How microwaves let us tune into one another – and the universe
Learn more about how microwaves revolutionised our ways of communicating and helped us understand the origins of the universe.
The Pope is watching. This had better work. Such thoughts perhaps ran through the mind of Guglielmo Marconi in 1932 as he set up a special antenna in the Vatican gardens while His Holiness Pope Pius XI looked on.
This antenna was part of a new radio link connecting the Vatican to the Pope’s summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. And not just any radio link.
Guglielmo Marconi made a telephone that used microwaves to link the Vatican to the Pope Pius XI’s summer home in the 1930s. Credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images/BBC
This one used microwaves – radio waves with extra-high frequencies. Marconi also set up a portable microwave communications system attached to a car, connecting the travelling Pope to the Vatican. Some have claimed this was the first mobile phone, albeit a very large one.
Thirteen years earlier, Marconi had shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Ferdinand Braun for his contributions to wireless telegraphy. The radio age was in full flow. But when Marconi turned to microwaves, he was embracing a part of the radio spectrum with very special properties.
Microwaves can carry vast quantities of information. They can also cook food, or scramble an enemy’s electronics. Microwaves have even helped reveal the very origins of the universe.
Pip-pip-pip
Long before Marconi built a microwave telephone for the Pope, someone else had already experimented with similar frequencies.
In the late 19th Century, a brilliant Indian scientist called Jagadish Chandra Bose – now, sadly, largely forgotten – developed some of the earliest microwave technology.
Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose was a pioneer in microwave technology. Credit: SSPL/Getty Images/BBC
This included the very first equipment for generating millimetre waves – the waves used by 5G devices today. In 1895, Bose demonstrated that millimetre waves could ring a bell, and even fire a gun remotely.
Marconi arguably gained some of his stardom thanks to Bose.
On 12 December 1901, using a non-microwave frequency, the Italian inventor carried out the first transatlantic radio transmission. Sitting in a hut atop a Newfoundland cliff, he listened to a swirling deluge of noise in his earphone for many hours – until he heard what he had been waiting for.
Pip-pip-pip.
The Morse code for the letter S. Frantically, he passed the earphone to his colleague and asked, “Can you hear anything?” He could.
It was an incredible feat. Those radio waves had travelled more than 2,000 miles from the south of England, across open water. At the time, his record for a long-distance radio transmission was just 80 miles.
In the years since, some have questioned whether the transmission really happened as Marconi described.
However, recent investigations show that it was theoretically possible, even with his early radio equipment.
Among that equipment was a device called a coherer, a simple radio signal detector. And while the records are somewhat murky, it appears this coherer was designed by none other than Bose.
“He came up with fascinating instruments,” says Bose’s biographer, Sudipto Das.
But Bose was, perhaps, too far ahead of his time. For one thing, there were few useful applications for microwaves during the early 1900s that weren’t already feasible with lower frequency radio waves. Bose shifted his focus away from physics to his greater interest, plant physiology, and “almost sank into oblivion,” says Das.
Magnetron popcorn
However, World War Two made microwaves important again. Radar allowed militaries to detect enemy aircraft by bouncing radio signals off them. And a microwave device called the cavity magnetron developed in Britain in 1940, turned out to be one of the most powerful and effective radar technologies around.
Small enough to install on aircraft, its fantastic range and precision gave Allied countries an important advantage that helped them win the war.
It was also a microwave-emitting magnetron that inspired Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer to invent microwave ovens in 1945. A peanut bar in his pocket began to melt when he walked past magnetrons in a laboratory. And when he later held up a packet of popcorn, the popcorn popped and “exploded all over the lab,” a Reader’s Digest article later recalled.
Magnetrons helped the Allies win WWII and later led to the invention of the microwave oven. Credit: SSPL/Getty Images/BBC
This happened because, at certain frequencies, microwaves excite molecules inside food, making them vibrate at the same frequency. The ensuing friction heats things up.
For microwave ovens, the frequency of choice is 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) – the same frequency used by many wi-fi routers. However, routers emit microwaves at much lower power levels than microwave ovens – that’s why you can’t make popcorn just by surfing the web.
