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Underwater glue inspired by shellfish might help repair ships

Taking inspiration from nature, scientists at MIT have engineered a new sort of glue that acts like a powerful adhesive even in underwater conditions and can cling on to virtually any surface, be it metal or organic. The glue might prove to be useful to repair ships or seal wounds and surgical incisions. The strongest […]

MIT readies neutron microscope - new kind of imaging

A joint project between scientists at NASA and MIT is focusing on creating a new kind of microscope that uses neutrons instead of beams of light or electrons to create high-resolution images. Since the subatomic particles are electrically neutral, such a microscope would allow scientists to peer through places otherwise inaccessible today, like inside metals […]

Underwater Atomic Force Microscopy opens new frontiers for biologists

To fully understand the processes and mechanisms that work at a cellular level, biologists should study them in their native, watery environments. But how would you go on doing this? Well, leave it to engineers to solve everyone’s problems – they have now deviced a kind of atomic force microscopy that works on samples sitting […]

Intelligent molecules that fold and change shape demonstrated for the first time

In an amazing breakthrough, scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) have for the first time demonstrated an extremely appealing, yet still obscure concept – intelligent molecules. By definition intelligence is the ability to learn and understand or deal with new situation and the latter is exactly what the researchers’ polymer molecules can do, namely  react to external stimuli and reversibly […]

Incredible molecular imaging shows individual chemical bonds for first time

Atomic level imaging has come a long way in the past decade, and after scientists first managed to image molecular structure and even electron clouds, now a group of researchers at IBM Research Center Zurich have visually depicted how chemical bonds differentiate in individual molecules using a technique called non-contact atomic force microscopy (AFM). In the image below […]

Scientists synthesize and image 5-ring graphite molecule in tribute to Olympics symbol

The 2012 London summer Olympic games are just a few weeks away, and as millions are set to flock to the city and other hundreds of millions will rejoice on the web and TV at the world’s grandest spectacle of athletic performance, it’s pretty clear this is one of the most anticipated events of the year. Every […]

IBM images electric charge distribution in a SINGLE molecule - world's first!

Part of a the recent slew of revolutionary technological and scientific novelties coming off IBM‘s research and development lab, the company has just announced that it has successfully managed to  measure and image for the first time how charge is distributed within a single molecule. The achievement was made possible after a new technique, called Kelvin probe force microscopy […]