Prof. Muhammad Bashouti outside the Swiss Institute for Dryland Environmental and Energy Research at Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University. Photo by Abigail K. LeichmanIf you isolate a single molecule of a conductive metal, can it conduct energy all by itself? That question nagged Muhammad Bashouti in high school and stumped his science teacher.
Actually, an Israeli researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science had found the answer (a resounding “yes”) several years before Bashouti was born in 1977. But it wasn’t yet public knowledge.