Choosing the right frequency for cooking is really important, says Caroline Ross at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Microwaves at 2.4 GHz penetrate well inside food, and this frequency also allows for even absorption of the radiation by food molecules.
“When you go higher, like tens of gigahertz, the penetration depth is pretty small, so it gets blocked by almost anything – even water in the air,” she explains.
Microwaves are special partly because of that ability, at certain frequencies, to interact with matter. OK, reheating your dinner leftovers might not seem very dramatic – but what about using microwaves to induce noises in people’s heads?
Havana syndrome
Military personnel who worked near to large microwave radar installations built during World War II later recalled that they could sense the radar operating. “It was possible to hear the repetition rate of the radar when we were standing close to the antenna horn,” one witness wrote in the 1950s.
James Lin, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago, heard such stories and attempted to reproduce the effect in his lab during the 1970s.
“I used myself as a guinea pig, basically,” he recalls, as he describes how he set up a microwave antenna and pointed it directly at his head.
Lin has suggested that the microwaves induced pressure waves inside his head, which he sensed as sound. To avoid cooking his brain, he kept the power levels low. “I could hear the pulse,” he says. “The fact I’m still alive… I guess it wasn’t too bad.”
This became known as the microwave auditory effect and it could help to explain a spate of mysterious illnesses reported by American diplomats around the globe, most famously in Havana, Cuba.
In 2016, staff at the US Embassy in Cuba reported unusual, debilitating symptoms – later called ‘Havana Syndrome.’ Credit: AFP via Getty Images/BBC
Victims of so-called Havana Syndrome report experiencing strange grating noises, a feeling of pressure building up in their ears, dizziness, nausea and memory loss. Was an enemy directing a microwave beam at these people? While some have dismissed this hypothesis, Lin says it remains the most plausible explanation for the auditory symptoms.
Microwave weapons do exist, though those discussed in public tend to target machines rather than people. The US military has missiles that can zap enemy electronics with microwaves, for instance. Microwaves can even bring down drones.
In contrast, Lin has developed ways of using microwaves to heal – for example, to treat muscle diseases and irregular heartbeats.
For the latter, he says it is possible to insert a tiny microwave-emitting device into the heart, via a catheter, in order to destroy abnormal heart tissue. This technique, now widely used, is less invasive than open heart surgery, he points out: “Just deliver a pulse at high power, a microwave, to burn the tissue.”
The universe talking
But microwaves don’t just save lives. They have also helped to reveal the origins of the universe. In the early 1960s, radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson attempted to use a large, horn-shaped antenna in the US state of New Jersey as a radio telescope. But they kept picking up an irritating hiss or static.
At one point, they thought this was caused by pigeon droppings in the antenna, so they shooed the birds away and cleaned up the mess. However, the birds were not to blame. What Penzias and Wilson were hearing was the sound of the universe itself.
“It’s a snapshot of early time,” says Sean McGee, at the University of Birmingham. Penzias and Wilson had discovered what we now call cosmic microwave background radiation – a signature left over from the Big Bang, when the universe exploded into being roughly 13.8 billion years ago. Penzias and Wilson was awarded half of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.
The European Space Agency shared this image of the cosmic microwave background, captured by its Planck satellite. Credit: ESA/Planck Collection/BBC
The residual radiation they detected is present throughout the cosmos. A small proportion of the snowy static on analogue television screens is attributable to it. In other words, until LED screens took over, people would pick up remnants of the Big Bang in their living rooms.
Satellites eventually helped astronomers to map the cosmic microwave background, recording its fluctuations as slight differences in temperature. Those fluctuations appear to have influenced where galaxies formed as the universe expanded.
“We’re all the result of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe that then seeded galaxies,” says McGee.
Today, people use microwaves for any international call that is connected by satellite. A great leap from the car-mounted equipment Marconi installed for the Pope in the 1930s.
It’s rather fitting that many people use microwaves to talk to one another day in, day out – since that is also how the universe has talked to us, helping to confirm our understanding of the greatest story of all time. The story of how everything began.
