Latest Molecule Stories
Rebekah Eliason for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online One of the hottest topics in chemical research right now is the study of graphene. This cutting edge compound, composed of a single layered sheet of hexagonal carbon atoms linked together, could be the next step in designing nanostructures for electronics and next-generation computers. Graphene nanostructures have the potential to form transistors, logic gates, and other parts for use in tiny electronic devices, but scientists...
Columbia University Nanoscale technology used to drive a 'big' C60 through a 'small' H2O may help drug delivery Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a technique to isolate a single water molecule inside a buckyball, or C60, and to drive motion of the so-called "big" nonpolar ball through the encapsulated "small" polar H2O molecule, a controlling transport mechanism in a nanochannel under an external electric field. They expect this method will lead to an array of new...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Every now and then, it’s fun to show off and remind the world just what you’re capable of. IBM has done that today by releasing what they’re calling the “World’s Smallest Movie,” a short film composed entirely with atoms. As if this weren’t enough, the movie is also accompanied by another series of movies wherein the IBM team explains how they were able to manipulate individual atoms to do their bidding and capture them...
Duke University Software builds "library" of millions of small, carbon-based molecules chemists might synthesize. Drug developers may have a new tool to search for more effective medications and new materials. It's a computer algorithm that can model and catalogue the entire set of lightweight, carbon-containing molecules that chemists could feasibly create in a lab. The small-molecule universe has more than 10^60 (that's 1 with 60 zeroes after it) chemical structures. Duke...
RUB researchers give floppy molecule a structure through solvent effects How you get the chameleon of the molecules to settle on a particular "look" has been discovered by RUB chemists led by Professor Dominik Marx. The molecule CH5+ is normally not to be described by a single rigid structure, but is dynamically flexible. By means of computer simulations, the team from the Centre for Theoretical Chemistry showed that CH5+ takes on a particular structure once you attach hydrogen molecules....
The Ohio State University Though scientists have long believed that complex organic molecules couldn’t survive fossilization, some 350-million-year-old remains of aquatic sea creatures uncovered in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa have challenged that assumption. The spindly animals with feathery arms—called crinoids, but better known today by the plant-like name “sea lily”—appear to have been buried alive in storms during the Carboniferous Period, when North America was covered with...
Berkeley Lab research at AAAS Meeting In the blink of an eye, more attoseconds have expired than the age of Earth measured in – minutes. A lot more. To be precise, an attosecond is one billionth of a billionth of a second. The attosecond timescale is where you must go to study the electron action that is the starting point of all of chemistry. Not surprisingly, chemists are most eager to explore it with X-rays, the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that can probe the core electrons...
Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres Until now, however, it was practically impossible to accurately predict which molecules performed well on the job. They basically had to be identified by trial-and-error. Now, an international team of scientists around Dr. Georg Heimel and Prof. Norbert Koch from the HZB and the Humboldt University Berlin has unraveled the mystery of what these molecules have in common. Their discovery enables more focused improvements to contact layers...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For all those who worried back in 2004 that the sky was falling because the original model of the molecular structure of water toppled out, have no fear, because things can go back to the way they used to be. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) researchers confirmed the original tetrahedral model, after an international research group challenged the model nine-years ago, claiming that water molecules form bonds only with two...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The majority of the scientific community has embraced the idea of different smells being based on the olfactory receptors’ ability to detect various shapes of odor molecules. However, a new study in the open access journal PLOS ONE has given credence to a less popular theory; that the sense of smell is based on the molecules’ different vibrations, not their shapes. The idea of a quantum, or vibration, basis for olfactory was...
