Live molecular stream

The live molecular stream is a public web page on which Molecular Reality Corporation shows the electric current through a pore on its laboratory bench in the United States Southwest while it is being measured. Its source is an EDR4, a commercial four-channel patch-clamp amplifier that samples the current 200,000 times a second. Twenty times a second the page redraws a summary of that signal, beside two camera views of the bench and a chat window, LabChat; full-rate recordings are kept in a public Streams archive.^[1][2]

On the evening of May 7, 2026, the company connected its amplifier to the internet end to end for the first time, and the page went up the following month. It watches a hole about 200 micrometers wide made by laser drilling, which puts the instrument closer in scale to a Coulter counter than to a nanopore. Most of the first recordings in the archive are of air. According to the company's guide for visitors, the stream is quiet most of the time, and the company "will not fake noise to entertain you."^[1]

Before May 2026 the current trace on the company's members' pages was simulated. In a post headed "Marching orders", dated March 28, 2026, Kent Kemmish described it as "a fake current trace with fake spikes, just to give you an idea of what molecular streaming data looks like". A section of the same post opens "It's approximately April 2026" and promises real traces within the month from "a miniature USB-powered four-channel amplifier" made by the Italian firm Elements srl. It ends with a condition: "To get real streaming above in April, we'll need to succeed at other intermediate objectives, or timelines will slip."^[3]

The amplifier and a flow cell were set up in Arizona for the first end-to-end test on the evening of May 7.^[4][5] The page itself was rebuilt on June 3 in a commit titled "Streaming page: 12-requirement overhaul".^[6] On June 8 it gained a logarithmic slider for the current axis, and the two webcams were moved off a side panel and laid over the trace.^[7][8] The archive opened on June 10, and its oldest recording, a 97-second test named air-test-10, was made at 8:47 that evening, Arizona time.^[9][10] Three days later the stream became the front page of the company's websites.^[11]

In July the company ran a campaign it called July of Streaming, planned as "one hundred hours of molecular streaming across the month of July" with 31 samples. When the guide was published in August, the archive held "eighteen recorded streams".^[1]

Most of the page is a single plot of current against time. Its vertical axis is labeled "Current (nA)" and starts at a full scale of plus or minus 140 nanoamperes; a logarithmic slider changes the scale anywhere from ±10 femtoamperes to ±600 nanoamperes, nearly eight orders of magnitude. The horizontal axis runs from "10m ago" to "now", and the window can be shortened to ten seconds. A detector marks spikes that stand more than 3.8 standard deviations from the baseline. Two camera panes sit over the plot, "Microscope", which looks down at the pore, and "Fluidics", which watches the sample handling from the side. When the cameras are off they read "no live view", and when the amplifier is idle the plot reads "no live data".^[12][13]

The bar along the bottom carries a voltage readout in millivolts and a switch for the signal mode, whose options are "Live" and "Prerecorded (coming soon)". It also holds LabChat, a scrolling text line called the chyron, a button that opens a video call, and a button marked "Prov", for provisions, which lists the sample, the pore and the flow cell in use. A status line reads "EDR4 e4-00044", with a display rate of 20 Hz and a "tick" of 60 Hz.^[12] Between experiments the chyron says "Next stream coming soon, check back for live molecular data."^[13]

LabChat runs as a transparent strip across the bottom of the plot, with a microphone button that turns speech into text, and conversations can be replayed against the recording afterward. According to the guide, a human reads the chat "when a human is at the bench, which is often"; it adds that "The worst that happens is the instrument answers instead." Viewers can also telephone the lab during streams.^[1]

At the bench the amplifier is connected by USB to a laptop, where a small program written by the company reads it through the manufacturer's software library and passes the readings to the company's server. From there they go to every open copy of the page. When no amplifier is connected, a simulator takes its place.^[4]

The two ends of the chain run at very different speeds. On the bench, the company records the amplifier's first channel at the device's highest rate, 200 kHz, keeping every 16-bit sample of both the current and the applied voltage.^[2] In the guide's words, that is "a measurement every five microseconds".^[1] Two such channels come to 800,000 bytes a second before compression, or about 2.9 gigabytes an hour. The page receives what the company calls "a 20 Hz feature stream", so each update a viewer sees stands for about 10,000 samples.^[2] An update holds a half-second preview of up to 256 points, 32 bars giving the minimum, maximum and mean current of each slice with a flag for spikes, and a set of computed features: the baseline, the root-mean-square noise, the rate of events, the number of spikes in the last second, the span of the signal and the mean current.^[13]

Each update also carries four numbers between 0 and 1 for the company's video game Maxine's Quest, which turns the same current into enemies on a screen: "danger", "mana", "spawn_rate" and "stability". A quiet pore reads danger near 0 and mana near 1. An active pore reads danger about 0.75, mana about 0.15 and stability about 0.55.^[13][4] Commands can travel the other way, to set the voltage or to fire the zapper, a brief high-voltage pulse. An early plan for the system noted that for a time these commands changed only the screen: "control "applied" is a UI lie until we wire the forward path." Handlers for them were later added to the program that drives the amplifier.^[4]

A 3D-printed bracket holds the amplifier directly above the flow cell, a block of acetal and PTFE that the company's shelf of provisions lists as a "d2600 style cell". Inside the cell is the 200-micron laser-drilled pore, entered on the shelf as a "laser-drilled macropore".^[2] At that size the instrument behaves like a Coulter counter. A particle is visible only if it is several micrometers across, and a single molecule passes unseen.^[13][a]

The first sample on the shelf is Phoenix tap water, described as a "Baseline conductivity standard". The sample list behind the Prov button adds "Swimming Pool water", with the note "Presumably chlorinated and all that.", and an iced coffee entered on June 16, 2026, as "iced-coff-june16th".^[2] Ketchup was added on June 30 and salsa and mustard on July 1; their entries are described under condiment trials.^[5] The guide explains the choice of samples in one sentence: "The road to the small end runs through the big end, and the big end loves ketchup."^[1]

Every stream that is recorded goes to the archive, where each entry lists its sample, pore and flow cell, its start time in Arizona and its size, and opens in a viewer that can be scrubbed at full rate alongside camera stills and the chat. In October 2026 the archive listed eighteen recordings made between June 10 and June 29, 2026, all at 200 kHz. The earliest were tests of the empty cell, air-test-10 through air-test-99, followed by "tapwater-test-2", "airbubbletest-tap-wter" and a seven-minute "tapwatertest".^[b] One recording made on June 28 is titled "Crazy pet time". Another, "golden-test-stream", is a synthetic signal made to test the viewer, and its pore is given as a "synthetic fractal pore".^[10]

The company presents the stream as the first piece of what it calls molecular streaming, in which anyone could watch molecules being measured. The guide is direct about what a visitor will see: "You are looking at a working instrument, not a show." It explains that "the experiments take hours of preparation for minutes of signal" and that "nothing on the stream is a medical claim."^[1]

The Coulter Courier, a local paper in the Southwest, reported the first end-to-end test under the headline "Local Bench Streams Salt Water to the World".^[5] Signal & Noise worked through the physics of the stream in "Nineteen Billion Ions a Second, Live on the Internet", calculating what a hole 200 micrometers wide can and cannot detect.^[13]

• Camtest
• Coulter principle
• Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality
• Patch clamp