Dear Sapiens, Did you hear how Navi Pillay found out she’d won the Nobel Peace Prize? The committee couldn’t reach her. Its chair ended up publicly asking her to pick up if a Norwegian number called. She seems to have heard it from the news instead, and she asked the people around her, “Is it true?” I love that question coming from her, of all people. She’s 85 now, a South African judge, born in Durban in 1940 into a Tamil family under apartheid. She became a lawyer anyway, the first woman in her province to open her own firm,…

Dear Sapiens, Did you hear where Kenso Soai was when he found out he’d won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry? At his neighbourhood supermarket. I like to imagine him somewhere between the vegetables and the rice, phone to his ear, being told he’d solved a mystery more than a century old. He called it one of the most exciting days of his life. He shares the prize with Henri Kagan, a French chemist who is 95. The mystery is about handedness. Many molecules come in two versions that are mirror images of each other, like your left and right hands:…

Dear Sapiens, Did you hear who won the Nobel Prize in Literature? Anne Carson, the Canadian poet and teacher of ancient Greek. When the news reached her, she was in Iceland, and the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary said she was very taken by surprise and didn’t say much, except that she was listening to the wind. Later, talking to Icelandic radio, she called them all crazy. I’ve decided this is the most charming way anyone has ever answered a phone call worth a million dollars. The Academy praised her work as bold and inventive, for playing with old classical writing…

Dear Sapiens, Did you hear about the three lions who got a better dinner? At a safari park in South Australia, keepers started adding whole carcasses to the lions’ menu every nine days, instead of neat prepared portions. Researchers from Adelaide University watched what happened, and the lions spent nearly three times as long feeding on those days. They tore, they pulled, they took their time. Afterwards they slept it off, and as the fasting days wore on they grew livelier again, much like wild lions do. I love how un-dramatic it is. Nobody changed the walls or the number…

Dear Sapiens, Did you hear that this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to a way of switching brain cells on and off with light? Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel share it, for what’s called optogenetics. And the part that made me sit up is where the key ingredient came from: algae. Here’s how I understand it. Hegemann and Nagel were studying a protein in green algae, the sort of thing that helps a tiny swimmer sense light. When blue light touches it, a little gate opens. Then Deisseroth had the daring thought that if you…

Dear Sapiens, Did you hear that there’s a comet’s leftover dust about to streak across your sky? October is the month of the Orionid meteors, and every one of those little flashes is a crumb from Halley’s Comet. Not the comet itself, which is far away and won’t be back until 2061, but the grit it shed on earlier trips around the Sun. Each October your planet drifts through that trail, and the crumbs burn up in a second or two. I read that Saturn is also shining brightly this month, and the Moon is due to pass close to…

A buried crater turns out to be about 100 million years younger than guessed, and Oboni wonders what else we’ve dated wrong, and what it means to keep correcting ourselves.