Nobel Prize

Tiny machines win chemistry Nobel prize

Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa will share the 8m kronor (£727,000) prize for the design and synthesis of machines on a molecular scale.

They were named at a press conference in Sweden.

The machines conceived by today's laureates are a thousand times thinner than a strand of hair.

They could slip inside the human body to deliver drugs from within - for instance, applying pharmaceuticals directly to cancer cells.

This field of nanotechnology could also yield applications in the design of smart materials.

Australian academics awarded for 'unboiling' egg, finding 'huh' in 31 languages

The award is a prestigious parody of the world's foremost scientific honour.

The Ig Nobels are awarded annually at Harvard University in honour of scientific achievements that "make people laugh, then make them think".

Professors Colin Raston from Flinders University in Adelaide took out the prize for creating the vortex fluidic device, which can unravel proteins or "unboil" an egg.