The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi for their work in the development of metal organic frameworks (MOF). The three scientists, who won the award on Wednesday, come from the universities of Kyoto in Japan, Melbourne in Australia and Berkeley in the United States, respectively. Such constructions can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or break down traces of pharmaceuticals in the environment. "Metal organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. According to Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, the new form of molecular architecture can be compared with the handbag of the fictional Harry Potter character Hermione Granger: small on the outside but very large on the inside.

Miniature robots that doctors could guide through a patient's body to kill cancer cells are closer to reality thanks to winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Three winners share the 727,000 prize for developing nanoscale machines--1000th the width of a human hair--that pave the way for applications in medicine, computing and engineering. The winners were Jean-Pierre Sauvage of the University of Strasbourg in France, Fraser Stoddart of Northwestern University in Illinois, USA, and Bernard Feringa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Each devised different groups of molecules with moving parts that they could control remotely, despite their tiny size. "It's early days, but once you can control movement, you have many possibilities," said Feringa, interviewed after receiving notification of the prize.