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[00:00.04]Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
[00:05.96]for their work in developing tiny machines.
[00:11.20]The three men are Jean-Pierre Sauvage,
[00:15.68]Sir James Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa.
[00:20.48]They designed extremely thin molecular machines.
[00:27.56]The machines are said to be 1,000 times thinner than a single piece of hair
[00:36.16]and have parts that move when energy is added.
[00:42.12]The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the scientists' work
[00:48.28]could lead to developments in new materials and energy storage systems.
[00:55.96]The science of making things unimaginably small is called nanotechnology.
[01:04.96]Nanotechnology gets its name from a measure of distance.
[01:11.52]A nanometer, or nano, is one-thousand-millionth of a meter,
[01:20.00]about the size of atoms and molecules.
[01:24.76]Jean-Paul Sauvage of France is a retired professor at the University of Strasbourg.
[01:33.48]He began the work on a molecular machine in 1983
[01:38.92]when he successfully linked together two molecules shaped like a circle or ring.
[01:48.16]It marked the first time chemists were able to make a molecule act in such a way.
[01:56.52]Fraser Stoddart is a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States.
[02:05.44]In 1991, he built on Sauvage's work.
[02:10.88]He found a way to move the molecular ring onto a molecular axle
[02:19.16]and was able to move the ring along the axle.
[02:24.68]Bernard Feringa is a professor of organic chemistry
[02:29.93]at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
[02:34.28]In 1999, he developed a molecular motor.
[02:40.03]It used a molecular blade that turned continuously in the same direction.
[02:48.32]Sara Snogerup Linse explained the importance of their work to reporters in Stockholm.
[02:56.87]"Maybe this morning you ground your coffee,
[02:59.82]maybe you used a motorized vehicle to get here
[03:03.50]- you used man-made machines operating on the centimeter to meter length scale.
[03:10.83]It's been a dream of scientists for over half a century
[03:15.40]to take this development all the way down to the molecular scale - that's nanometers.
[03:21.85]A nanometer is one million times smaller than a millimeter..."
[03:25.48]Snogerup Linse is chair of the Nobel Chemistry Committee.
[03:31.16]Sauvage, Stoddart and Feringa will share a $930,000 prize for their work.
[03:41.04]They will also receive a medal and diploma at an award ceremony on December 10.
[03:49.33]I'm Anne Ball.
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