By Chris Baraniuk, BBC World Service. This content was created as a co-production between Nobel Prize Outreach and the BBC.
A help in solving crimes and a revealer of history’s secrets: radiocarbon dating is one of the keys that unlocks our world.
Willard Libby. Photo: University of Chicago
There would be heaps of the stuff in sewage. Willard Libby was sure of it.
It was the mid-1940s, and the US chemist’s goal was to find a radioactive form of carbon, carbon-14, in nature. He had realised that, if it were there, it would leave a slowly decaying trace in dead plants and animals – so finding out how much was left in their remains would reveal when they died.
But Libby had to prove that carbon-14 existed in the wild in concentrations that matched his estimates. Other scientists had only ever detected carbon-14 after synthesising it in a lab.
Libby reasoned that living things would deposit it in their excrement, which is why he turned to sewage. Sewage produced by the people of Baltimore, to be precise. And he found what he was looking for.
Libby didn’t know it then but the idea that you could use radioactive carbon – radiocarbon – to date things would have all kinds of diverse applications.
Since the mid-20th Century, radiocarbon dating has confirmed the age of countless ancient artefacts, helped solve missing person cases, and put ivory traffickers in jail. It has even enabled scientists to understand the intricacies of Earth’s climate. Radiocarbon dating is one of the keys that unlocks our world.
But how does carbon-14 come into existence in the first place? Libby understood that it was being produced constantly by cosmic rays striking nitrogen atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere and changing their structure. The resulting carbon-14 atom quickly combines with oxygen to make radioactive carbon dioxide (CO2).
Back on the ground, plants absorb some of that radioactive CO2 in the air as they grow, as do the animals – including humans – that eat them. While a plant or animal is alive, it keeps replenishing its internal store of carbon-14 but, when it dies, that process stops. Because radiocarbon decays at a known rate, measuring how much is left in organic material will tell you the material’s age. A clock that starts ticking the moment something dies.
‘Putting things in order’
Once Libby confirmed there was carbon-14 in the methane gas from Baltimore sewers, he went on to detect radiocarbon in many different things, allowing him to prove how old they were – from the linen wrappings of the Dead Sea Scrolls to a piece of a ship found in the tomb of Sesostris III, an Egyptian king who lived nearly 4,000 years ago.
“This is a problem where you won’t tell anybody what you’re doing. It’s too crazy,” Libby later said. “You can’t tell anybody cosmic rays can write down human history. You can’t tell them that. No way. So we kept it secret.”
But once he had proved it worked, he let the world know. And, in 1960, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
His technique works on organic material that is up to 50,000 years old. Older than that, and there is too little carbon-14 left. Carbon-14’s gradual decay is what makes radiocarbon dating possible – but that also means you can only go back so far.
Dead Sea Scroll fragments were among the first items dated using carbon-14. Credit: Getty Images/BBC
Radiocarbon dating is now central to our understanding of history.
“In terms of putting things in order, in terms of being able to compare between different regions in particular, and understand that pace of change, it has been really important,” explains Rachel Wood, who works in one of the world’s most distinguished radiocarbon dating labs, the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.
She and her colleagues date materials including human bones, charcoal, shells, seeds, hair, cotton, parchment and ceramics, but also stranger substances. “We do the odd really unusual thing, like fossilised bat urine,” she says.
The lab uses a device called an accelerator mass spectrometer to directly quantify the carbon-14 atoms in a sample – unlike Libby, who was only able to measure the radiation emitted and thereby infer how much carbon-14 a sample contained. The accelerator can also date tiny samples, in some cases a single milligram, whereas Libby needed much more material.
Dating skeletons
Removing carbon-containing contaminants can take weeks, but once done the accelerator readily spits out a sample’s estimated age.
“It’s really exciting to be able to see the results immediately.”
Rachel Wood, Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.
Radiocarbon dating has settled some long-standing arguments. Take the human skeleton discovered by theologian and geologist William Buckland in Wales in 1823. Buckland insisted it was no more than 2,000 years old, and for more than a century, no-one could prove he was wrong. Radiocarbon dating eventually showed it was actually between 33,000 and 34,000 years old – the oldest known buried human remains in the UK.
