Pentafoil knot
File sealed
The detectives are still writing this one up. The poster and the facts are below; the film and the interrogation room open soon.
Booking photographs
The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, ruled every 0.1 nm. Tied in a shoelace, the same knot is about ten million times wider.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- Pentafoil knot (51). Aliases: cinquefoil, Solomon’s seal.
- Crossings
- Five. Billed as the most complex knot outside DNA, until its makers tied eight.
- Height
- 2.4 nm across. Flat as a pressed flower.
- Weight
- 5.0 zeptograms, irons and all
- Build
- A 160-atom loop wound as a double helix on five irons.
- Habits
- Keeps one chloride ion at its heart, on ten hydrogen bonds.
- Weakness
- The first one comes untied if you take its irons away.
- Associates
- A protein designed to tie the same knot tied a trefoil instead.
- Last seen
- Letting anions through a fatty membrane, in a lab in Manchester.
of them in the purple speck of crystal that first showed the knot to X-rays, give or take.
You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Pentafoil knot, No. 102 of the exotic forty. They were made for noticeboards around Boston, Cambridge and the rest of the east coast.
Found one? Scan its QR code with your phone. If you're a signed-in player, the sighting goes on your record with +1 XP.
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