A common mineral, α-alumina, found abundantly in Earth's crust, may have played a critical role in initiating the chemical reactions necessary for life to begin. This exciting discovery, detailed in a ...

Nearly four billion years ago, the earliest precursors of life on Earth emerged. First small, simple molecules, or monomers, banded together to form larger, more complex molecules, or polymers. Then ...

Researchers have devised a new technique -- using a sheet of carbon just one atom thick -- to visualize the structure of molecules. The technique, which was used to obtain the first direct images of ...

Crystal structure prediction (CSP) of organic molecules is a critical task, especially in pharmaceuticals and materials science. However, conventional methods are computationally intensive and ...

The alkanes are a homologous series with a structure based on a carbon chain - each carbon atom forms four covalent bonds The intermolecular forces vary between molecules, so different organic ...

Part of Chemistry (Single Science) Unit 1: Structures, trends, chemical reactions, quantitative chemistry and analysis In chemistry, ‘bonding’ describes how atoms are held together. ‘Structure’ ...

Materials scientists have developed a simple, generalizable technique to fabricate complex structures that assemble themselves. The researchers demonstrated that they can produce a large, complex ...

CORRECTION: On Oct. 21, 2014, this story was corrected to explain that when antibiotics kill bacterial cells, they exert a selection pressure on the microbes to develop resistance. During an infection ...