Molecular jigsaw: pattern diversity encoded by elementary geometrical features.

Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) images of self-organized monolayers of Frechet dendrons display a variety of two-dimensional ordering motifs, which are influenced by engineering the molecular interactions. An interaction-site model condenses the essential molecular properties determined by molecular mechanics modeling, which in a Monte Carlo approach successfully predicts the various ordering motifs. This confirms that geometry as well as a few salient weak interaction sites encode these structural motifs.

Comparative ingestive mastication in domestic horses and cattle: a pilot investigation.

It is often assumed that horses chew food more intensively during ingestion than cattle, which - as ruminants - complete part of the mastication during rumination. This has been proposed as a reason for more robust mandibles, larger masseter insertion areas and larger masseter muscles in horses as compared to cattle and other grazing ruminants. In this study, we evaluate results of comparative feeding trials with three horses (338-629 kg) and three cows (404-786 kg), on four different roughages. Ingestion time (s/g dry matter) and chewing intensity (chews/g dry matter) differed among animals within a species, indicating an influence of body mass, and differed significantly between different forages. However, although numerical differences clearly suggest that horses have longer ingestion times and higher chewing intensities on high-fibre roughage than do cattle, this could not be proven in this dataset, most likely because of the small number of individuals sampled. Further studies are required to corroborate the suspected ingestive behaviour difference between equids and ruminants.

A polymeric sodium complex of 3,6-bis(2-pyridyl)-1,2,4,5-tetrazine.

The ligand 3,6-bis(2-pyridyl)-1,2,4,5-tetrazine forms a 1:1 complex with Na[BPh4], which has been structurally characterised as a one-dimensional polymeric system with an unusual coordination geometry about the sodium.

Metallostars: high-nuclearity linearly developed nanostructures containing multiple cluster motifs.

Metallostars are complexes in which a single branching site bears a number of metallated arms. Although they are related to metallodendrimers, they have the advantage of being capable of extending in an unlimited sense; in contrast to metallodendrimers, steric interactions decrease with increasing generation number. In this paper a series of polyalkyne stars with four and six arms, based upon a single tetrahedral carbon core and a benzene core, respectively, are reported and their reactions with [Co2(CO)8] to give metallostars that contain multiple [C2Co2(CO)6] motifs are described.