News

What happens when the boundaries between scientific disciplines begin to dissolve? Some of the most profound breakthroughs emerge when distinct perspectives come together. On Oct. 15, 2026, an international community of scholars gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, to celebrate the 2026 NOMIS Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Awardees — Tobias Kippenberg, Andrew Gonzalez and Ulrike Malmendier — three pioneering researchers whose boundary-crossing work exemplifies this collaborative spirit.

On Oct. 14, 2026, scientists, scholars and curious minds gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, for the 2026 NOMIS Insight lectures. Showcasing the pioneering research of the 2026 NOMIS Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Awardees, the event highlighted how curiosity and the convergence of disciplines spark transformative discoveries spanning the physical world, our planet and the human mind.

Michael Woodford and Robert E. Hall have been awarded the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for developing new macroeconomic models that have significantly improved our ability to implement effective stabilization policy.

Karl Deisseroth has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discoveries leading to optogenetics.

New groundbreaking research from the University of St Andrews, co-authored by NOMIS–STRI Fellow Jenna Kohles, has created the largest combined bat genome and fossil study ever undertaken, finding that bats most likely originated in Europe around 65 million years ago, before spreading across the world.

How can we better understand debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s? NOMIS–Salk Fellow Eduardo Vieira de Souza, together with other scientists at the Salk Institute, are tackling this question. The researchers created the first microprotein atlas of the human frontal cortex with and without Alzheimer’s disease, and have found a link between a microprotein and […]

ETH Zurich has opened the 2026 call for the NOMIS–ETH Fellowship Program, inviting outstanding early-career researchers to pursue independent, interdisciplinary projects on one of science’s most fundamental questions: how life begins and where it may exist. Applications for fellowships within the Centre for Origin and Prevalence of Life (COPL) are open until Nov. 6, 2026.

New research by NOMIS Awardee Sara Seager and colleagues offers support for the possibility that complex biological molecules could exist in the highly acidic environment of Venus’s cloud layer.

Former NOMIS–STRI Fellow Ummat Somjee has been recognized with a 2026 Award in Field Biology from the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation for his innovative, field-based experiments focusing on the evolution, function and costs of elaborated insect traits. Launched in 2020, the awards provide scientists with unrestricted funding, attention and support at critical junctures in their careers so they can focus on commitment and creativity, elevate often underrepresented perspectives to problem-solving, and promote progress in the biological sciences through research focused on our natural world.

How does increased activity of the Neandertal growth hormone receptor shape the bodies of people who carry it today? A study by researchers at the Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, co-authored by NOMIS Awardee Svante Pääbo, identified two amino acid changes that are unique to the Neandertal growth hormone receptor. They found that adults who carry the Neandertal receptor have, on average, about 270 grams more muscle. They also tend to have slightly shorter tooth roots and subtle differences in the shape of the jaw. Their findings were published in Current Biology.

NOMIS researcher Tom Griffiths and colleagues have found that people can rapidly assess a game they have never played and play it sensibly on their first try, using only a few quick, shallow mental simulations. The study, published in Nature, sheds light on how people reason their way through unfamiliar situations, and could inform the design of AI systems that work out not just how to solve a new problem, but whether it is worth thinking about at all.

Do matador bugs — and some of their plainer-looking relatives — store poison from the plants they eat? Exploring this question, former NOMIS–STRI Fellow Ummat Somjee, together with collaborators from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Texas at Austin, found the first evidence that the matador bug accumulates cyanide-producing compounds from eating passionflower plants, storing the toxins in their bodies to deter birds and other predators. The findings were published in the Journal of Chemical Ecology.