Molecular Mimicry: Plastic, Steel Line Up Like Kin OCTOBER 20,
2010 Tasty Science: One of the first models produced by a
research team to model the molecular structure was built out of
simple marshmallows and coffee stirrers. The method, researcher
Frank Bates says, is "very low tech as far as the visualization
goes." (Courtesy of Frank Bates) Frank Bates didn't start out
expecting to find a fundamental property of nature, but that's
what he may have done. Bates is a chemical engineer and
materials scientist at the University of Minnesota. He makes
block copolymers — a kind of plastic. Copolymer means they're
made from two different plastics, the end product having the
best properties of both. "We had synthesized these molecules and
wanted to know how they were organized down at the molecule
scale," says Bates. So he and his students went to the [DuPont-
Northwestern-Dow Collaborative Access Team beamline at Sector 5
of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source at
Argonne National Laboratory], whe