The periodic motion of flexible knots, and the connection to DNA

Can the topology of microobjects influence the way they move in a fluid? Experiments and simulations of Polish and Swiss researchers published in the Physical Review Letters show that the dynamics of elastic chains settling ...

Proof of water wires motivated by a biological water channel

Aquaporins are proteins that serve as water channels to regulate the flow of water across biological cell membranes. They also remove excess salt and impurities in the body, and it is this aspect that has led to much interest ...

Rapid screening machine can read and separate protein sequences

The structural properties of proteins that could eventually become important materials for manufacturing and medicine are revealed by a novel optical technique that works rapidly to sort through amino acid sequences even ...

Metamaterial: Mail armor inspires physicists

The Middle Ages certainly were far from being science-friendly: Whoever looked for new findings off the beaten track faced the threat of being burned at the stake. Hence, the contribution of this era to technical progress ...

Faster (cheaper) method for making big bioactive ring molecules

Ring molecules called cyclic depsipeptides play an important role in living organisms. Microbes make them as part of their chemical arsenal for attacking competitors and they have proven effective as antibiotics, anti-retrovirals ...

New inorganic aromatic ion

(Phys.org)—Aromatic molecules are a staple of organic chemistry. Aromatics, like benzene, have a unique pi-electron character that makes the ring structure exceptionally stable. While aromatics are typically reserved for ...

The construction of ordered nanostructures from benzene

A way to link benzene rings together in a highly ordered three-dimensional helical structure using a straightforward polymerization procedure has been discovered by researchers from RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science ...

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