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When we think of ions, we usually think of single atoms that have lost or gained some electrons, but entire molecules can also become ions. In a new publication that was highlighted as an Editor's Suggestion in Physical Review Letters this week, physicists from the University of Amsterdam, QuSoft and Stony Brook University, show that cold molecular ions can be created using a new method, and that they are a very useful tool for detecting small amounts of other, regular molecules.

How a new neural network can predict and understand molecules in a more efficient way A research paper from Victor Garcia Satorras, Emiel Hoogeboom and Max Welling, from the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam, recently got accepted to the ICML congress, the leading conference on machine learning.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Universities of Konstanz and Amsterdam have uncovered a new state of matter, liquid glass, with previously unknown structural elements. The discovery leads to new insights into the nature of glass and its transitions. While glass is a truly ubiquitous material that we use on a daily basis, it also represents a major scientific conundrum.

Gels occur everywhere in our everyday life, but the precise way in which they form is not very well understood. Combining experimental observations and numerical models, physicists from the universities of Amsterdam and Cambridge and from Unilever have now shown that gel formation is closely related to another well-known physical process: percolation.