[Borek]

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 was awarded jointly to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines".

More on the ideas behind: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2016/press.html

[jasongnome]

Very interesting research. I went to a conference at Durham University in England about 10 years ago and they were doing research then making molecules of specific shapes and imaging them.

They said that the work they were doing had no practical use at the time but they were hoping it would lead to machines like this.

[Yggdrasil]

Very interesting research. I went to a conference at Durham University in England about 10 years ago and they were doing research then making molecules of specific shapes and imaging them.

They said that the work they were doing had no practical use at the time but they were hoping it would lead to machines like this.

The prize is for work done well over 10 years ago.  The key experiments they cite are from 1983, 1991, and 1999.

DNA origami may enable nanotechnologists to make artificial molecular motors more easily.  See for example: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/2/e1501209

[Babcock_Hall]

The bacterial flagellar motor can spin in either direction, even though the current only flows in one direction.  This comment is strictly a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the Nobel committee's choice.