Thanks GeronL.
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Posted on 09/14/2012 7:55:26 PM PDT by neverdem
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 same team took the first-ever single-molecule image in 2009 and more recently published images of a molecule shaped like the Olympic rings.
The new work opens up the prospect of studying imperfections in the "wonder material" graphene or plotting where electrons go during chemical reactions.
The images are published in Science.
The team, which included French and Spanish collaborators, used a variant of a technique called atomic force microscopy, or AFM.
AFM uses a tiny metal tip passed over a surface, whose even tinier deflections are measured as the tip is scanned to and fro over a sample.
The IBM team's innovation to create the first single molecule picture, of a molecule called pentacene, was to use the tip to pick up a single, small molecule made up of a carbon and an oxygen atom.
This carbon monoxide molecule effectively acts as a record needle, probing with unprecedented accuracy the very surfaces of atoms.
It is difficult to overstate what precision measurements these are.
The experiments must be isolated from any kind of vibration coming from within the laboratory or even its surroundings.
They are carried out at a scale so small that room temperature induces wigglings of the AFM's constituent molecules that would blur the images, so the apparatus is kept at a cool -268C.
While some improvements have been made since that first image of pentacene, lead author of the Science study, Leo Gross, told BBC News that the new work was mostly down to a choice of subject.
The new study examined fullerenes - such as the famous football-shaped "buckyball" - and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, which have linked rings of carbon atoms...
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
I hope this technology leads to synthetic fuel to run our transportation system.
God spoke the oscillating strings into existence, if they be the mechanics of they universe. He is not the string(s).
IMHO.
Wikipedia is OK if it isn't political, IMHO.
Then they are his instrument for the song of existence.
I was thinking the same thing. What they were doing is coming up with an appropriate way to model molecules. To finally go down and see that level and think, yeah, we thought it would look pretty much like that, is astounding.
I can subscribe to that- the similarity between a leaf and a snakes pattern and insects tells me they all had the same Designer.
Beautiful! Thank you for posting this!
The name’s Bond...Atomic Bond.
Soon, perhaps, these types of tests will lead to actually nano-engineering materials on a molecule-by-molecule basis.
Room temperature superconductors, computers that will make todays machines look like etch-a-sketches, materials that are thousands, perhaps even millions of times stronger and lighter than anything we know now, insulation, the mind boggles at the possibilities...
We really do create Him in our image. My own take is that the universe is God’s mind.
The photo looks just like the schematic.
The photo reminds me of the Star of David.
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