Molecules move faster on a rough terrain

Roughness, the presence of irregularities on a surface, is commonly associated with slower motion and stickiness. This is true at different length scales: at human size (1 meter), it takes longer to walk along a path that ...

Liquid flow is influenced by a quantum effect in water

Researchers at EPFL have discovered that the viscosity of solutions of electrically charged polymers dissolved in water is influenced by a quantum effect. This tiny quantum effect influences the way water molecules interact ...

New polymer releases molecular cargo in response to force

Caltech scientists have developed a new kind of polymer that can carry a chemical payload as part of its molecular structure and release it in response to mechanical stress. The chemical system they have developed could one ...

Synthesis of helical ladder polymers

Researchers at Kanazawa University synthesized helical ladder polymers with a well-defined cyclic repeating unit and one-handed helical geometry, as they reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Polymer reversibly glows white when stretched

Researchers at the University of Fribourg's Adolphe Merkle Institute (AMI) and Hokkaido University in Japan have developed a method to tailor the properties of stress-indicating molecules that can be integrated into polymers ...

Fullerenes bridge conductive gap in organic photovoltaics

Organic photovoltaics have achieved remarkably high efficiencies, but finding optimum combinations of materials for high-performance organic solar cells, which are also economically competitive, still presents a challenge. ...

New moves for polymer chain dynamics

A technique that enables researchers to watch the motion of individual molecules within a polymer has been developed by KAUST: it challenges current thinking about polymer physics and could lead to new materials that can ...

Scientists develop novel method to monitor molecular aggregation

Chiral molecules are defined as molecules that are non-superimposable on their mirror images, much like that of left and right human hand bone structure. There are many examples of chiral molecules in nature, including proteins ...

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