The Mysterious Process of Awarding Science Nobels

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded yesterday to three scientists for developing a microscope that zooms in to smaller details than any microscope has ever been able to discern.

Journalists and scientists love to speculate about who will win, but they’re almost always wrong.

Thomson-Reuters correctly predicted that Shuji Nakamura would win the Physics prize this year, but had to perform a massive data-comb in order to do so.

NPR science correspondent Joe Palca joins Here & Now's Robin Young to discuss why it’s so difficult to predict the Nobel Prize in the sciences.