(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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...