Wednesday, 9th October Three Americans Win Nobel for Physics STOCKHOLM(Reuter) - Three U.S. scientists, David Lee, Douglas Osheroff and Robert Richardson, won the 1996 Nobel Physics Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Wednesday. The academy said the prize was awarded for "their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3," a breakthrough in low-temperature physics made in the early 1970s at New York's Cornell University. Lee, born in 1931 in Rye, New York State, and Richardson, born in 1937 in Washington DC, both work in Cornell University's Department of Physics. Osheroff, born in Aberdeen, Washington State in 1945, works at the Department of Physics at California's Stanford University. The academy said three men, with Lee and Richardson as senior researcher and Osheroff as a graduate student, discovered the helium isotope helium-3 can be made superfluid at a temperature only about two thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Superfludity is a scientific term for when a liquid is made so cold it loses all its usual molecular patterns. A research team seeking to confirm the existence of cosmic strings -- immense objects thought to have been responsible for the creation of the universe -- was able to test its theories using the three men's discovery.