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Mankind has long been fascinated by the discovery and invention of new technologies and gadgetry. Often times this fascination is borne out of necessity, but in many other cases, the sometimes lifelong pursuit is that of pure intellectual curiosity. The beginning of the 19th century revealed as much when Alessandro Volta reported (1) the first electrical battery—now referred to as a Voltaic cell—using stacks of copper and zinc plates separated by a sulfuric acid electrolyte. This discovery of a constant electrical energy source later led to Hans Christian Oersted’s observation of electromagnetic fields in 1820 (2), Michael Faraday’s vertical conducting wire orbiting around a magnet in 1821 (3), and eventually Joseph Henry’s report (4), in 1831, of a small rocker actuated by reciprocating magnetic attraction and repulsion, the latter of which is considered by many to be the first electric motor. At that time, it was not clear what application Henry’s invention might fulfill, and even he admits in his manuscript to the editor that, “…the article, in its present state, can only be considered a philosophical toy…” (4). Little did Henry know at the time that his discovery would later lead to the development of more advanced electrical motors that are capable of doing work at then unfathomable scales, and ultimately would result many years later in the development of complex machinery in the form of assembly lines, elevators, and modern-day all-electric motor vehicles, to name only a few. The 2016 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry (Nobelprize.org) (Fig. 1)—namely, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard L. Feringa—may be likened to that of Volta, Oersted, Faraday, and Henry in terms of how they initiated completely new areas of research, for which they have been honored with this year’s Nobel Prize, specifically for their seminal contributions to “the design and … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: jcbarnes{at}wustl.edu or chadnano{at}northwestern.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Molecular recognition, based on noncovalent bonding interactions, plays a central role in directing supramolecular phenomena in both chemical and biological environments. The identification and investigation of weakly associated recognition motifs, however, remains a major challenge, especially when the motifs are interlinked with and obscured by other robust binding modes in complicated systems. For example, although the host-guest recognition between the radical cations of both cyclobis(paraquat

Polar and polarizable π-conjugated organic molecules containing push-pull chromophores have been investigated extensively in the past. Identifying unique backbones and building blocks for fluorescent dyes is a timely exercise. Here, we report the synthesis and characterization of a series of fluorescent dyes containing quadrupolar A-D-A constitutions (where A = acceptor and D = donor), which exhibit fluorescence emission at a variety of different wavelengths. We have investigated the effects of different electron-withdrawing groups, located at both termini of a

Industrial-scale thermal separation processes have contributed greatly to the rise in carbon dioxide emissions. Porous materials, such as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), can potentially reduce these emissions by achieving nonthermal chemical separations through the physical adsorption of targeted species with high selectivity. Here, we report the synthesis of the channel-based MOFs