2 Americans, 1 Israeli win Nobel chemistry prize

The prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) recognised Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath for showing how the ribosome, which produces protein, functions at the atomic level.

"As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics," the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

This was the third of this year's Nobel prizes, following awards for medicine or physiology on Monday and for physics on Tuesday.

Prizes for the sciences and for peace were established in the will of 19th century dynamite tycoon Alfred Nobel and have been handed out since 1901. Sweden's central bank began awarding a prize for economics in 1969; Kazinform cites China Daily.