Many of the biological materials that researchers are most interested in studying, including those associated with major diseases, don’t lend themselves to the conventional methods that researchers typically use to probe a material’s structure and chemistry. One technique, called magic-angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance, or MAS-NMR, has proven highly successful as a way of determining the properties of complex molecules such as some proteins. But the resolution achievable with such systems depends on the spinning frequency of tiny rotors, and these systems have bumped up against limits imposed by the…
