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{{Main page featured article
| title = Molecular Reality Corporation
| image = Photo-demonpore64.png
| image_caption = The demonpore 64 (2020 to 2021)
| text = '''[[Molecular Reality Corporation]]''' is an American company that builds instruments for counting and identifying particles and molecules one at a time, as they pass through a hole in a membrane. [[Kent Kemmish]] and [[Charles Gaillard]] founded it in 2018 as [[demonpore, inc.]], a name taken from [[Maxwell's demon]], the imaginary being who sorts molecules at a door; it took its present name in 2021, and its founder later explained the change: "you can't name a biotech startup after Maxwell's Demon in the age of Qanon." Its central idea is the [[juxtapore]], a pore formed where the holes in two sliding membranes overlap, so that the opening can be widened, narrowed or shut while the instrument runs. From a single bench in Arizona the company streams the electric current through a pore to anyone watching online. It runs its research as a role-playing game, [[Epic Quest Bio]], whose players earn [[Experience points (Epic Quest Bio)|experience points]] for quests, and its guide for visitors is narrated by [[Keltar]], a one-eyed felt puppet who calls himself "a puppet with a processor". In October 2026 it published the design of its own desktop reader, the [[MR1 Nanopore Reader]], under a status line that reads "Designed. Simulated. Built and measured: not yet."
}}
{{Main page did you know
| image = Keltar-forward.png
| image_caption = Keltar
| items =
* ... that the telephone line of [[Molecular Reality Corporation]] is answered, in synthesized speech, by a version of '''[[Keltar]]''' ''(pictured)'', a felt puppet who describes himself as "only mostly real"?
* ... that a player who answers every question wrongly still defeats '''[[Irrationalis, Dragon of Excessive Pessimism]]'''?
* ... that '''[[TAB-42]]''', the inspector in the browser game [[Silver Orange]], has "been doing this job for 34 years" and is instructed never to acknowledge "that anything about your job or this situation is unusual"?
* ... that in [[Maxine's Quest]], the scoreboard labeled "Kent" gains 100 points each time '''[[Maxine (character)|Maxine]]''' is hurt?
* ... that members of the '''[[Molecular Streaming Corps]]''' were offered 500 experience points for a tweet that "Doesn't have to go viral, just has to be a banger!", and 50,000 for one that "Doesn't have to be a banger, just has to go viral"?
* ... that a '''[[Player Scientist]]''' is defined as anyone who "buys an MR series device and enrolls in the game", and that in May 2026 the company was "not ready to ship" the devices?
* ... that the '''[[Timeline of Molecular Reality Corporation|timeline of Molecular Reality Corporation]]''' includes a planned game that was renamed because "we didn't ship in 2021"?
* ... that the best afternoon of data in the early '''[[History of Molecular Reality Corporation|history of Molecular Reality Corporation]]''' was recorded while its founder was "somewhere else"?
}}
{{Main page column break}}
{{Main page in the news
| image = MR1 Nanopore Reader render.jpg
| image_caption = The MR1 Nanopore Reader, in a render of the unbuilt design
| items =
* '''[[Molecupedia]]''' replaces the front page of the websites of [[Molecular Reality Corporation]], which since August had shown a single sentence about a brain and an eye. It answers a [[Experience points (Epic Quest Bio)|500 XP quest]], since switched off, for "an awesome (and accurate) wikipedia page".
* A commit renames the company's open instrument design, until then called "Daemon Pore" and "Sentinel", to MR1. It is the second device the company has called '''[[MR1]]'''.
* Version 1.0.0 of the '''[[MR1 Nanopore Reader]]''' ''(render pictured)'' is released under the [[GNU Affero General Public License]] and, five days later, placed in the public domain under CC0, with the status line "Designed. Simulated. Built and measured: not yet."
| ongoing = [[Live molecular stream]] · [[Streams archive]]
}}
{{Main page on this day
| image = Flyer-maxine-name.png
| image_caption = The "Meet Maxine" page from the project's first slide deck, about 2015
| default =
The records of [[Molecular Reality Corporation]] date the following events by year alone, so any of them may have happened on this date:
* 2012: [[Kent Kemmish]] first thinks of mechanical nanopores, pores whose opening can be changed by moving solid parts.
* 2013: In the company's fiction, Kemmishtree and [[Keltar]] found the [[Church of Sequence Space]].
* 2021: [[demonpore, inc.]] becomes Molecular Reality Corporation.
* 2022: Kemmish writes "[[Our North Star]]: Utility-Scale Molecular Sensing", the best he "could do one night in 2022".
* 2024: The volunteer community later called the [[Molecular Streaming Corps]] is founded as the Molecular Streaming Services Corps.
| 02-02 =
* 2021: United States Patent 10,908,144, on [[sliding occlusion]], is granted, with Kent Kemmish as its inventor.
