Floating an idea

What happens when an extraordinary, scarcely believable, claim is made? You’d expect checking, then re-checking, refining experiments and re-testing. With the result confirmed, only then is it ready to be released to the scientific community. Something that must be, at times, a daunting experience.

That’s the situation a team from South Korea finds itself in. We’ve been tracking this story since 2020, when the team first released hard-to-believe results that some chemical reactions turn their reactants in nano-rockets – they diffuse faster than via Brownian motion alone. Indeed, the team members themselves didn’t believe in the effect when they first heard about it in fluorescently-labelled enzymes. But, given the potential importance of such an effect, they took a look and found to their surprise that they could observe the effect in certain, simpler chemical reactions.