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Enlarge Image Crystallized. Winner Daniel Shechtman and an atomic model of a quasicrystal (inset). Credit: The Ames Laboratory/DOE This year's Nobel Prize for chemistry goes to a scientist whose controversial discovery forced chemists to redefine the concept of a crystal. In 1982, Daniel Shechtman of the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa discovered an alloy of aluminum and manganese that appeared to have fivefold symmetry—that is, the atoms in it formed a pattern that appeared essentially the same when rotated by a fifth of a turn, or 72 degrees. Other researchers scoffed, as such arrangement was thought to be...

Three researchers share the prize for revealing the workings of the cell's protein-making machine.Three molecular biologists who mapped the structure and inner workings of the ribosome — the cell's machinery for churning out proteins from the genetic code — have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who works at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK; Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Thomas Steitz at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, share the prize equally. "I'm in a bit of shock at the moment," Ramakrishnan told Nature shortly...