Troubleshooting unstable molecules in chemical space

Chemical evolution in space--a source of prebiotic molecules.

In Laboratory Astrophysics at Leiden University a laboratory analog for following the chemical evolution of interstellar dust in space shows that the dust contains the bulk of organic material in the universe. We follow the photoprocessing of low temperature (10 K) mixtures of ices subjected to vacuum ultraviolet radiation in simulation of interstellar conditions. The most important, but necess...

Unstable molecules form stable tissues.

C are major structural proteins in the extracellular matrix, making up about one-third of protein mass in higher animals. In addition to their sheer bulk, this protein family is of interest because of their diversity of structural and morphogenetic roles and the attribution of an increasing number of hereditary diseases to mutations in collagens (1–4). All collagens have a distinctive molecular...

Foodstuffs as Unstable Chemical Systems.

The subject matter of this symposium is too large to be encompassed in a group of five short papers, and the planning dilemma lay in the selection of a few illustrative topics from a great deal of material. The papers to be considered are therefore to be regarded as examples of topics of interest to those engaged in food research and not as an attempt to define the range of the subject. Derived...

Molecules in Space

Complete Erdős Space Is Unstable

It is proved that the countably infinite power of complete Erdős space Ec is not homeomorphic to Ec. The method by which this result is obtained consists of showing that Ec does not contain arbitrarily small closed subsets that are one-dimensional at every point. This observation also produces solutions to several problems that were posed by Aarts, Kawamura, Oversteegen, and Tymchatyn. In addit...