Chemistry Nobel awarded for lithium-ion battery development
October 9, 2019
John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their development of lithium-ion batteries. The batteries are found in everything from watches to automobiles.
Advertisement
The trio of US-based John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham from Britain and Akira Yoshino of Japan were jointly awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their contribution "to the development of lithium-ion batteries," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm announced on Wednesday.
Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Academy, said the prize was about "a rechargeable world."
"Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized our lives and are used in everything from mobile phones to laptops and electric vehicles," the Academy wrote on Twitter.
The committee added that their research "has revolutionized our lives," and the laureates "laid the foundation of a wireless, fossil fuel-free society."
In a phone call following the announcement, Akira Yoshino said the lithium-ion battery is important because of its contribution to a "sustainable society," adding, "climate change is a very serious issue for humankind."
Fully charged
Wittingham developed the first fully functional lithium battery in the 1970s, while Goodenough doubled the battery's potential the following decade. Yoshino was then able to eliminate pure lithium from the battery, making it safer to use.
John Goodenough, born in 1922 in Jena, Germany, became the oldest laureate ever awarded, Hansson said. At 97, Goodenough, now a US citizen, is a few months older than last year's Physics Prize laureate, Arthur Ashkin, Hansson added. The Academy was unable to reach Goodenough before the winner's names were made public.
A week of celebrations
The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded by the Karolinska Institute on Monday to US-born scientists William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza, along with British scientist Peter Ratcliffe, for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to the availability of oxygen.
Three scientists are to share the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics for their research into the history of the universe and its structure, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm announced on Tuesday.
One-half of the prize went to James Peebles, a dual Canadian-US citizen, for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology. The other half of the award was jointly given to Swiss scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star, Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Academy, said.
The 2018 and 2019 prizes for literature will be announced on Thursday. For the first time in 70 years, last year's award was postponed as the institution found itself without a quorum to decide the winner.
The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be announced on October 14.
The prizes in each category carry a purse of 9 million kroner ($918,00, €813,151), a gold medal and a diploma for each full Nobel award. The medals will be presented at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.
jlw/sms (dpa, Reuters, AFP, AP)
Nobel Prize: Chemistry in everyday life
Receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is a great honor. The laureates are rewarded for years of hard work. Many of their discoveries still influence our lives today.
Image: Imago/Science Photo Library
1980: Decoding our genetic makeup
It took 13 years to decode the entire sequence of the human genome. The result: Three billion components and roughly 20,000 genes make humans what they are. This knowledge is in part thanks to the work of Walter Gilbert and Fred Sanger. They received the Nobel Prize for their methods of exact DNA-sequencing.
Image: Fotolia/majcot
1988: Powerplant in a leaf
The most important chemical reaction on Earth can be observed in the woods: Photosynthesis. Plants, algae and bacteria use sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. Certain protein compounds in the cells are responsible for this. Robert Huber, Hartmut Michel and Johann Deisenhofer researched this mechanism and earned a Nobel Prize for their work.
1991: Getting the picture through nuclear magnetic resonance
Heart, brain, bones – an MRI can show all that in detail and help discover tumors, for example. The basis for this diagnostic tool is the high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Richard Ernst was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in developing the process.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1995: Saving the ozone layer
Thanks to the ozone layer, people can get tan more or less safely – if we put on sunscreen. Ozone filters out the majority of the sunlight's harmful UV-B-radiation. Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland received the Nobel Prize for finding out what destroys the ozone layer: nitrogen oxide and chlorofluorocarbons.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1996: The soccer molecule
Never heard of "fullerenes?" It's easy to picture them – just think of a soccer ball. It consists of numerous pentagons and hexagons. 60 carbon atoms are assembled like this in the most famous fullerene. Robert Curl Jr.m Sir Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley received the Nobel Prize for describing the fullerene structure.
1997: Energy through ATP
Adenosintriphosphat (ATP) is to our cells what coal, wind, or solar power are to us. Without this universal "energy currency," we couldn't flex our muscles. An adult human uses half his weight in ATP every day! Sir John Walker received the Nobel Prize, because he was able to explain how ATP is produced in the cell.
Image: Fotolia/Kzenon
2003: Water for the cell
Water pipes pump fresh water into a house and waste water out. Our cells' water supply works in a similar way, as Peter Agre showed in 1988. 15 years later, he received the Nobel Prize for discovering the protein that regulates the water passage through the cell membrane. This pipe process is universal: It works for humans, animals, plants and bacteria.
2005: Green chemistry
Protecting the environment and saving resources and energy. Thanks to Robert Grubbs, Richard Schrock und Yves Chauvin, these goals of green chemistry are no longer uptopian. The Nobel laureates found an elegant way to produce complex chemical compounds, now used by the pharmaceutical industry, for example. They rebuilt existing natural compounds in an efficient, environmentally-friendly way.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
2008: Light in the darkness
This luminous umbrella is actually the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. Its fluorescent green protein is used in numerous areas of biology. One of the facilitators of this technique was Nobel laureate Martin Chalfie. He used the glowing protein to mark cell parts of a nematode, or roundworm. That opened up a host of possibilities, like understanding the how nerve cells function.
2009: Factories of life
DNA directs the makeup of a cell's different parts. These parts are produced by tiny factories, the ribosomes. Humans would tend to specialize their activities in such a situation, but each ribosome produces thousands of different cell parts. Ada Yonath, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz received the Nobel Prize for discovering how these factories work.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
2011: Frying with quasicrystals
Should you ever burn your scrambled eggs, think of Dan Shechtman's discovery: quasicrystals. He received the Nobel Prize for discovering them. Structured like an oriental mosaic, they may soon be found in frying pans as an anti-stick-layer.
2012: Receptors for good taste
Billions of them are located in our body: Receptors can be found on the outside of every cell. Through them, cells can examine their surroundings, move and communicate with other cells. The "G-protein-coupled receptors" are important to perceive taste or smell. Americans Brian Kobilka and Robert Lefkowitz earned the Nobel Prize for exploring this protein family.
2013: Chemistry and computers
US researchers Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel laid "the foundation for the powerful programs that are used to understand and predict chemical processes." The Nobel Prize committe says "computer models mirroring real life have become crucial for most advances made in chemistry today."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
2014: Heroes of microscopy
German physicist Stefan Hell and Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner developed a new microscopy method. It shifts the limits of light microscopy to the nanoscale. Even living tissue, such as cancer cells, can now be studied in detail.
2018: The revolution of evolution
Frances H. Arnold, George P. Smith and Gregory P. Winter intervened in evolution and created something in the laboratory that nature itself did not produce. Claes Gustafsson of the Nobel Prize committee said at the time of the announcement: "They applied Charles Darwin's principles in the test tube." Today, for example, drug manufacturers use their methods to produce insulin for diabetics.