More recent human remains have also revealed their secrets thanks to this technology.
In 1975, a 13-year-old girl called Laura Ann O’Malley was reported missing in New York. Remains found in a California riverbed in the 1990s were thought to have originated in a historic grave until radiocarbon dating earlier this year showed they belonged to someone born between 1964 and 1967, who most likely died between 1977 and 1984. This fitted the timeline of O’Malley’s disappearance, and DNA analysis confirmed the remains were hers.
Forensic analyses often rely on the “bomb pulse” method of radiocarbon dating, which is possible due to the hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapons tests that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s.
The blasts sent vast quantities of additional carbon-14 into the air, but these artificially high levels have been falling ever since. And so, by comparing carbon-14 measurements with that downward-sloping curve, it is possible to date materials from the mid-20th Century onwards very precisely – to within a year or so, in some cases.
“I don’t know of any other technique that comes close to that,” says Sam Wasser at the University of Washington. “It’s extraordinarily useful.”
Wasser has analysed radiocarbon dating results from ivory samples as part of efforts to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade. The data can show whether the elephants died before or after the 1989 ban on ivory sales, whatever traffickers may claim.
Thanks to carbon-14 dating, scientists can determine if ivory was poached illegally.
‘Smoking gun’
One man jailed on this evidence is Edouodji Emile N’Bouke, convicted in Togo in 2014. While DNA tests uncovered the geographic origin of the ivory he trafficked, radiocarbon dating showed exactly when the elephants were poached. These two strands of evidence were “the smoking gun critical to bringing N’Bouke to justice,” the US State Department later said.
The same techniques have exposed artworks as forgeries. Take the painting of a village scene that one forger claimed was made in 1866. Radiocarbon dating confirmed that it had actually been painted, and artificially aged, during the 1980s.
Radiocarbon dating has also shed light on climate change by helping scientists understand the effect of fossil fuel emissions on Earth’s climate. Studies of glaciers and ancient ecosystems, for example, are made much more accurate thanks to radiocarbon dating technology.
“It’s also very useful for people who want to use climate models to predict what the climate may potentially be like in the future,” says Tim Heaton at the University of Leeds. Scientists can use radiocarbon records to establish how Earth’s climate changed over time, and check climate models against those results, validating the models’ accuracy.
Carbon-14 dilution
But another clock is ticking. Fossil fuels contain copious quantities of carbon but no carbon-14 – the organisms that became coal, natural gas and oil, died so long ago that the carbon-14 they once contained has long since decayed. That means fossil fuel emissions are diluting the carbon-14 in Earth’s atmosphere today, which has a direct effect on how much radiocarbon ends up in living things.
Heather Graven at Imperial College London says that, in the worst-case scenario of extremely high emissions during the next century or so, the accuracy of radiocarbon dating could crumble.
“Something that’s freshly produced will have the same [radiocarbon] composition as something that’s maybe 2,000 years old,” she says. Radiocarbon dating wouldn’t be able to tell the two apart.
Rachel Wood argues that these problems won’t arise any time soon, but Paula Reimer, professor emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast, thinks fossil fuel emissions do “put a damper” on radiocarbon dating and ultimately threaten its accuracy.
She spent many years working to heighten the precision of radiocarbon dating, by making painstaking measurements of the radiocarbon found in tree rings, for example, to reveal variations in atmospheric levels of carbon-14 across millennia.
Extremely precise curves of radiocarbon levels are now available dating back 14,000 years or so. But fossil fuel emissions may eventually bring this era of incredible precision to an end.
By Chris Baraniuk, BBC World Service. This content was created as a co-production between Nobel Prize Outreach and the BBC.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1960 for his method to use carbon-14 for age determination in archaeology, geology, geophysics, and other branches of science.
Nobel Peace Prize 2007 for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.
Nobel Peace Prize 2007 for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.
Five documentaries inspired by the Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Prize, National Geographic Documentary Films and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel have collaborated on a 5-part short documentary series, celebrating the ongoing impact and influence of Nobel Peace Prize laureates around the world. Watch the films here.
