Prize

Celebrating the stranger side of science – focusing on those discoveries that can make you laugh and then make you think – the 2022 the Ig Nobel Prizes serve as a good-natured counterpoint to the stuffy and impenetrable Nobel Prizes.

In its first year the Black and White Minimalist Photography awards presents a sublime collection of esoteric monochrome imagery. From surreal architectural abstractions to desolate snowbound compositions, the contest is a reminder of the power of minimalism.

NASA's Artemis mission will (hopefully) take astronauts to the Moon in 2024 … and when those people get there, they'll need to go to the bathroom. With that in mind, the space agency is now looking to the public for ideas for "moon toilets."

Photographer Oleg Ershov won the International Landscape Photographer of the Year award with a folio of spectacular vertical images. In its sixth year, the photo contest delivers a stunning array of images focusing on the beauty of the natural world.

Back in April the world got its first direct glimpse of a black hole. Now the team behind this historic work is being awarded a Breakthrough Prize.

If you've ever wanted a Nobel Prize and don't have the time to come up with a major intellectual contribution, you can just buy one… the medal, that is. Not the prize itself. At Nate D Sanders Auctions, the 1927 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is on the block today.

Google and the IEEE have launched the Little Box Challenge, offering a US$1 million first prize for an innovative electronic design to shrink power inverters down from their current bigger-than-a-bread-box size to something less than the size of a small laptop.

Longitude Prize 2014 is a new competition with a £10 million prize aimed at solving one of today’s great technological challenges, with the British public voting for which issue the prize will be given to.

On Monday, XPrizen announced the launch of three new competitions by 2020 as part of its XPrize Ocean Initiative, which is aimed at improving the health and understanding of the world’s oceans.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2013 was awarded jointly today to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof "for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells."

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in response to the massive proliferation of illegal robocalls, has announced a US$50K prize for a solution to the problem of blocking robocalls.

The Romantik Hotel Muottas Muragl located in Switzerland has recently been awarded the highly-coveted Swiss Solar Award 2011.