Chemistry

Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and often a little bit of bacteria.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three researchers who harnessed the quantum behaviors of semiconductor nanocrystals.

To buffer the brain against menaces in the blood, a dynamic, multi-tiered system of protection is built into the brain’s blood vessels.

After decades of frustration, researchers have determined how an airborne scent molecule links to a human smell receptor.

A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in space and brought to the young Earth.

The buckminsterfullerene revolution never came, but some researchers are eagerly exploring the properties of newfound carbon crystals known as fullertubes.

Efforts to build a better digital “nose” suggest that our perception of scents reflects both the structure of aromatic molecules and the metabolic processes that make them.

The chemists Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless were recognized for their development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.

Without a good definition of life, how do we look for it on alien planets? Steven Strogatz speaks with Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist, and Sheref Mansy, a chemist, to learn more.