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A thin liquid crystal film on a surface of photoactive dye turns into a wonderland of exotic moving patterns if just illuminated by a simple lamp.  Spirals move and oscillate across the surface in the form of advancing wavefronts, encountering and annihilating each other.

A codon-scrambling algorithm enables the PCR-based synthesis of repetitive proteins by finding the least-repetitive synonymous gene sequence

The nanoscale structures of liquid crystals are rarely more exotic than that of the sponge phases of bent-core molecules, visualized here in an electron microscope image made by researchers at the Liquid Crystal Materials Research (MRSEC) Center of the University of Colorado, Boulder.   The image shows a plant stalk-like network that gives the appearance of a grayscale photo of dense tropical foliage, but here the stalk