Crazy from laboratories: Fake molecules that look real, science goes too far!

Attention, attention! I tell you a scientific news from the University of Radboud that is giving people talk, some geniuses sent a master move in the laboratory. They developed synthetic molecules that behave just like real ones! Emil Sierda, the star of the experiments at Radboud, tells how they came up with this crazy idea: “A little while ago, we had a crazy idea: create a quantum simulator, do you follow me? We wanted to build fake molecules that were a carbon copy of the real ones. And boy, did we do it! The results were insane, the genius molecules we put together were practically clones of the original ones.”

But that’s not all, it turns out these brainiacs figured out how to make changes to molecules without limits, Alex Khajetoorians, the head of Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) at Radboud, says: “The thing is, making molecules is already a challenge.” in itself, but the most complicated thing is to understand how they manage and react, you know what I mean? We wanted to simulate them so we could play with them and make changes to them that would be impossible with real molecules. Imagine the chemical carnival that would take place! “

And to demonstrate their power, these geniuses created a fake version of a very important molecule: benzene. Benzene is like the big man of all chemical products, it is the one that takes center stage in the manufacture of polystyrene, this material that you have surely seen in containers and things like that, but best of all, they made benzene in a false way , with elements that are not even organic! Furthermore, these molecules are huge, ten times larger than the real ones. Doesn’t it sound easier to understand now, huh?

The applications of this new wonder are endless, friends; Daniel Wegner, Radboud’s assistant teacher, tells us that they are still dreaming up all the possibilities: “We have a lot of ideas in our heads and we don’t know where to start, this is so exciting! This is going to help us in all the scientific fields, from the inventions of the future to the ones we didn’t even imagine, just think, we could understand chemical reactions in detail, as if we were watching a movie in slow motion, we could even make electronic devices with a single molecule, like shrinking the size of a transistor on a computer chip”.

But beware, my people, this is just the beginning of the journey. Although Emil Sierda gives us an exciting piece of information: “They say that in the distant future, these quantum simulators could become true quantum computers, but that is still in its early stages, friends. For now, we are going to continue understanding molecules like never before.”