Photo: Haseeb Jamil / Unsplash
Physics Nobel for the discoverer of cosmic neutrinos, medicine prize for optogenetics
Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the IceCube observatory and the discovery of neutrinos from space. A day earlier, the pioneers of optogenetics won the medicine prize.
Key facts
- Francis Halzen, 82, is a Belgian physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He proposed catching neutrinos under the South Pole ice in 1988.
- The medicine prize went to Karl Deisseroth (Stanford), Peter Hegemann (Humboldt University of Berlin) and Georg Nagel (University of Würzburg).
- Optogenetics lets scientists control nerve cells with light and study how the brain works.
- Each prize is worth 12 million Swedish kronor.
What's next
- The chemistry prize is announced on Wednesday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday 9 October.
Source: Interia, Polsat News (5–6 Oct 2026)