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 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.
A team of astronomers led by a U.S. graduate student has discovered a planet that shouldn't...
iPhones, staplers, aluminum foil. Humans are surrounded and defined by their technologies. We might even say:...
The discovery of DNA in a 400,000-year-old human thigh bone will open up a new frontier...
Comet Ison seems to have been destroyed in its encounter with the Sun.Telescopes saw the giant...
