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Molecular streaming

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From Molecupedia, the encyclopedia of very small things
Molecular Reality Corporation's term for live data from molecular sensors
For pressure-driven flow of ions through channels a few atoms high, see Molecular streaming (nanofluidics).
Molecular streaming
White flow cell glowing orange and white from below, red and blue wing nuts and tubing, next to the amplifier box (964x528).
A flow cell marked "08", lit from below on the company's streaming bench
Used byMolecular Reality Corporation, Molecular Streaming Corps
ExplainedMarch 28, 2026
SensesMolecules streaming through a sensor; data streamed to people
Longer formUniversal Molecular Streaming
Earlier titleNature, 2019

Molecular streaming is the term Molecular Reality Corporation and its volunteer community, the Molecular Streaming Corps, use for detecting molecules with small sensors and sending the measurements live over the internet. The company's founder, Kent Kemmish, gave two reasons for the name in March 2026: "you can think of analytes passing through detectors as 'streaming' through them" and "the data itself will be 'streamed' to you and whomever you choose to share it with." The same message begins its account of the term with the sentence "Nobody outside the corps calls it molecular streaming yet."[1]

The phrase had been used before, with a different meaning. A paper published in Nature in 2019 is titled "Molecular streaming and its voltage control in ångström-scale channels"; there it describes salt water driven by pressure through slits a few atoms high.[2] Since May 2026 the company has streamed the current from a commercial amplifier on its bench to a public web page, which it calls the live molecular stream.

Etymology

The company's coinage

Kemmish's message of March 28, 2026, "Marching orders", was the first post in the Corps' section of the company's member software. It explains the term and names one precedent from the scientific literature: "In the literature I've only seen one related use of 'streaming', in a paper (Keerthi et al. 2021) where Andre Geim's group ... used 'ionic streaming' to refer to an extremely cool experimental setup where they passed ions through a precisely engineered angstrom-scale-tall 2-dimensional void between two graphene planes." He added: "I think that set a reasonable precedent for how we're using 'streaming' here."[1]

Earlier uses

The 2019 Nature paper comes from the collaboration the message describes. Its authors are from the University of Manchester, where Geim works, and from the École normale supérieure in Paris. A. Keerthi is the second author and Geim is among the others.[2] The channels were slits of graphite and hexagonal boron nitride, and the paper reported that applying a fraction of a volt raised the pressure-driven ion flow, which it calls the streaming mobility, by up to twenty times.[2][3]

The word streaming has belonged to that kind of flow for longer. When pressure pushes an electrolyte through a narrow channel or a porous plug, the liquid carries along the charge of the thin layer that lines the walls. The result is a streaming current, or, if no current can flow, a streaming potential.[4] The streaming potential was first observed by the German physicist Georg Quincke in 1859, who forced water through a clay plate.

In Molecular Reality's usage the word means something else twice over: particles moving through a sensor one at a time, and data sent continuously over a network, in the sense of streaming video.

Use by the company

By 2024 the company's community was called the Molecular Streaming Services Corps, later shortened to the Molecular Streaming Corps. The paper sign in the mug of the company's mascot, Keltar, still reads "M.S.S.C."[5][6] The company's hardware is "the MR series of molecular streaming devices",[7] and an earlier handheld was called the MR1 Molecular Streaming Device. In February 2026 the headline of its home page read "MOLECULAR STREAMING FOR LIFE".[6] Its plans treat the streams of many members as one instrument: the help file of its member software says that by distributing thousands of devices, the Corps "acts as a 'Virtual Ultra-Device,' capable of generating exponential amounts of data across diverse environments".[8] See Ultra-Device. In 2024 the company's chatbot had a shorter explanation of the name: "Unlike other 'corps', M.S.S.C. does not require you to leave home and go to some faraway place. The 'faraway place' is all around you!"[6]

Kemmish uses a longer phrase, Universal Molecular Streaming, for the company's long-range goal, which he had earlier called utility-scale molecular sensing: "I came up with Universal Molecular Streaming because it's fewer syllables."[9] The welcome message of the member software defines it as "the idea that anyone anywhere should be able to 'see' (as in count, identify, characterize, measure, and discover) any kind of molecule from around them and inside them, as easily as they now use electricity or the internet."[10]

When "Marching orders" was posted, the current trace at the top of the member software was not yet real. The message says so: "What you see there today is a fake current trace with fake spikes, just to give you an idea of what molecular streaming data looks like." It planned to replace the trace with live data from "a miniature USB-powered four-channel amplifier", and to accept streams from "any kind of molecular sensing device people want to stream data from".[1] It also set a target: "Aspirationally, by the end of 2026, at least a few hundred people will be streaming data".[1] In August 2026 the company's guide described its equipment as "one instrument in one lab".[5]

The live stream

Dark-field microscope view of a laser-drilled pore: a dark oval opening with a single red laser dot and floating specks (1334x672).
The pore the company's provisions list gives for its live stream, a hole about 200 micrometers across drilled by laser

