Consider a short piece of rope—could you guess which knots are more likely to form if you crumple and shake it? Synthetic chemists have long been working on a molecular version of this problem, and so ...

Scientists have developed a way of braiding three molecular strands enabling tighter and more complex knots to be made than has previously been possible. The paper, published in Nature Chemistry ...

Knots are everywhere—from tangled headphones to DNA strands packed inside viruses—but how an isolated filament can knot itself without collisions or external agitation has remained a longstanding ...

Many of the processes essential to life involve proteins -- long molecules which 'fold' into three-dimensional shapes allowing them to perform their biological role. Many of the processes essential to ...

Tangles of string typically become knotted, from macroscopic twine down to long-chain macromolecules such as DNA. Here, we demonstrate that knotting also occurs in quantum wavefunctions, where the ...

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? For decades chemists have tried to make smaller and smaller molecular knots in an ...

(Nanowerk News) Consider a short piece of rope: could you guess which knots are more likely to form if you crumple and shake it? Synthetic chemists have long been working on a molecular version of ...

Using computational predictive models, the scientists identified a shortlist, a kind of 'periodic table', of the most designable knot types, i.e. those knots that could easily self-assemble under ...