He always carries a black leather notebook so he can scribble down new molecular structures as they float into his mind.

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But Dr Bensimon's work has certainly made the task of disentangling tiny molecular structures less hair-raising than it used to be.

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Pyridylamines' molecular structures are vastly different from the catalysts that produce polypropylene.

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Once a gamer downloads an easy-to-install plug-in, he or she can start competing with other players, rotating complex three dimensional molecular structures with a click of the mouse.

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The materials Dr Brooks and his colleagues are planning to use in their experiment have more complex molecular structures than graphite, but they work in essentially the same way to create restrictions on where electrons can go.

ECONOMIST: Magnetism

These drugs, several of which are wending their way through human testing at Pfizer, Bayer, GlaxoSmithkline and other firms, are like Swiss Army knives, with molecular structures versatile enough to deactivate two, three or even four tumor-promoting proteins at once.

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The French postal service, for example, has used it to help its workers choose the best delivery routes, and pharmaceutical researchers are using it to determine molecular structures by combining their gut instincts with known results stored in a database.

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Huang is now turning his focus beyond gamers to a host of new customers that will need number-crunching power: oil companies doing deep-sea seismic analysis, Wall Street banks modeling portfolio risk and biologists visualizing molecular structures to find drug target sites.

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