Radio telescopes help scientists map molecules in space and uncover where and how stars form - Phys.org

The Nobel prize in chemistry 2026 has been awarded to two scientists for discoveries that showed how chemical reactions can produce an overwhelming excess of one of two mirror image forms of a molecule. Henri B Kagan at Paris-Sud University in France and Kensō Soai at Tokyo University of Science in Japan have been awarded the prize “for the discovery of nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis”. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners in Stockholm, Sweden, on Wednesday. They will each receive an equal share of a prize of 12m Swedish kronor (about £900,000). Many molecules, including amino acids that form the building blocks of proteins, can exist in two forms that contain the same atoms, but are mirror images of one another, much like a person’s left and right hands. This property is known as chirality. However, the chemistry underpinning life is surprisingly “homochiral”, or same-handed. Proteins are built almost exclusively from L-amino acids, while the sugars that form the backbone of DNA and RNA have the opposite D- configuration.

An illustration showing a chip and DNA strands inside a water drop. Image credits: ZME Science To you or me, a tiny drop of water looks ordinary. There seems to be nothing special about it. However, some researchers see a whole computing device inside a drop. There is no silicon processor inside, but they claim that the billions of DNA molecules in a water drop can interact, process information, and produce an answer.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.