* 2025: The same patent lapses for non-payment of its maintenance fee.
| 02-04 =
* 1927: Rolf Landauer, who showed that erasing one bit of information must release a minimum amount of heat ([[Landauer's principle]]), is born in Stuttgart.
| 02-05 =
* 1914: Alan Hodgkin, who with Andrew Huxley explained the nerve impulse as a flow of sodium and potassium ions across the membrane of the cell ([[Hodgkin-Huxley model]]), is born in Banbury.
| 02-11 =
* 1898: Leo Szilard, who in 1929 tied the measurements of [[Maxwell's demon]] to a cost in entropy, is born in Budapest.
| 02-15 =
* 1988: Richard Feynman, who described a future of machines built atom by atom in "[[There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom]]", dies in Los Angeles.
| 02-17 =
* 1913: [[Wallace H. Coulter]], inventor of the [[Coulter counter]], is born in Little Rock, Arkansas.
| 02-18 =
* 1838: [[Ernst Mach]], a physicist who doubted that atoms were real, is born in Moravia.
| 02-19 =
* 1916: Ernst Mach dies near Munich.
* 2019: A video on the company's channel records "fields of dna molecules at 100x".
| 02-20 =
* 1844: [[Ludwig Boltzmann]], who explained heat and entropy as the statistics of molecules, is born in Vienna.
| 02-23 =
* 2026: [[Maxine (character)|Maxine]] receives written instructions describing her as "the friendly, highly energetic, fast-talking cartoon representation of a Maxwell's Demon".
| 03-17 =
* 2026: Kent Kemmish records the first of 83 broadcasts of [[Radio KENT]].
| 03-20 =
* 1944: Erwin Neher, who with Bert Sakmann recorded the current through a single ion channel ([[Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann]]), is born in Landsberg am Lech.
| 03-28 =
* 2026: [[EQBio-OS]], the company's members' software, opens with the message "You're looking at the operating system of a real-life biotech startup, Molecular Reality Corporation."
| 03-29 =
* 2025: The domain epicquest.bio is registered.
* 2026: [[Kemmishtree]] posts "rain of blood", "Focused Ion Beam pore" and "Flossing with DNA" to the members' inbox, among more than twenty messages in two days.
| 04-10 =
* 2026: The company's calendar holds a "LATE NIGHT SAVE THE WORLD EMERGENCY BROADCAST".
| 04-14 =
* 2003: The [[Human Genome Project]] announces that it has finished sequencing the human genome.
| 04-17 =
* 1942: [[Jean Perrin]], whose experiments on Brownian motion persuaded physicists that molecules exist, dies in New York.
| 04-25 =
* 1953: ''Nature'' publishes the double-helix model of [[DNA]].
* 2026: The company's calendar holds a "Saturday TELETHON". A message dated the same day thanks members "for attending our sparsely attended meeting".
| 05-02 =
* 2026: The company's calendar holds a "May Day All Hands Meeting".
| 05-07 =
* 2026: An [[EDR4]] amplifier and a flow cell in Arizona are connected for the company's first end-to-end [[live molecular stream|live streaming]] test. A commit the same day reads "Remember to add all the maxine files."
| 05-09 =
* 2017: Priority date of Kent Kemmish's patent application "Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof".
* 2018: The application is filed, one year to the day later.
| 05-11 =
* 1905: ''Annalen der Physik'' receives [[Brownian motion|Albert Einstein's paper]] on the motion of small particles suspended in a liquid, whose predictions Jean Perrin tested from 1908 to establish [[Molecular reality (history of science)|the reality of molecules]].
* 1918: Richard Feynman is born in New York City.
| 05-18 =
* 2026: The company's calendar holds an "Epic Jamboree!"
| 06-12 =
* 1942: Bert Sakmann is born in Stuttgart.
| 06-13 =
* 1831: [[James Clerk Maxwell]] is born in Edinburgh.
* 2026: The [[live molecular stream]] becomes the front page of the company's site, and the members' software moves to an address of its own.
| 06-26 =
* 1824: William Thomson, who in 1874 named Maxwell's sorting being a [[Maxwell's demon|demon]], is born in Belfast.
* 2000: A working draft of the human genome is announced at the White House ([[Human Genome Project]]).
| 07-18 =
* 2021: The domain molecularreality.com is registered.
| 07-22 =
* 2026: The company builds [[Silver Orange]], a "surreal 80s-arcade browser game" with no molecular content.
| 07-24 =
* 2026: Over seven hours and 26 minutes, the company renders "[[Iridian|IRIDIAN: 197 Views of the Seeing Eye]]", a gallery of animated eyes. Eighteen of the 197 fail to render.
| 08-07 =
* 1998: Wallace H. Coulter dies in Miami.
| 08-09 =
* 1776: Amedeo Avogadro, after whom the number of molecules in a mole is named ([[Avogadro constant]]), is born in Turin.
| 08-18 =
* 2026: An "ultraminimalist splash with email-code contact form" becomes the front page of the company's site.
| 08-19 =
* 2026: The front page is rebuilt around one sentence: "everybody's racing to build the brain, we're building the eye."
| 08-23 =
* 2024: The domain [[keltar.ai]] is registered.
| 08-26 =
* 1723: [[Antonie van Leeuwenhoek]], who saw bacteria through microscopes of his own making, dies in Delft.
