This year ‘s Shaw Prize in Astronomy is awarded to Matthew Bailes, Duncan Lorimer and Maura McLaughlin for their discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs). The Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine is awarded to Patrick Cramer and Eva Nogales, for pioneering structural biology that enabled visualisation, at the level of individual atoms, of the protein machines responsible for gene transcription, one of life’s fundamental processes. They revealed the mechanism underlying each step in gene transcription, how proper gene transcription promotes health, and how dysregulation causes disease. The Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences is awarded to Vladimir Drinfeld and Shing-Tung Yau for their contributions related to mathematical physics, to arithmetic geometry, to differential geometry and to Kähler geometry. (SCMP Wrapper)