In 1998, Makur Diet lost his leg to a bullet in war-damaged South Sudan. Despairing for his future, Makur was close to committing suicide, until he was given a prosthetic leg. Makur realised that he now had a chance to do something good in the world and decided to devote his life to helping other amputees. At an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) centre in South Sudan, Makur makes prosthetic legs and gives hope to other persons who have lost a limb. He is helping to rebuild his country, one leg at a time.
Makur works at an International Committee of the Red Cross centre in South Sudan. The ICRC have received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1917, 1944 and 1963.
In the chaos of the world’s largest refugee camp, Kamal Hussein is a beacon of hope. From his small ramshackle hut, and armed only with a microphone, he has taken it upon himself to try and reunite the thousands of Rohingya families who have been torn apart by violence and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. However, in finding lost family members and bringing them back together, he is not just helping them. He is also finding peace for himself.
In an area of Iraq destroyed by ISIS, Hana Khider leads an all-female team of Yazidi deminers in their attempts to clear the land of mines. Their job involves painstakingly searching for booby traps in bombed out buildings and fields, where one wrong move means certain death. Even though the devastations caused by ISIS still are evident and the local people are suffering, they are trying to forget the past and remain hopeful.
Hana works for the Mines Advisory Group, an organisation who are part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a coalition awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.
How would natural habitats develop without human interference? In this documentary we follow an international team of scientists and explorers on an extraordinary mission in Mozambique to reach a forest that no human has set foot in. The team aims to collect data from the forest to help our understanding of how climate change is affecting our planet. But the forest sits atop a mountain, and to reach it, the team must first climb a sheer 100m wall of rock.
Here you get to follow the two South African musicians; Tsepo Pooe, who grew up in Soweto Township; and Lize Schaap, who grew up in wealthy Pretoria. They are both part of a very special and unique orchestra, the Miagi Orchestra. Inspired by the legacy of 1993 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nelson Mandela, the orchestra aims to help the nation overcome decades of violence, conflict and division through the power of music.
How X-rays and crystals revealed the true nature of things
The story behind the 100-year-old discovery that continues to render Nobel Prizes.
Alone in the Martian desert, a robot was looking for answers. In 2012, Nasa’s Curiosity rover scooped up a small pile of sand, ingested it, and blasted it with X-rays. The intrepid bot was going to find out what that sand was made of, which could in turn reveal information about the historical presence of water on Mars – because any water in this dusty, red plain was long gone.
Lawrence Bragg and Sir William Bragg. Smithsonian Institution Archives.
Nearly a century earlier, in 1915, William and Lawrence Bragg – a father and son team – had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on X-ray crystallography, a technique that makes it possible to determine the atomic and molecular structures of crystals by studying how X-rays diffract, or deviate, when they interact with them.
Many materials, from tiny proteins to metals, can form crystals, and X-ray crystallography became the gold standard for revealing how various forms of matter are put together.
Back on Earth, Michael Velbel at Michigan State University was waiting eagerly for data from Curiosity on Mars. This was the first time X-ray crystallography had ever been done on another planet.
“I was shadowing the mission all along,” recalls Velbel.
NASA’s Curiosity rover brought X-ray crystallography to another planet for the first time. Credit: Getty Images/BBC
Curiosity’s analyses revealed details of the water content of minerals on Mars, which have given credence to – though not proved – the hypothesis that the planet had large bodies of water just a few hundred thousand years ago.
“We can finally get a grasp on that,” says Velbel.
Knowing what things are made of lets us do some amazing things. Analysis of atomic and molecular structures have helped scientists design drugs, unravel the secrets of DNA, and even make better batteries.
You can tell X-ray crystallography is important because it has played a role in numerous Nobel Prizes – some put the tally at more than two dozen. And yet few people know just how awesome a technique it is.
Regular patterns
“A lot of people call me ‘Chrystal the Crystallographer’ – or ‘C-squared’” jokes Chrystal Starbird at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She remembers the first time she used X-ray crystallography to determine a molecular structure. “I was looking at something no-one else had looked at before. I was like, ‘Wow, how cool is that!’”
