Scientists determine ‘Oumuamua isn’t made from molecular hydrogen ice after all

The debate over the origins and molecular structure of ‘Oumuamua continued today with an announcement in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that despite earlier promising claims, the interstellar object is not made of molecular hydrogen ice after all. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-08-scientists-oumuamua-isnt-molecular-hydrogen.html…

New quantum sensing technique allows high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a widely used tool for chemical analysis and molecular structure recognition. Because it typically relies on the weak magnetic fields produced by a small thermal nuclear spin polarization, NMR suffers from poor sensitivity compared to other analytical techniques. A conventional NMR apparatus typically uses large sample volumes of about a milliliter—large enough to contain around…

Extending electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy to nanoliter volume protein single crystals

Biochemists can use electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) on protein single crystals to determine the ultimate electronic structure of paramagnetic protein intermediates and investigate the relative magnetic tensor to a molecular structure. The method is, however, withheld by typical protein crystal dimensions (0.05 to 0.3 mm) that do not provide sufficient signal intensity during protein crystallography. In a new study on Science…