Prof David Liu is among the winners of 2025’s ‘Oscars of science’, with honours also going to researchers for landmark work on multiple sclerosis, particle physics and ‘skinny jabs’ For the past five years, David Liu – a professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical research facility in Massachusetts – has marked Thanksgiving by handing over his entire annual salary, after taking care of taxes, to the staff and students in his laboratory. It started as the pandemic broke and Liu heard that students who wanted to cycle instead of taking public transport could not afford bicycles. Given how hard they worked and how little they were paid, Liu stepped in. He couldn’t unilaterally raise their incomes, so emailed them Amazon eGift cards. This ran into problems too, however. “Everyone thought they were being scammed,” he recalls. And so he switched to writing cheques. Continue reading...

My entire leg was on fire. It was as if someone had slit it open with a knife One night, while in my recording studio in Tucker, Georgia, my ankle started getting red, itchy and swollen. I love walking and hiking, so I assumed I had hurt it on a recent…