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From today's featured article

Matte black demonpore 64 cartridge tray on a wood table: two rows of teardrop-shaped wells along the back, a red translucent inset with a clear flow cell in the centre, a plastic syringe in front, red lettering demonpore 64 on the front edg

The demonpore 64 (2020 to 2021)

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 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." (Full article...)

Did you know ...

Keltar

... 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 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 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 was recorded while its founder was "somewhere else"?

In the news

A translucent mint-green desktop instrument with a round knob on top and a flow-cell block with two looped tubes

The MR1 Nanopore Reader, in a render of the unbuilt design

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 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."

On this day

Flyer for demonpore (mechanical nanopores for universal molecular sensing): four flat red cartoon Maxine poses with captions (shape-shifting trailblazer, does not play by the rules, wants to be a medical super-intelligence, might save your

The "Meet Maxine" page from the project's first slide deck, about 2015

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.

Today's featured picture

Silver aluminium EDR4 amplifier box with a blue-lit USB cable clamped in a 3D-printed bracket over a white flow cell with red wing nuts.

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". (EDR4)

Photograph: Molecular Reality Corporation

Other areas of Molecupedia

About Molecupedia: who writes this encyclopedia, why its company facts carry sources, and how to reach the company.
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: Neutral point of view, Conflict of interest and the General disclaimer.

Molecupedia's sister projects

Molecupedia is written and hosted by Molecular Reality Corporation, which also hosts a range of other projects that do not exist.

Molecule Commons
Free media repository
Moleculary
Dictionary and thesaurus
Moleculequote
Collection of quotations
Moleculedata
Free knowledge base

Molecupedia languages

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 is Late Latin for "without reason".