If you’ve ever seen one of those ball-and-stick models of chemical substances, you’ll know what X-ray crystallographers are working towards. They want to find out what atoms are in a material and exactly how they are bonded together.
When Starbird does this kind of analysis, one key early step in the process is taking, say, a protein and working out how to grow crystals of it on a very small scale. Just as water forms ice crystals when it freezes, proteins can form very tiny crystals under certain conditions.
Those crystals are then harvested with tiny hair-like loops – which can be a very tricky procedure – and placed on an X-ray diffractometer.
The crystals are necessary because when you shine X-rays on their ordered structure, you get a regular diffraction pattern – precise markings specific to the chemical nature of the crystal in question.
When X-rays pass through crystals they produce distinctive diffraction patterns. Credit: BBC
However, proteins are much more complicated than water molecules so conditions must be just right for them to crystallise. Starbird may have to try hundreds of different approaches – using different chemicals, temperatures or humidity levels – before it works.
“I’m somebody who’s OK with delayed gratification,” she jokes.
Mapping insulin
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
One scientist who would probably have related to that was Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. She spent 34 years using X-ray crystallography to work out the structure of insulin, beginning in the 1930s. Insulin is a hormone that helps control blood sugar levels but Type 1 diabetics are unfortunately unable to produce it.
In Hodgkin’s case, obtaining the insulin crystals wasn’t especially difficult. But because insulin contains no fewer than 788 atoms, it took a long time for her to map the entire structure using early X-ray crystallographic methods. Her achievement made it much easier to mass-produce insulin for the treatment of diabetes.
By the time Hodgkin had finally finished, in 1969, she had already been awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her X-ray crystallographic studies. She had also determined the structures of penicillin – an important antibiotic – and vitamin B12.
She died in 1994. At a memorial service the following year, Max Perutz – who also received a joint Nobel Prize in Chemistry for crystallographic work – said, “Her X-ray cameras bared the intrinsic beauty beneath the rough surface of things.” He praised both her kindness and her “iron will” to succeed.
“She was a terrific inspiration.”
Elspeth Garman at the University of Oxford, who knew Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.
Garman describes an X-ray diffraction pattern as “an incredibly complicated reflection.”
X-rays directed at a crystal structure interact with the electrons orbiting atoms inside that structure and diffract, leaving a detectable trace on (in Hodgkin’s day) X-ray photographic film nearby.
The result is a pattern, which you can painstakingly convert into a topographical map of the structure, or a three-dimensional model.
Women excelling
Garman notes that many women have excelled at X-ray crystallography. She credits the Braggs, in part, for this. “They had the most amazing academic tree of women that they encouraged and took on as graduate students when people in other fields didn’t,” she says.
Rosalind Franklin with microscope in 1955. MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, via Wikimedia Commons.
Besides Hodgkin, there was also Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction image of DNA was among many findings she made while trying to work out the structure of DNA. Some of her findings influenced Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins in their own endeavours on this subject. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in 1962. Many argue Franklin never received sufficient credit.
X-ray crystallography has also been involved in more recent Nobel Prize-awarded work – including the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for genome-editing technology, which has roots in crystallographic studies of RNA.
One hugely important application of X-ray crystallography is in drug discovery. It has helped scientists find drugs for sickle-cell disease and even certain cancers, for example.
Rob van Montfort, group leader in the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery at the UK’s Institute of Cancer Research, says crystallography can reveal which compounds could block or control key proteins in the body, and thus treat a disease.
“X-ray crystallography… provides pictures showing how, exactly, the compound binds to the molecule,” he explains.
At Diamond Light Source, a science facility in the UK, staff use X-ray beamlines to check the medicinal potential of compounds at high speed, by analysing potential binding-sites on a given protein. “Overnight, you could look at 200,” says Garman. “It’s absolutely staggering.”
Credit: shisheng ling via Getty Images
Researchers have also used this approach to study battery materials – a key technology for the transition away from fossil fuels. Phil Chater, crystallography science group leader at Diamond Light Source, says X-ray crystallography reveals how the materials inside batteries can degrade over time.
