Structural properties as a research area focuses on the characterization, quantification, and modeling of how the arrangement and connectivity of components within a system determine its behavior and performance. This includes investigating geometric, topological, and symmetry-related attributes in materials, molecules, biological assemblies, or engineered structures, and relating these features to mechanical, electronic, optical, or functional responses. Research typically integrates experimental probing (e.g., diffraction, microscopy, spectroscopy) with theoretical and computational methods (e.g., continuum mechanics, graph theory, atomistic simulations) to establish structure–property relationships that enable prediction, optimization, and rational design of systems with targeted structural performance.
The AI-based program AlphaFold predicts a protein's 3D structure with remarkable accuracy. However, it tends to reduce heterogeneous structures to a single dominant conformation, or shape, and overlooks experimental conditions ...
Biotechnology
Jun 29, 2026
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In an international experiment, researchers observed Jahn–Teller polarons—quasiparticles that could play an important role in future ultrafast spintronic devices. These polarons emerged within the crystal lattice of cobalt ...
Condensed Matter
Jun 25, 2026
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A study published in Nature Physics provides new molecular-level evidence from simulations that liquid water is not a single uniform substance, but a constantly shifting mixture of two distinct microscopic structures.
When viruses travel through the air in tiny droplets, they can quickly start to dry out. Yet many viruses remain infectious after rehydration—something that is still not fully understood. Now, an international team of researchers ...
Biotechnology
Jun 24, 2026
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How the proteins in our bodies bind together to form protein complexes plays a critical role in numerous cell functions—staving off diseases, for instance, or transporting ions across cell membranes. A better understanding ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jun 24, 2026
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Over the past decade, Professor L. Mahadevan's Soft Math Lab at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has helped establish how the ancient Japanese paper arts of folding or cutting ...
General Physics
Jun 24, 2026
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Magnetic quantum oscillations have been unexpectedly observed in insulators, where freely moving charge carriers are not expected to exist. A joint study by researchers from Tokyo University of Science, The University of ...
Condensed Matter
Jun 23, 2026
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New instruments on the horizon promise the most precise tools yet to study and experiment on the smallest and most complex materials ever manufactured. In a paper published in the journal Nature Materials, University of Cincinnati ...
Nanomaterials
Jun 23, 2026
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Researchers at the University of Twente and Utrecht University have packed rigid, rod-shaped particles into soft lipid containers the size of a living cell and watched the container and its contents reshape each other. The ...
Soft Matter
Jun 22, 2026
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How large, fully folded proteins can pass through cell membranes without destroying them has long been one of the open questions in cell biology. Using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), Leonid Sazanov and Ziyu Zhao at the ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 22, 2026
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