Seeing Atomic Bonds Before and After Reactions 47
Necroloth sends this quote from an article at Wired:
"For the first time, scientists have visually captured a molecule at single-atom resolution in the act of rearranging its bonds. Until now, scientists were only able to infer molecular structures. Using atomic force microscopy (abstract), the individual atomic bonds that connect the carbon molecule's 26 carbon and 14 hydrogen atoms are clearly visible and look startlingly similar to the stick diagrams in chemistry textbooks."
Amazing To Actually "See" it (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember so many years of visualizing the molecule structures in school and learning how and why the atoms arrange themselves in molecules. The diagrams drawn and the physical models helped but always the thought of (Camelot)"It's just a model." (/Camelot) was there. Seeing the images created of these molecules by something actually measuring them was pretty damn cool and shows us just how accurate those models are. The technology which allows us to obtain these images is always pretty amazing too. To obtain these images .. "Non-contact atomic force microscopy uses a very fine, sharp point to read the electrical forces produced by molecules; as the tip is moved near a molecule’s surface, it’s deflected by different charges, producing an image of how the atoms and bonds are aligned."
So, it's in a way, similar to old record players where the stylus drags across the surface of an album and through the physical interactions with the play surface, converts the grooves and ridges to sound.. The stylus used in the article to measure the layout of the atomic forces is one atom thick at the end and is deflected by the forces which allows the generation of an image (it never physically touches anything).. All very cool stuff.
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I'm just very impressed that people were able to infer the structures of these molecules indirectly without ever being to see them directly.
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I imagine the scientist comforting the molecules... "don't worry, you're just going to feel a tiny prick!"
J/K, I'm sure all the researches have big brass ones. Bravo!
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Very neat stuff, indeed. I recall chem classes in early '60s where we were introduced to trying to calculate bonding energies in single and double bonds, then on to forces in crystals. Along the way, many of us thought "gee, wouldn't in be neat if we could not only see the bonds but measure them as well?" To see this, and the work leading up to it over the years, has amazed me.
Given the number of times I played some of my LPs, would have been good to have had a no-contact stylus.
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Given the number of times I played some of my LPs, would have been good to have had a no-contact stylus.
That would be awesome! Maybe you could use a laser to read the music data off the spinning disk. I guess instead of grooves, you could encode the music with little 'dots' to represent...
oh, never mind...
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Gotcha, and the wry sarcasm, and got a nice laugh; I thank you. I wonder, tho, if there's a nifty way to read old LPs with no contact. I might have missed it. Do you know?
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You could get a ELP Laser Turntable [elpj.com] but it would probably be cheaper to get the original artists to reform and perform live in your home.
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Wow, that's one fine piece of equipment! Also twice my annual income. Thanks for finding it.
"cheaper to get the original artists to reform and perform live in your home."
Um, no, especially when you add in transpo, accomodations, consumables. For a lot of it, it wouldn't work anyway, too many of 'em are indisposed or dead.
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That's an interesting approach; neat idea.
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In the case of electromagnetic forces, that is exactly what we mean with "touches"!
In such a context, contact is usually consider the case where a repulsive force is dominating, preventing the probe from getting any closer without more force applied to it. You can still be closer to the sample, without being in this repulsive regime, and for example have an attractive van der Waals force. This isn't "touching" because if you let go of the probe, it will move closer, as opposed to the cas
not "visually captured" (Score:5, Informative)
Atomic Force Microscopy [wikipedia.org] does not visually capture anything. It measures atomic forces with a finer resolution that goes beyond the optical diffraction limit for wavelengths of light visible to the unaided eye.
The rendered images are derived from the force measurements and thus these really are "inferred images" or visual renderings of force measurements. These are definitely not "visual capture" images. These are visual renderings.
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Are you trying to say that you can't "see" braille?
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You don't have to SHOUT; I'm hard of hearing!
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Correct. I never indicated that they were taking pictures but were able to "generate an image" based upon the stylus' deflection from the forces in the atomic bonds (it's why I used the record player analogy). I recall first hearing about this when scientists used this method of visualizing atoms when they arranged some atoms to form the acronym IBM. See this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms) [wikipedia.org] and This for information on the Scanning Tunneling Microscope they used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki [wikipedia.org]
Absolutely cool, relatively meh (Score:5, Funny)
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I didn't think there'd be much of an atomic bomb left to see after a reaction.
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[AOL] Me Too! [/AOL]
On the other hand... "My name is Bonds... Atomic Bonds..."
Before and After -- not "during the act" (Score:3)
Bonding rules (Score:2)
No surprise really (Score:2)
...look startlingly similar to the stick diagrams in chemistry textbooks.
Yeah, well, applied physics has a history of looking very much as we imagined it would in almost every case where there have been questions. Begging the question; "Are we really looking at reality, or stuff we want to see?"
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Which begs the question, are you really truly a gigantic dick, or are you just a turd?
atomic bombs (Score:2)
Fascinating (Score:3)
Extend this technology to 3D and it will have some interesting uses for things like protein folding.
Re: Fascinating (Score:2)
just 2d? (Score:2)
I wonder if the same imaging is possible in 3d, that would be really awesome in research.
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They're all single Angstrom resolution.
Halos of Darkness (Score:1)
Reminds me of old-time television cameras, from the 1950s and early 1960s, with the bright objects surrounded by a halo of dark.
Huh? (Score:3)
We've been seeing things like and many orders of magnitude more complex that this using Crystallography for more than a hundred years. Google "electron density maps" and check out some of the pictures in 3D. Then head over to the Protein Data Bank to see atomic resolution molecular structures determined using crystallography for more than 80,000 protein, nucleic acids (DNA, RNA) and carbohydrates. Even the Ribosome structure has been determined all in 3D. What they have here is a force map which is even more indirect than the electron density and these molecules are "nano-dwarfed" by the sheer complexity and size of molecules whose structures are already available by crystallography.