Exceptional painting - exceptional lead binding

Micro and macro X-ray analysis detects lead formate in Rembrandt's Night Watch

31-Jan-2023 - Rembrandt van Rijn was one of the most important Dutch painters of the 17th century. Probably his most famous painting is The Night Watch from 1642, which can be admired today in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. An international team has now identified lead formate in several areas of the Night ...

Nano Dandelions

Bundles of cysteine-lead nanowires spread into highly oriented structures

05-Sep-2007 - Under an electron microscope they look like dandelions. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, Xiao-Fang Shen and Xiu-Ping Yan explain their nanoscopic bouquets: They consist of spread-out bundles of nanowires made of lead and the amino acid l-cysteine. The Chinese researchers have discovered a new, ...

Nano Wagon Wheels

Synthesize molecule shaped like a wagon wheel

11-Jul-2007 - It looks like a tiny wagon wheel: Scanning tunneling microscope images published in the journal "Angewandte Chemie" depict giant molecules with a diameter of 7 nm, whose "hub", "spokes", and "rim" are clearly recognizable. This unusual, highly symmetric structure was made by a team led by Sigurd ...

Molecular Rendezvous Caught on Camera

Scientists watch on the atomic level how individual molecules recognize each other

04-May-2007 - The body is an almost perfect machine. For it to function properly, each individual component, that is each molecule, must reliably fulfill its specific function. Each molecule must thus "recognize" other molecules and work with them. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solid ...

Golden Nano-Dumbbells

Selective binding of gold nanoparticles to the ends of rod-shaped viruses

10-Apr-2007 - Nanotechnology appears to be an unstoppable trend and it requires defined nanoscale building blocks and patterns. "A typical difficulty with the synthesis of nanostructures is the modification of nanoscale objects at specific positions" says Alexander Bittner, whose work with a team from the Max ...

Rings Made of Little Rods

Water droplets as templates: gold nanorods self-assemble into rings

14-Mar-2007 - Rod-shaped nanocrystals normally arrange themselves parallel to each other. Researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas now report in the journal Angewandte Chemie completely unexpected behavior of nano-objects: the spontaneous self-assembly of polymer-coated metallic nanorods into ...

Gel on Command

Switching between liquid and gel: counterion-dependent conformational change in molecular aggregates

06-Sep-2005 - Twisted nanostructures are an important biological motif - just think of the DNA double helix or proteins with helical sections important to their function. Researchers are anxious to produce artificial helices, which could be useful in nanotechnological applications. Korean researchers have now ...

The Dye with the Pumpkin Cuff

Complexation with a large cuff-shaped molecule stabilizes rhodamine dye fluorescence

20-Jun-2005 - When irradiated, fluorescent dyes emit light at a different wavelength; for scientists and engineers, these dyes are extremely important aides, as active media in dye lasers, as markers for biomolecules in diagnostics, or for the detection of single molecules. A team from the International ...

Soft shell, hard core: nanotubes made of cyclic peptides with a synthetic polymer coating

12-May-2005 - Ever since the discovery of carbon nanotubes in the early 1990s, scientists and engineers have been fascinated by the possibilities for these little tubes made of organic materials in the fields of microelectronics, substance separation, and biomedicine. Freiburg researchers have now produced ...

Rock 'n' Roll Down the Tubes

Metal-filled fullerenes are "hopping" inside of carbon nanotubes

08-Mar-2004 - The technical world keeps getting smaller. Eventually the miniaturization of chips will reach dimensions at which individual atoms will have to be manipulated. As components of a quantum computer or nanoelectronics of the future, self-assembled molecular arrangements that look like nanoscopic ...