3D Crystal Grown On a DNA Lattice

An anonymous reader suggests an article over at ScienceDaily about the achievement of the holy grail of nanoscience: "[R]esearchers at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have for the first time used DNA to guide the creation of three-dimensional, ordered, crystalline structures of nanoparticles. The ability to engineer such 3-D structures is essential to producing functional materials that take advantage of the unique properties that may exist at the nanoscale — for example, enhanced magnetism, improved catalytic activity, or new optical properties."

Comments

It's a journalistic convention

[Quadraginta]

When you quote a piece, you're supposed to put anything you add that isn't in the original quote in square brackets. What you add is supposed to be harmless, of course, not changing the original meaning, but keeping it grammatically and typographically correct.

In this case, the full quote would be:

"In an achievement some see as the "holy grail" of nanoscience, researchers..."

The summary dropped the introductory phrase, which makes the quote:

"researchers..."

But if the quote is used where it is, the first letter should be capitalized to make it grammatically correct. Hence, the capital is added, but it's put in square brackets to put you on notice that this is not precisely a direct quote.

Another common use of the convention is when you quote something that contains a pronoun, and you need to put the proper nouns in to make sense of it:

"Joe Slashdot couldn't care less. He hated journalists anyway."

To quote only the second sentence, you'd write:

"[Joe] hated journalists anyway."

Because if you leave it as "he" your audience wouldn't know who the heck "he" is.