Lithium-ion batteries work by allowing lithium ions to travel between layers of material – that’s how they charge up and discharge energy.
“Maintaining that [layer] structure is very important for the prolonged life of these batteries,” Chater says.
But crystallography allows you to see, sometimes, how layers are changing, affecting the ability of the ions to move in and out, he adds. Scientists can then search for ways of overcoming the problem.
A close look at comet ice?
X-ray crystallography has clearly made waves in many fields. But there’s an elephant in the room, says Garman.
A rival technique called cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is now enabling scientists to derive the structure of certain molecules in a completely different way – by firing beams of electrons at them. Some molecules have traditionally been too small for cryo-EM devices to see, however solutions are emerging on that front.
There’s also artificial intelligence (AI). If AI can accurately predict molecular structures, there may be less need to use X-ray crystallography for this task. But Starbird cautions that there are many structures AI doesn’t predict well.
“I think people have a misconception that crystallography might be done soon, because we have AI – we’re not even close to that,” she says.
The Braggs, presumably, would be glad to hear this. And X-ray crystallography devices may go on even more exciting adventures in the future. Velbel suggests sending one to a distant comet orbiting our sun.
“Wow. I’d want to see what comet ice looks like,” he says, explaining that we might find exciting mixtures of unusual compounds if we could study it up-close. “I think it would be fascinating.”
By Chris Baraniuk, BBC World Service. This content was created as a co-production between Nobel Prize Outreach and the BBC.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.
An Unfinished Symphony: Nobel Peace Prize documentary
The Miagi Orchestra is a South African orchestra dedicated to helping the nation overcome decades of violence, conflict and division through the power of music.
The film follows two of its musicians: Tsepo Pooe, who grew up in Soweto Township; and Lize Schaap, who grew up in wealthy Pretoria. Through their eyes, and differing experiences of growing up in South Africa, we understand the enormous impact apartheid continues to have, but also see hope for a brighter future for the country. The Miagi Orchestra’s mission is inspired by the work and legacy of Nelson Mandela, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
National Geographic Documentary Films, the Nobel Prize and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel have collaborated on a 5-part short documentary series, celebrating the ongoing impact and influence of Nobel Peace Prize laureates around the world.
Inspired by the Nobel Prize, and distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films, the five Orlando von Einsiedel-directed short documentaries, produced by Grain Media and Rideback, each gives center stage to the legacy of a different Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
In war-torn South Sudan, Makur Diet knows all too well the horror of conflict. Over ten years ago, he lost his leg to a bullet.
Despairing for his future, Makur was close to giving up, until one day he was given a prosthetic leg, and with it a new lease of life. Makur now devotes his life to helping others who have been injured in the war to walk again.
National Geographic Documentary Films, the Nobel Prize and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel have collaborated on a 5-part short documentary series, celebrating the ongoing impact and influence of Nobel Peace Prize laureates around the world.
Inspired by the Nobel Prize, and distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films, the five Orlando von Einsiedel-directed short documentaries, produced by Grain Media and Rideback, each gives center stage to the legacy of a different Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Lost and Found tells the inspiring story of humanity in the world’s largest refugee camp.
The film follows Kamal Hussein, a Rohingya refugee who has dedicated his life to reuniting children with their parents with the support of the double Nobel Prize-awarded organisation, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR.)Lost and Found, from National Geographic Documentary Films, is the result of a partnership between the Nobel Prize and Academy Award-winning director Orlando von Einsiedel (The White Helmets.)
National Geographic Documentary Films, the Nobel Prize and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel have collaborated on a 5-part short documentary series, celebrating the ongoing impact and influence of Nobel Peace Prize laureates around the world.
Inspired by the Nobel Prize, and distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films, the five Orlando von Einsiedel-directed short documentaries, produced by Grain Media and Rideback, each gives center stage to the legacy of a different Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
An international team of scientists and explorers, lead by Dr Julian Bayliss, go on an extraordinary mission in Mozambique to reach a forest that no human has set foot in.
