Today’s Test Tubes
Picture that icon of science, the test tube. Now forget it-or at least envision it as a vastly smaller and differently shaped vessel that is leading to a much faster, more organized, and less expensive way to develop drugs, agrichemicals, and advanced materials.
The square-inch grid shown here contains 128 troughs-new-wave test tubes-filled with varying combinations of metallic oxides that scientists examined for their ability to form high-temperature superconductors. A research team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led by physicist Xiao-Dong Xiang and chemist Peter Schultz, used a gun-like mechanism to deposit the chemicals. After applying heat to mix and stabilize them, the scientists lowered a plate with 128 probes to test which compounds showed negligible electrical resistance at certain temperatures-an indication of potential superconductivity.
In a process known as combinatorial chemistry, scientists are using such grids to assemble and evaluate large numbers of permutations of compounds at one time. To continue their research, for example, Xiang and his colleagues created one-inch grids with 1,024 troughs earlier this year.
This photograph, which shows molecular combinations diffracting light like paints in a miniature watercolor palette, was taken by Felice Frankel, artist-in-residence at MIT’s Edgerton Center. Her forthcoming book On the Surface of Things (Chronicle Books, 1997) will include a similar image, among many other photographs, and text by George Whitesides, a Harvard University professor of chemistry.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.