According to the music magazine Q, a sure sign that you are over 30 years old is that you can no longer resist the allure of self-assembly furniture. But the novelty soon wears off - after frustrating evenings of dropped hammers and lost Allen keys, you soon yearn for furniture that really would assemble itself, leaving you to put your feet up in front of the TV. (Incidentally, why is it that when I tune in to cable TV, expecting exciting documentaries about sharks or dinosaurs, I always get half an hour of interminable waffle about self-assembly furniture?)
Reassurance is on its way. Chemists are devising ever more ingenious schemes to do what mindless viruses do with effortless ease, but birch-veneer-and-fibreboard bookcases don?t: that is, assemble themselves from macromolecular components into elegant polyhedral capsules. Such capsules could have a variety of useful applications, from the delivery of designer drugs, to the stabilization of otherwise highly reactive chemical species (although, it must be said, they?d be hopeless at housing your hi-fi.)
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