2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

Congratulations to contributing authors Esther Duflo and Abhijit V. Banerjee, of MIT, and Michael Kremer, of Harvard, who shared the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”

Duflo was a founding Editorial Committee Member of the Annual Review of Economics. Listen to a 2011 interview in which she discusses the methods she developed and for which she is being recognised, in English and French.

We’ve made these articles freely available to celebrate this achievement:

The Experimental Approach to Development Economics, A.V. Banerjee and E. Duflo, 2009 Annual Review of Economics
Under the Thumb of History? Political Institutions and the Scope for Action, A.V. Banerjee and E. Duflo, 2014 Annual Review of Economics
Improving Education in the Developing World: What Have We Learned from Randomized Evaluations?, M. Kremer, 2009 Annual Review of Economics
Providing Safe Water: Evidence from Randomized Evaluations, M. Kremer, 2010 Annual Review of Economics
Using Randomized Controlled Trials to Estimate Long-Run Impacts in Development Economics,
M. Kremer, 2019 Annual Review of Economics

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. To find out how we create our highly cited reviews and stimulate discussion about science, please watch this short video. Members of the media can visit our Press Center to sign up for journal access.

2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Congratulations to our contributing authors John B. Goodenough, of the University of Texas at Austin, who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry  with M. Stanley Wittingham, of Binghamton University and Akira Yoshino, of the Asahi Kasei Corporation and Meijo University, “for the development of lithium-ion batteries.”

We’ve made these articles freely available to celebrate this achievement:

Oxide-Ion Electrolytes, J.B. Goodenough, 2003 Annual Review of Materials Research
Jahn-Teller Phenomena in Solids, J.B. Goodenough, 1998 Annual Review of Materials Research

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. To find out how we create our highly cited reviews and stimulate discussion about science, please watch this short video. Members of the media can visit our Press Center to sign up for journal access.

2019 Nobel Prize in Physics

Congratulations to our contributing author P. James E. Peebles, of Princeton University, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics  “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology.” He shares it with Michel Mayor, of the University of Geneva, and Didier Queloz, also of the University of Geneva and of the University of Cambridge, who won it “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a sola-type star.”

Read P.J.E. Peebles’ autobiographical article and watch him in conversation with Sandra Faber, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is the co-Editor of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics:

Seeing Cosmology Grow, 2012 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. To find out how we create our highly cited reviews and stimulate discussion about science, please watch this short video. Members of the media can visit our Press Center to sign up for journal access.

2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Congratulations to our contributing authors William G. Kaelin, Jr., of Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Gregg L. Semenza, of Johns Hopkins University, who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine  with Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe, of Oxford University, “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”

We’ve made these articles freely available to celebrate this achievement:

The von Hippel-Lindow Tumor Suppressor Protein, W. G. Kaelin, Jr., 2018 Annual Review of Cancer Biology
Pharmacologic Targeting of Hypoxia-Inducible Factors, G. L. Semenza, 2019 Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Oxygen Sensing, Hypoxia-Inducible Factors, and Disease Pathophysiology, G. L. Semenza, 2014 Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease
Hypoxia-Inducible Factor 1 and Cardiovascular Disease, G. L. Semenza, 2014 Annual Review of Physiology

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. To find out how we create our highly cited reviews and stimulate discussion about science, please watch this short video. Members of the media can visit our Press Center to sign up for journal access.

LGBTQ+ Studies: a Mini-Collection of Review Articles.

June 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an uprising of the LGBTQ+ community in New York City that is credited for sparking the gay rights movement in the United States.   

To commemorate the anniversary, we are offering access to four articles that explore health, law, research, and public opinion of the LGBTQ+ community. They are all freely available to read.

“There have been extraordinary changes in public understanding and acceptance of LGBT people and issues, and significant advances have been made in scientific understanding of LGBT youth mental health. At the same time, critical gaps in knowledge continue to prevent the most effective policies, programs, and clinical care from addressing mental health for LGBT young people.” 

Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Youth, in the 2016 Annual Review of Clinical Psychology

“In a review of courts’ use of social science evidence on same-sex parenting and the immutability of homosexuality, Levit notes ‘a fairly dramatic shift in the past twenty years, [in which] science is becoming an ally to rather than an oppressor of gays and lesbians.’ Levit’s observation receives support from a recent study of citation patterns in social science research on the effect of parents’ sexual orientation on child outcomes.” 

The Role of Social Science Expertise in Same-Sex Marriage Litigation, in the 2017 Annual Review of Law and Social Science

“The prediction that transgender people would fall into the dustbin of history proved to be far off the mark. In the 1980s and 1990s, vibrant activism by transgender and gender nonconforming people around their economic and social marginalization, the medical regulation of their identities, and the legal restrictions on cross-dressing in public that were still on the books in many cities and states gained more visibility.” 

The Development of Transgender Studies in Sociology, in the 2017 Annual Review of Sociology.  

“With television shows such as Ellen and Will & Grace, even people who would not necessarily know an out gay individual have an opportunity to virtually know one. (…) Multiple studies have found that knowing someone who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender is associated with more supportive attitudes. Moreover, the degree of contact matters. People are more likely to have positive views when they have a closer relationship with someone who is gay (Brewer 2007). It is harder to express negative views and discriminate against someone if the person is a close friend or family member.” 

Examining Public Opinion About LGBTQ-Related Issues in the United States and Across Multiple Nations, in the 2019 Annual Review of Sociology.  

Photographing a Black Hole

Using the EHT, scientists obtained an image of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87, outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon.
Credit: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.

A team of astronomers published the first photograph of a black hole. The “monster,” as they’ve called it, is 40 million kilometers across (about 3 million times the size of Earth), located at the center of a galaxy known as Messier 87, about 500 million trillion kilometers away.

