Morning everyone, here are this week’s research highlights:

Viscosity is a property that’s easy to think about on the bulk scale (pouring syrup compared to water, for example), but it’s less easy to get your head around it on a molecular scale. But using a molecular rotor, viscosity can be measured within cells…

Heard of the Eshelby twist? No, it’s not a 1950s dance craze, but a type of crystal defect, and it can be exploited to make some very pretty looking nanotrees…

And finally this week, a subject quite dear to my heart: solid-state synthesis. Having spent rather a long and frustating time during my PhD trying (and failing) to make a whole raft of compounds that calculations predicted should exist, I’m glad to see that other people have been successful in making a new polymorph of lithium bromide — exactly as predicted.

Enjoy.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)