Group items tagged

For more than a century scientists have relied on the "ergodic theorem" to explain diffusive processes such as the movement of molecules in a liquid. However, they had not been able to confirm experimentally a central tenet of the theorem - that the average of repeated measurements of the random motion of an individual molecule is the same as the random motion of the entire ensemble of those molecules. Now, however, researchers in Germany have measured both parameters in the same system - making them the first to confirm experimentally that the ergodic theorem applies to diffusion.

A scalable quantum simulation of a molecule for the first time ever. It would finally enable practical simulation of "large" chemical systems. A research performed with Google and world class universities.

A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned.

The first "molecules" made from two photons have been created by physicists in the US. The breakthrough could allow both conventional and quantum computers to encode and process information using photons.

I wonder if the effect also works with much larger numbers of photons involved. By slowing down any initial (Rydberg) photons and letting the later photons catch up it might be possible to create a very sharp "shock" front of photons. This could produce in itself be an ultra-short pulse of light or maybe it could be used as the trigger for massive stimulated emission in a laser.

Single molecule detection: Might this be of interest for detecting proteins or other stuff on Mars etc.?

:) so Technology Review wrote the article now, based on an arXiv paper uploaded only now, but actually the paper was already published in Nature last year: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys1636

I will never sleep thinking that these things are everywhere....

As far as I'm concerned, that's next Nobel in chemistry :)

Ancient Earth might have had an extraterrestrial supply of vitamin B3 delivered by carbon-rich meteorites, according to a new analysis. The result supports a theory that the origin of life may have been assisted by a supply of key molecules created in space and brought to Earth by comet and meteor impacts.

While most humans are right-handed, our proteins are made up of lefty molecules. In the same way your left and right hands mirror one another, molecules can assemble in two reflected structures. Life prefers the left-handed version, which is puzzling since both mirrored types form equally in the laboratory.

One basic molecule allows to achieve a broad range of material stiffness.

Molecules that monitor voltage - of any use?

NASA has confirmed the presence of water on the moon's sunlit surface, a breakthrough that suggests the chemical compound that is vital to life on Earth could be distributed across more parts of the lunar surface than the ice that has previously been found in dark and cold areas.

Here is one of the associated papers that appeared in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1198-9

Scientists have developed artificial genetic molecules with different structural backbones (XNA, TNA) and/ or a different nucleic acid alphabet. (from April 2012)

Normally we associate levitation of objects to superconducting materials. Here a new technique is shown where levitation of a whole new range of materials is shown. "The large temperature gradient leads to a force that balances gravity and results in stable levitation," said Fung, the study's lead author. "We managed to quantify the thermophoretic force and found reasonable agreement with what is predicted by theory. This will allow us to explore the possibilities of levitating different types of objects." Paper at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4974489 New microgravity experiments possibility?

not really I fear .... "Typical sizes of the trapped particles are between 10 μm and 1 mm at a pressure between 1 and 10 Torr. The trapping stability is provided radially by the increasing temperature field and vertically by the transition from the free molecule to hydrodynamic behavior of thermophoresis as the particles ascend."

Might still be OK micro to mm sized experiments. The technique seems to be reliable and cheap enough to compete with other types of microgravity approaches - more research needed to define boundaries of course.