The image was captured by a network of eight telescopes named Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), and assembled with an algorithm developed by young computer scientist Katie Bouman.

Dr. Eliot Quataert is the Director of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center at UC Berkeley and an Editorial Committee Member of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophyics. His research focuses in part on black holes and galaxy formation. He spoke to Annual Reviews about this breakthrough.

What do you make of this announcement?

This is an incredibly exciting result. I was expecting something good but was even more amazed and impressed by the results than I had expected to be. It really is a testament to the hard work of hundreds of people over decades that we have been able to take this first real picture of what it looks like close to a black hole.

What new paths for research do you expect this will open?

The observations will continue to get better as the technology improves and new telescopes are added across the Earth, and maybe even in space. This will enable even better pictures of what the gas looks like close to a black hole. Over time, I think this will allow us to develop a better understanding of what is happening not only near the black holes that EHT can observe, but of all black holes across the Universe. This will impact a huge range of problems in astrophysics, from our understanding of how galaxies form and are affected by black holes to our understanding of the warped strong gravity very close to the event horizon of a black hole.

What articles can you recommend for readers who want to learn more about black hole research?

An older one, but famous, is “Black Hole Models for Active Galactic Nuclei,” by Martin J. Rees, in the 1984 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Two recent ones on the role of black holes in galaxy formation are “The Coevolution of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes: Insights from Surveys of the Contemporary Universe,” by Timothy Heckman and Philip Best, and “Coevolution (Or Not) of Supermassive Black Holes and Host Galaxies,” by John Kormendy and Luis Ho, respectively in the 2014 and the 2013 volumes of the same journal.

We’ve made all three of these articles freely available for 30 days.

Congratulations to Annual Reviews Authors on NAS Awards

Congratulations to the following Annual Reviews contributing authors for receiving these National Academy of Sciences awards:

Barbara Dosher, of the University of California, Irvine, won the Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences “for her groundbreaking work on human memory, attention, and learning.” She wrote for the 2017 Annual Review of Vision Science.

She shared the prize with Richard Shiffrin, of Indiana University, who was recognized “for pioneering contributions to the investigation of memory and attention.” He wrote for the 1992 Annual Review of Psychology.

Günter Wagner, of Yale University, won the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal “for his book  Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation, which makes fundamental contributions to our understanding of the evolution of complex organisms.” He wrote for the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics in 1989 and 1991.

Mark E. Hay, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, won the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal “for his research into algal science, with implications for the world’s imperiled coral reefs.” He wrote for the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics in 1988 and 2004, and the Annual Review of Marine Science in 2009.

James P. Allison, of the University of Texas MD Anderson Center, won the Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal “for important discoveries related to the body’s immune response to tumors.” He wrote for the Annual Review of Immunology in 1987, 1991, and 2001, and the Annual Review of Medicine in 2014.

Howard Y. Chang, of Stanford University, won the NAS Award in Molecular Biology “for the discovery of long noncoding RNAs and the invention of genomic technologies.” He wrote for the Annual Review of Biochemistry in 2009 and 2012.

Rodolphe Barrangou, of North Carolina State University, won the NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences “for the discovery of the genetic mechanisms and proteins driving CRISPR-Cas systems.” He wrote for the Annual Review of Food Science in 2012, 2016, and 2017, and the Annual Review of Genetics in 2017.

Marlene R. Cohen, of the University of Pittsburgh, won the Troland Research Award “for her pioneering studies of how neurons in the brain process visual information.” She wrote for the Annual Review of Neuroscience in 2012 and 2018.

Etel Solingen, of the University of California, Irvine, won the William and Katherine Estes Award “for pathbreaking work on nuclear proliferation and reducing the risks of nuclear war.” She wrote for the Annual Review of Political Science in 2010.

Jennifer A. Doudna, Annual Reviews Contributing Author, Wins Kavli Prize, NAS Medal

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Photo: Doudna Lab, UC Berkeley

Congratulations to Jennifer A. Doudna, of the University of California, Berkeley, who won the 2018 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and the National Academy of Science Award in Chemical Sciences.

Dr. Doudna shared the Kavli Prize with Emmanuelle Charpentier, of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and Virginijus Šikšnys, of Vilnius University, “for the invention of CRISPR-Cas9, a precise nanotool for editing DNA, causing a revolution in biology, agriculture, and medicine.” 

She received the NAS Award “for co-inventing the technology for efficient site-specific genome engineering using CRISPR/Cas9 nucleases.”

Read her articles on the topic here.

2018 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience Goes to Annual Reviews Authors Hudspeth, Fettiplace, Petit

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Photo: kavliprize.org.

Congratulations to A. James Hudspeth, of Rockefeller University; Robert Fettiplace, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison; and Christine Petit, of the Institut Pasteur, who shared the 2018 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience “for their pioneering work on the molecular and neural mechanisms of hearing.”

Click on their names to find the articles they wrote for the Annual Review of Biophysics, the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, the Annual Review of Neuroscience, the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the Annual Review of Physiology.

Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics Co-Editor Ewine van Dishoeck Wins Kavli Prize, NAS Medal

Screen Shot 2018-06-04 at 11.13.24.pngCongratulations to Ewine van Dishoeck, of Leiden University, who won the 2018 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics and the National Academy of Science James Craig Watson Medal.

The Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Astrophysics received the Kavli Prize “for her combined contributions to observational, theoretical, and laboratory astrochemistry, elucidating the life cycle of interstellar clouds and the formation of stars and planets.”

The James Craig Watson Medal was awarded to her “for improving our understanding of how molecules, stars, and planets form.”

Dr. van Dishoeck has co-edited the journal with Sandra Faber since 2010. You can find her articles about planet, star, and molecule formation here.