Alva Review-Courier -

Three scientists won a Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for advances in a field that has big hopes for very tiny machines — the smallest ever built.

Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Scottish-born Fraser Stoddart and Dutch scientist Bernard "Ben" Feringa were honored for making devices the size of molecules, so tiny that a lineup of 1,000 would stretch about the width of a human hair.

Someday, experts say, such devices might lead to benefits like better computer chips and batteries, and tiny shuttles that could be injected into patients to deliver drugs directly to infections and tumors. But th...