| 08-27 =
* 1949: Wallace H. Coulter files his patent application on "Means for counting particles suspended in a fluid", the instrument later sold as the [[Coulter counter]].
| 09-05 =
* 1906: Ludwig Boltzmann dies at Duino, near Trieste.
| 09-09 =
* 1737: Luigi Galvani, whose experiments on the legs of frogs led him to propose [[animal electricity]], is born in Bologna.
| 09-26 =
* 2026: The company builds the data for [[The Hole World]], its atlas of molecular sensing: 2,112 entries, from 1,596 academic groups to 15 instrument makers.
| 09-30 =
* 1870: Jean Perrin is born in Lille.
| 10-03 =
* 1956: Wallace H. Coulter presents the Model A, the first commercial [[Coulter counter]], in Chicago. It counts red blood cells at about 3,300 a second.
| 10-15 =
* 2026: A commit to the MR1 repository "Adds AGPLv3 license to all relevant source files and root directory".
| 10-16 =
* 1948: Wallace H. Coulter's dated notes record the first demonstration of the [[Coulter principle]].
* 2026: Version 1.0.0 of the [[MR1 Nanopore Reader]] design is released under the [[GNU Affero General Public License]].
| 10-18 =
* 2026: A commit renames "Daemon Pore" and "Sentinel" to MR1 throughout the company's instrument repository.
| 10-20 =
* 1953: Wallace H. Coulter is granted US Patent 2,656,508, the basis of the Coulter counter.
| 10-21 =
* 2026: A commit to the MR1 repository places the whole project in the public domain under CC0 1.0, five days after its first release under the [[GNU Affero General Public License]].
| 10-24 =
* 1632: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is born in Delft.
| 10-25 =
* 2026: [[Molecupedia]] becomes the front page of the websites of [[Molecular Reality Corporation]].
| 11-05 =
* 1879: James Clerk Maxwell dies in Cambridge.
| 11-11 =
* 2025: The repository that later becomes the [[MR1 Nanopore Reader]] receives its first commit, titled "first commit".
| 11-15 =
* 2018: The patent application on sliding occlusion is published as US 2018/0328909.
| 11-22 =
* 1917: Andrew Huxley is born in Hampstead, London.
| 11-26 =
* 1996: The ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'' reports single strands of DNA and RNA detected one at a time as they pass through a protein pore, [[alpha-hemolysin]], the experiment from which [[nanopore sequencing]] grew.
| 12-04 =
* 1798: Luigi Galvani dies in Bologna.
| 12-07 =
* 2025: The company posts a video invitation to the [[Church of Sequence Space]].
| 12-11 =
* 1867: James Clerk Maxwell describes, in a letter to Peter Guthrie Tait, the sorting being later named Maxwell's demon.
* 1926: Jean Perrin gives his Nobel lecture, "Discontinuous Structure of Matter".
| 12-20 =
* 1998: Alan Hodgkin dies in Cambridge.
| 12-23 =
* 2025: A commit reads "Add Sentinel Nanopore Reader Rev 11 SCAD file". Sentinel was an early name of the MR1 Nanopore Reader.
| 12-24 =
* 2014: The domain [[demonpore.com]] is registered, on Christmas Eve.
| 12-29 =
* 1959: Richard Feynman gives the talk "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" at a meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech.
}}
{{Main page columns end}}
{{Main page featured picture
| image = Stuff-edr4.jpg
| title = EDR4
| caption = An [[EDR4]], a USB patch-clamp amplifier made by [[Elements srl]], seated in a 3D-printed cradle above a white flow cell with red wing nuts on the bench of [[Molecular Reality Corporation]]. The company's guide calls it "the laboratory's ear". It samples the current through the pore two hundred thousand times a second, and the unit that does the company's streaming carries the serial number "e4 00044".
| credit = Photograph: Molecular Reality Corporation
}}
{{Main page other areas
| items =
* '''[[Molecupedia:About|About Molecupedia]]''': who writes this encyclopedia, why its company facts carry sources, and how to reach the company.
* '''[[Help:Contents|Help desk]]''': how to read Molecupedia. Help with editing it is not offered, because it cannot be edited.
* '''Village pump''': there is none. Discussion takes place on the talk pages, among editors whose usernames are invented, as on [[Talk:Molecular Reality Corporation]].
* '''Reference desk''': questions about the company's science may be put to [[Keltar]] on the company's voice line, which a version of him answers in character.
* '''Content portals''': [[Portal:Molecular Reality]] and [[Portal:Nanopores]].
* '''Policies''': [[Molecupedia:Neutral point of view|Neutral point of view]], [[Molecupedia:Conflict of interest|Conflict of interest]] and the [[Molecupedia:General disclaimer|General disclaimer]].
}}
{{Main page sister projects}}
{{Main page languages
| items = This Molecupedia is written in English. Some of its sources are not: one post in the company's inbox, from the persona Molecular de Unamuno, is in Spanish; another, from the persona Jeanne d'Arc, takes Voltaire's French motto "Ecrasez l'infame!" as its title; and the name of the dragon [[Irrationalis, Dragon of Excessive Pessimism|Irrationalis]] is Late Latin for "without reason".
}}