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French physicist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji passed away in Paris in October 2026 at the age of 93. Born in Algeria in 1933, he moved to France for his university studies and went on to become one of the most respected teachers and researchers in modern physics, spending decades inspiring students at the Collège de France and the École Normale Supérieure. His greatest scientific breakthrough was figuring out how to cool and trap atoms using laser light. In nature, atoms constantly buzz and zip around at the speed of a jet plane, which makes them almost impossible to study or measure accurately. Cohen-Tannoudji realized that carefully tuned laser beams could act like a sticky liquid—pushing gently against the atoms from all directions to slow them down to a crawl and cool them to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. For this pioneering work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 alongside Steven Chu and William Phillips. ...

Elizabeth Holmes was born in 1984 in Washington, D.C., and was determined to make a name for herself from an early age. In 2002, she went to Stanford University to study chemical engineering, but dropped out at just 19 years old to start a blood-testing startup named Theranos. Holmes promised to change healthcare forever. She claimed she had built a small machine called the “Edison” that could run hundreds of medical tests using only a few drops of blood from a quick finger prick. Dressed in black turtlenecks like Apple’s Steve Jobs, she charmed famous politicians, retired military generals, and wealthy business leaders. She raised over $700 million from rich investors, turning Theranos into a $9 billion company and striking big deals with major pharmacy chains like Walgreens. ...

Indian theoretical physicist Professor Ashoke Sen has won the prestigious 2026 Oskar Klein Medal, becoming the first Indian physicist to ever receive this honor. Past winners include renowned Nobel Prize laureates such as Chen-Ning Yang, Steven Weinberg, and Hans Bethe. Born in Kolkata in 1956, Sen grew up in an academic family where his father was a physics professor. He studied physics at Presidency College in Kolkata and earned his Master’s degree from IIT Kanpur before moving to the United States to complete his Ph.D. and work at major research facilities. ...

In August 2026, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, announced the recipients of the 2026 Dirac Medal—one of the highest global honours in theoretical physics. Alongside international stalwarts Bernard Derrida, Marc Mézard, and Haim Sompolinsky stood Prof. Deepak Dhar, an INSA Distinguished Professor at ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru. Following his 2022 Boltzmann Medal (where he became the first Indian recipient in history) and the 2023 Padma Bhushan, this latest recognition places Prof. Dhar into an extraordinary global club: he is one of only ten physicists in the world to have won both the Boltzmann Medal and the Dirac Medal, and only the second scientist working in India to claim the Dirac honour after Ashoke Sen. ...