The buzziest science awards of the year were handed out this week, with machine learning and artificial intelligence receiving the most attention. The University of Toronto’s professor emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, renowned as “the godfather of AI,” received the Nobel prize in physics alongside Yale physicist John Hopfield, for their ground-breaking work in machine learning. Hinton and Hopfield’s research provided the foundation for machine learning and artificial neural networks.

Their work proved essential to the recipients of another Nobel.

The 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded to University of Washington chemist David Baker for computational protein design, and shared with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (both at Google DeepMind) for their work on protein structure prediction using artificial intelligence.

University of Massachusetts developmental biologist Victor Ambros and Harvard Medical School molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun shared the Nobel prize in medicine for their research on microRNA, the molecules that control gene expression.

Korean author Han Kang received the Nobel prize in literature. The prize committee praised Kang for her “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Best known for The Vegetarian, published in English in 2007, Kang’s next book is the forthcoming We Do Not Part, out in January 2025.

And the Nobel peace prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese victims advocacy group founded by the survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and victims of nuclear weapons tests.

Other reads this week include: the erasure of women scientists in awarding Nobel prizes; a firsthand account of beta testing some Nobel prize-winning research; and the biography of the Nobel’s namesake, Alfred Nobel.

All the best.