Packings, types Discovery

Allpress and Sanders have used a simple uniform radial relaxation to assess the relative stabilities of variously shaped clusters commencing with units of the f.c.c. lattice. They showed, by use of one Morse and various Mie potentials, that the icosahedral structure had, with one minor exception, the lowest energy regardless of size. At about the same time, Burton attempted a complete optimization of a sequence of concentric f.c.c. clusters, and found that the smallest cubo-octahedron is unstable and distorts to what was later shown to be a regular icosahedron. This significant discovery, of the metastability of a close-packed unit in isolation, led Hoare and Pal to examine other structures of the cubo-octahedral type. They found that... 

The discovery of solid catalysts led to a breakthrough of the chemical process industry. Today most commercial gas-phase catalytic processes are carried out in fixed packed bed reactors. A fixed packed bed reactor consists of a compact, immobile stack of catalyst pellets within a generally vertical vessel. On macroscopic scales the catalyst bed behaves as a porous media. The fixed beds are thus employed as continuous tubular reactors in which the reactive species in the mobile fluid (gas) phase are reacting over the catalyst surface (interior or exterior) in the stationary packed bed. Compared to other reactor types or designs utilizing heterogeneous catalysts, the fixed packed bed reactors are preferred because of simpler technology and ease of operation. 

The aqueous solubility of a compound is another key property in drug discovery and poor solubility is often the cause of a series demise. Aqueous solubility is inversely related to lipophilicity. High-throughput methods are now available to measure solubility, " but approaches to estimate solubility from computational models are less suc-cessfnl. The models are not sufficiently accurate to predict poor solubility with great precision. Moreover, solubility is influenced by many factors such as ionic strength, type of buffer, crystal packing, etc., all properties which are difficult... 

The last step to liberating all the inherent potential of these early nucleoproteinic systems of RNA and protein was found in the dual conformational abilities of the small 2 -deoxy-D-ribose cycle to account for a conformationally amplifying switch between A- and B-type nucleic acid versions [7 a, 8 c, 33]. The discovery of the information store of DNA enabled the systems to separate the replication of a more densely packed DNA message from the informational and functional instruments needed in the hitherto existing nucleic-acid-protein interaction schemes and promoted by this... 

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