Two Americans and German share Nobel Prize for chemistry

Two Americans and a German shared this year's Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for making a quantum leap in light microscopy, NBC News reports.


The laureates are Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Stanford University's William Moerner; and Romanian-born Stefan Hell, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said they earned the prize "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy."


Staffan Normark, the academy's secretary, said during Wednesday's announcement in Stockholm that the research behind the prize is about "how the optical microscope became a nanoscope."


The laureates will share $1.1 million (8 million Swedish kronor) in prize money, and receive their gold medals during an awards ceremony in December.


This year's round of Nobel announcements kicked off on Monday with the medicine prize, which went to US-British researcher John O'Keefe and Norwegian husband-and-wife team May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for discovering the "inner GPS" that helps the brain navigate through the world.


The physics prize followed on Tuesday: Japanese-American physicist Shuju Nakamura shared the prize with Japanese colleagues Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, for inventing the blue-light diodes that brought about a revolution in LED lighting.
Next up is the literature prize, to be announced on Thursday, followed by the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the economics prize on Monday.