No posts for a while - busy as you like - but this really caught my attention. Harry Anderson at Oxford has managed to take a conjugated linear molecule, bend it around a central ‘hub-and-spoke’ template (see picture), and then remove that core to leave just the molecular ring, only three nanometres across.

As Anderson told Chemistry World, ‘Physicists have long been fascinated by the persistent ring-currents and quantized magnetisation observed in small loops of wire. It will be interesting to discover whether similar effects can be observed in molecular nanorings.’ I love stuff like this …