A chemist won a Nobel Prize explaining why a wilted carrot shrivels in salt water
Osmosis moves water across a membrane from a weaker solution toward a stronger one, but for decades nobody could explain why the resulting pressure followed such exact, predictable numbers. In 1887, Jacobus van 't Hoff showed that a dilute solution's osmotic pressure obeys the same mathematical law as a gas's pressure, volume and temperature, letting chemists calculate it instead of just measuring it. The discovery helped win him the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901.