Research on quasars and carbon nanotubes was recognized by the judges of the inaugural Kavli Prizes, announced on 28 May in Oslo. Maarten Schmidt of the California Institute of Technology, and Donald Lynden-Bell of the University of Cambridge in the UK, are joint recipients of the astrophysics prize for their pioneering work on quasars. This “dramatically expanded the scale of the observable Universe and led to our present view of the violent Universe in which massive black holes play a key role,” according to the Kavli committee.

Louis Brus of Columbia University in New York and Sumio Iijima of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, share the prize for nanoscience for their respective discoveries of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum dots) and carbon nanotubes. And the neuroscience prize — awarded for their “discoveries on the developmental and functional logic of neuronal circuits” — went to Pasko Rakic of Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, Thomas Jessell of Columbia University and Sten Grillner of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The three US$1-million prizes are to be awarded every two years.