The team, including some of the world’s foremost climate change experts, aims to collect data from the forest to help in our understanding of how climate change is affecting our planet. But the forest sits atop a mountain, and to reach it, the team must first climb a sheer 100m wall of rock. The scientists’ work is based on research conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
National Geographic Documentary Films, the Nobel Prize and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel have collaborated on a 5-part short documentary series, celebrating the ongoing impact and influence of Nobel Peace Prize laureates around the world.
Inspired by the Nobel Prize, and distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films, the five Orlando von Einsiedel-directed short documentaries, produced by Grain Media and Rideback, each gives center stage to the legacy of a different Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
In an area of Iraq destroyed by ISIS, Hana Khider leads an all-female team of Yazidi deminers in their attempts to clear the land of mines. Their job involves painstakingly searching for booby traps in bombed out buildings and fields, where one wrong move means certain death.
National Geographic Documentary Films, the Nobel Prize and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel have collaborated on a 5-part short documentary series, celebrating the ongoing impact and influence of Nobel Peace Prize laureates around the world.
Inspired by the Nobel Prize, and distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films, the five Orlando von Einsiedel-directed short documentaries, produced by Grain Media and Rideback, each gives center stage to the legacy of a different Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
How we can shape the future we want – learnings from India
Whether it is scientific innovation, healthy diets or pollution-free cities, the future we want will be determined by what we prioritise today, and how societies are organised to deliver those priorities.
On a warm November morning in Bengaluru, a packed auditorium of students sat on the edge of their seats as Nobel Prize laureates and other world-leading experts discussed the science and institutions needed to drive change. Hands shot up to ask questions about democracy, youth empowerment and how the rules and regulations that governments create shape the prosperity of a country.
In 2024, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” Their research shows how former European colonies have thrived or struggled depending on the governance systems colonial powers imposed. This award became the spark for the Nobel Prize Dialogue in India, where Robinson and 2021 chemistry laureate David MacMillan met hundreds of students to discuss science and institutions.
Challenged the familiar narrative
Robinson challenged the familiar “one-way street” narrative of economic development, proposed by leading British philosophers and economists from the eighteenth century onwards. In that narrative, Western societies, stretching back to the ancient Greeks, solved social and economic challenges and the rest of the world copied. In this worldview, the only way to achieve economic progress and human flourishing was through adopting liberal governance philosophies. This story has been persuasive and for good reason: life expectancy in wealthy liberal economies has grown markedly in the last century.
Photo: Tata Trusts.
But Robinson pointed out that many European ideas and innovations – whether the idea is “democracy” or the “printing press” – are often taken from elsewhere and adapted. Or the new idea is the direct result of cultures interacting, says Robinson. He called this the “two-way street” but argued that this is no longer the only way of innovating. Other economic models, notably China, have also delivered rapid progress for society without adopting liberal ideals. On top of that, in recent decades gross inequality has become a destabilising influence in many liberal societies, he said.
What does this mean for the future we want? From an institutional point of view, the future is less clear. Economic models that have dominated for over a century are being questioned. For Robinson, this offers possibilities, but can also be profoundly unsettling.
Catalysing action
Photo: Tata Trusts.
David MacMillan brought a different perspective to the table. MacMillan is convinced that the solutions to many of the challenges facing humanity, from disease prevention to zero-carbon societies, will likely have chemistry at their heart.
Chemical reactions are at the center of most major industrial chemical processes – and most of these are driven by catalysts. For MacMillan the science of catalysts is one of the most exciting areas of chemistry, offering huge potential. For example, Earth’s population of eight billion people is dependent on the catalyst behind the Haber-Bosch process (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1918) to produce nitrogen fertilisers. Indeed, half the nitrogen in our bodies comes from synthetic fertilisers.
“Everything you see in this room is the result of a chemical reaction.”
David MacMillan, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021
To realise the full potential of chemistry will require much greater investment in chemistry – and India is well placed to grow its chemistry community.
If we can match the sky-high optimism of this generation with fairer institutions, better wealth redistribution, youth empowerment and long-term investment in research and education – then the future we want becomes the future we collectively create.
