The irony of Donald Trump publicly demanding the Nobel Peace Prize all year is that the world probably paid closer attention than in recent memory to see who was going to be announced the winner yesterday. Maybe you’re a supporter of the American president who scanned the headlines to see if he won. Or perhaps you’re decidedly not a Trump supporter who paid attention to ensure he lost. In the face of this expanded global audience, Trump failed in his attempts to snag the prize — and the White House responded angrily.

Today in The Conversation Canada, we have a story from one of our most prolific contributors, James Horncastle of Simon Fraser University, an international relations expert. He delves into how the Nobel Prize Committee’s selection of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado seems a not-so-subtle rebuke to Trump. She won for her work “promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela” and her push to move the country from dictatorship to democracy — which seems the opposite direction Trump is taking the United States.

This is just one of many fascinating pieces on this year’s Nobel Prizes by our global network over the past week.

Apart from the analyses listed below on winners in health, literature and science categories, our U.K. team interviewed one of the winners, Shimon Sakaguchi, for The Conversation Weekly podcast on his immune system breakthrough in a fascinating first-person account of how he and his team discovered how the body stops its own immune system from turning against itself.

Whether you’re irritated or relieved that Trump failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize, it’s helpful to remember the Nobel prizes are considered the world’s most prestigious awards for intellectual achievement. They recognize and celebrate outstanding contributions that have conferred the “greatest benefit to humankind” in fields like science, literature and peace. We cover them extensively at The Conversation since they align so closely with the ethos of our global mission: that science, facts, research, higher learning and convictions matter. They elevate democracy. 

Enjoy your Thanksgiving weekend and scroll down to take in some truly insightful and fascinating reads about these important prizes. 

Lee-Anne Goodman

Deputy Editor/Politics Editor

Nobel stories from the global network

A pro-democracy Venezuelan politician wins this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Is it a rebuke to Trump?

James Horncastle, Simon Fraser University

With the world’s traditional champion of democratic governance in retrenchment, other pro-democracy forces are stepping into the breach — including the Nobel Committee.

Donald Trump would have been an unsuitable choice for the 2025 Nobel peace prize – but he may be a more serious contender in 2026

Stefan Wolff, University of Birmingham

The peace prize rules made it hard for the US president to win this year. But that doesn’t rule him out for 2026.

How pollution and the microbiome interact with Tregs, the immune system regulators whose discovery was honored with the Nobel Prize

Prakash Nagarkatti, University of South Carolina; Mitzi Nagarkatti, University of South Carolina

Researchers are gaining insights into how external factors like air pollutants, diet and medications, and even microbes in the gut interact with regulatory T cells, for better or for worse.

Nobel medicine prize: how a hidden army in your body keeps you alive – and could help treat cancer

Justin Stebbing, Anglia Ruskin University

How this year’s Nobel-winning research could make cancer immunotherapy even smarter.

Nobel Prize in physics awarded for ultracold electronics research that launched a quantum technology

Eli Levenson-Falk, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

The discovery that superconducting circuits can behave like quantum particles was a revolutionary development in the field of quantum technologies.

How László Krasznahorkai’s Nobel-prize winning genius slowly spread around Europe

Zsuzsanna Varga, University of Glasgow

It took over a decade for the Hungarian novelist to be recognised in English-speaking countries.

Our engineering team is making versatile, tiny sensors from the Nobel-winning ‘metal-organic frameworks’

Jie Huang, Missouri University of Science and Technology; Bohong Zhang, Missouri University of Science and Technology; Chen Zhu, Missouri University of Science and Technology; Rex Gerald, Missouri University of Science and Technology

By trapping different molecules, metal-organic frameworks could make for efficient breath sensors that predict lung disease, cancer or diabetes.

Metal-organic frameworks: Nobel-winning tiny ‘sponge crystals’ with an astonishing amount of inner space

Stavroula Alina Kampouri, Rice University

Just a gram of these tiny crystals can have an internal surface area as big as a soccer field. A materials expert explains the almost magical chemistry of MOFs.