Two Japanese scientists and a Tokyo-born American share the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics for helping explain why the universe is asymmetrical and thus fit for life.

The Nobel committee lauded Yoichiro Nambu, now at the University of Chicago, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan for work that helped show why the universe is made up mostly of matter and not anti-matter via processes known as broken symmetries.