For more than a century, scientists have treated chemistry as the master key to building new materials, tuning bonds and charges to coax atoms into useful patterns. A new wave of research is quietly ...

In chemistry, molecules with a "flat" geometry are often stable enough to support a wide range of reactions. But in the quantum world, that's not technically true.

In chemical reactions, molecules transform from reactants into reaction products through a critical geometry called a transition state that lasts less than one millionth of one millionth of a second.