An algorithm helps design peptides that will self-assemble on a given surface to produce a supramolecular structure of desired geometry.

Growing heart cells in a scaffold containing gold nanowires produces a tissue patch that is thicker and in which the cells beat synchronously as they do in healthy heart tissue.

Engineered bacteria that incorporate unnatural amino acids at multiple positions provide a new tool that may facilitate designing proteins to fold more predictably into molecular machinery components.

Automated diffraction tomography provides rapid determination of structure of zeolite to atomic precision.

Over at Wired.com: A New York Hall of Science staffer has made a rap video to introduce kids (and probably quite a few adults) to the basics of nanotech.  The refrain will help them remember the definition of a nanometer, and the Foresight message comes through: “But with great power comes great responsibility!”  The subtitles [...]

The Foldit approach to protein structure determination and protein design has proved its worth with the solution by citizen scientists in three weeks of an important protein structure that had stumped scientists working on the problem for more than a decade.

Excellent lineup of speakers again this year for the Open Science Summit, Oct. 22-23, and you can get in for only $100 if you register by this Friday:  http://opensciencesummit.com Hope to see you there!  —Christine Peterson, President, Foresight Institute

Ultrasound was used to pull on polymer chains attached to opposite sides of a chemically almost inert molecular ring, splitting it into its two components.

H+ Magazine has a report by Ben Goertzel on the Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. … This was the largest AGI conference yet, with more than 200 people attending, and it had a markedly different tone from the prior conferences in the series. A number of participants noted that there was less of an [...]

Electrons from a scanning tunneling microscope cause a molecule of butyl methyl sulfide to rotate about a single sulfur atom attached to a copper surface.