don’t exist. A loophole remained however which was closed by the second laureate Alain Aspect by switching the measurement settings of the experiment after the entangle pair had left the source to prove that the setting could not affect the result.

Finally the third laureate Anton Zeilinger exhibited the phenomenon of quantum teleportation which involves moving the quantum state of a particle to another at a distance. This is the basis of quantum computing and quantum cryptography.

The prize for physiology or medicine goes to Svante Pääbo who essentially founded the field of paleogenomics. This is the study of the genomes of ancient, perhaps extinct, biological species. Extracting and sequencing ancient DNA has been known to just about everyone since Jurassic Park but the reality is more difficult as DNA degrades over time and samples tend to be contaminated by bacteria and contemporary organisms. So Pääbo began by studying the mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals as they are small and thousands of copies are present in each cell.

As technology and his own techniques improves, he also sequenced the nuclear DNA of Neanderthals, allowing comparative analyses with the DNA of modern humans. He was later also able to identify a completely new species Homo denisova from DNA evidence alone. He showed that this species interbred with Homo sapiens and helped establish ancient migration patterns.

I think the research that went into the prize for chemistry is the least well known of the lot to the general public but it’s not really hard to understand either. Barry Sharpless, for whom this is the second Nobel Prize, and Morten Meldal conceived and created a mechanism to implement what is now called click chemistry. In chemistry, you often want to snap different groups of molecules together and you want a joining process that works regardless of the chemical properties of each group. These two laureates, working independently, came up with the process called the copper catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition that used copper ions to speed up the previously known process of using two groups of chemicals azides and alkynes to snap together like buckles and reduce unwanted byproducts.

However copper ions are toxic to living things, making this process unsuitable for purposes like making pharmaceuticals. The third laureate Carolyn Bertozzi therefore invented a new way to make the process work without copper ions. Her idea was to put the alkyne half of the buckle under strain to make it more reactive. She used it to attach fluorescent marker molecules to carbohydrate polymers on the surface of cells, allowing them to be more easily tracked as they move about the body. Her version of the process is called bioorthogonal reactions.

Finally the prize in the economic sciences goes to Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for their studies of financial crises and the banking system’s role in them. Diamond and Dybvig showed that banks are intermediaries between savers and borrowers, which sounds simple enough but by pooling many deposits, banks are able to offer long-term loans to borrowers to support investments while also assuring depositors that they can access their funds at need. This however only works if the banks are trusted to be sound and the system is at risk of a bank run if depositors try to withdraw their money en masse.

Bernanke is of course well-known as the chairman of the Federal Reserve during the financial crises of 2007-2008 but it is his work in studying the Great Depression that was cited for the prize. He showed that the banks were not just a victim of the crisis, but when banks failed, the loss of information about borrowers contributed to prolonging the crisis. As The Economist noted, these insights seem like fairly obvious ones but I suppose the formal, academic treatment of the subject is valuable.