Chemical computers are becoming ever more of a reality - this is being demonstrated by scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. It turns out that after an appropriate teaching procedure even a relatively simple chemical system can perform non-trivial operations. In their most recent computer simulations researchers have shown that correctly programmed chemical matrices of oscillati...

Just like carbon atoms in sheets of graphene, nanoparticles can form stable layers with minimal thicknesses of the diameter of a single nanoparticle. A novel method of linking nanoparticles into such extremally thin films has been developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The tailoring successes to date of researchers synthesising layers of nanoparticles would not be adequate to stage even ...

Intuition suggests that a sample of material compressed uniformly from all sides should reduce its dimensions. Only a few materials subjected to hydrostatic compression exhibit the opposite behaviour, expanding slightly in one or two directions. Researchers at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences have developed a material with exceptionally high negative compressibility via a previously unknown mechanism.

A single drop with the volume of a millionth of a litre is really not very large and certainly does not look like something you can do much with. However, a simple device, constructed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, can split the microdroplet into a collection of equally-sized nanodroplets. Now, the chemicals or genetic material contained in a single microdroplet can be the starting point of eve...