The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the winner this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry, after awarding the prizes for Medicine and Physics earlier this week.

On Tuesday, the Nobel committee announced that the work of three UK-born scientists working in the US on the properties of strange forms of matter had "opened the door on an unknown world".  David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and Michael Kosterlitz found that atoms behave in unexpected ways when subject to extreme conditions, such as cold or being flat.  It's hoped that this research will lead to improving materials for electronics and super-computing.

"The work was a long time ago but it's only now that a lot of tremendous new discoveries are based on this original work, and have extended it," said Professor Haldane.

On Monday, the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology went to researcher Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for discoveries about the secrets of how cells can remain healthy by recycling waste in a "self eating" process known as autophagy.  It's part of the body's natural defenses that allow it to cope with starvation, fight off invading bacteria and viruses, and clears away old junk to make way for new cells.  Dr. Ohsumi said the human body "is always repeating the auto-decomposition process, or cannibalism, and there is a fine balance between formation and decomposition.  That's what life is about."