The building blocks of rationally designed chemicals are simple elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on. These elements can be combined in myriad ways to accomplish a variety of chemicals with different characteristics. Even the same chemical can be treated differently—with pressure or heat, for example—to show drastically different properties. A simpler version is to think of how water can be boiled to cook pasta or frozen to become ice—the same ingredient can be made into two different states via temperature treatment.
Click here for original story, Researchers design tunable, self-recovering dyes for use in next-generation smart devices
Source: Phys.org