On the evening of May 7, 2026, an EDR4 amplifier and a flow cell in Arizona were connected for the company's first end-to-end streaming test.[11] The EDR4 is a four-channel patch-clamp amplifier powered by USB, made by Elements srl; the company's guide calls it "the laboratory's ear" and gives its sampling rate as 200 kHz.[5] The pore on the stream is a 200-micron laser-drilled pore, about the size of the apertures that Coulter counters use to count blood cells, so the dips worth looking for come from cells and particles several micrometers across.[12]

From June 13, 2026, the stream was the company's home page, and from June 29 it was the default view of a new front page.[12] Two camera panes over the trace, labeled Microscope and Fluidics, show the flow cell, and the status line carries the amplifier's serial number, e4-00044. Video and current run on very different clocks, as the company's essay on its data plans notes: "Cameras run at 30 fps", one frame every 33,000 microseconds, while "The amplifier samples every 5 µs", a factor of 6,600.[13] Signed-in viewers can type into an overlay called LabChat, whose messages are replayed against the recording. A detector marks dips deeper than 3.8 standard deviations by default, and the vertical scale is a logarithmic slider running from 10 femtoamperes to 600 nanoamperes.[12]

A relay program condenses the amplifier's output into packets sent about twenty times a second. Each carries a half-second preview of the trace, summary statistics such as the baseline, the noise and the rate of events, and four "game signals" used by the company's game Maxine's Quest. Commands travel the other way: a voltage setting, and a "zapper" pulse with a cooldown of three seconds.[6]

The archive of recorded streams held eighteen recordings in August 2026, "from a seven minute tap water test" upward.[5] The first are recordings of air, named from air-test-10 to air-test-99. "What-a-Day-for-a-Daystream", recorded on June 16, used tap water and the laser-drilled pore, and a recording of June 28 is titled "Crazy pet time".[12] The company called July 2026 "July of Streaming", a campaign of "one hundred hours of molecular streaming across the month of July" with thirty-one samples.[5] The guide warns viewers: "a real lab stream is quiet most of the time, and we will not fake noise to entertain you."[5]

Data

The company's open design for its own instrument, the MR1 Nanopore Reader, specifies a stream format. The reader samples the current 100,000 times a second as 16-bit numbers and sends them in frames of 64 samples, each frame 146 bytes long and beginning with the four ASCII letters "SENT".[14] At 1,562.5 frames a second this comes to about 1.8 megabits per second, within the 12 megabits per second of a full-speed USB link. The raw samples alone come to 720 megabytes an hour, or about 6.3 terabytes for one channel recording for a year. On the company's current bench, viewers receive only the condensed packets; the archive keeps raw samples, voltages, annotations and camera stills in bundles of one minute each.[6]

The second meaning of the term carries a claim about ownership. In "Marching orders" the data is streamed "to you and whomever you choose to share it with",[1] and company copy of 2026 calls for "all the data fundamentally under an individual household's control".[15] A 2026 company white paper describes a continuous molecular stream from a home as "among the most sensitive data imaginable".[6]

Software is to learn from the streams. Company copy of 2026 announces the aim "to create a public domain nanopore world model", which "will learn to understand signal-producing events in nanopore current data at the level of the sensing zone and instrument parameters".[15] Both plans are described in The Nanopore World Model and, for steering instruments, RLMF.

Reception

The newsletter Debye Length set Kemmish's sentence "Nobody outside the corps calls it molecular streaming yet" beside the title of the 2019 Nature paper in October 2026, and observed that the two uses of the phrase mean different things.[3] Signal & Noise described the live stream in July 2026 under the headline "Nineteen Billion Ions a Second, Live on the Internet".[12]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Marching orders". EQBio-OS.
  2. ^ a b c Mouterde, T.; Keerthi, A. (2019). "Molecular streaming and its voltage control in ångström-scale channels". Nature 567 (7746): 87-90. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-0961-5.
  3. ^ a b Ferris Calloway (October 12, 2026). "Notes on demonpore, Two Pore Guys and Roswell". Debye Length.
  4. ^ Delgado, A. V. (2007). "Measurement and interpretation of electrokinetic phenomena". Journal of Colloid and Interface Science 309 (2): 194-224. doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2006.12.075.
  5. ^ a b c d e f "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
  6. ^ a b c d e f "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
  7. ^ "Join Kemmishtree in our Club to Cure All Diseases". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
  8. ^ "EQBio-OS help: Data, AI & Community Ecosystem". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
  9. ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Big Picture". EQBio-OS.
  10. ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "welcome". EQBio-OS.
  11. ^ Dot Kimberley (May 12, 2026). "Local Bench Streams Salt Water to the World". The Coulter Courier.
  12. ^ a b c d e Lenora Ashgrove (July 29, 2026). "Nineteen Billion Ions a Second, Live on the Internet". Signal & Noise.
  13. ^ "Keltar's Critique v2: The Nanopore World Model (Hardened)". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
  14. ^ "MR1 Nanopore Reader". GitHub. October 16, 2026.
  15. ^ a b "RLMF". molecularreality.com. Molecular Reality Corporation. June 29, 2026.
Retrieved from "https://molecularreality.com/wiki/Molecular_streaming"
Last edited 3 hours ago by DwellTimeDave