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A combination of supercomputer calculations and a bombardment of high-energy particles has revealed how a new kind of material opens its pores and 'breathes'.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), are formed from building blocks made up of metal ions connected by organic molecules. These molecular blocks assemble themselves to produce a variety of crystal-like structures whose porous nature and ‘shape-shifting’ abilities could make them ideal for emerging applications, such as trapping greenhouse gases or delivering drugs.

'One of the key selling points of MOFs is the exceptionally large internal surface area that some of the frameworks can possess,' Matthew Ryder, a DPhil student in the Multifunctional Materials & Composites (MMC) Laboratory at Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, tells me. 'Some MOFs have internal surface areas as large as 10,000 square metres per gram and to put that into perspective, that's a larger surface than a football field in every gram of MOF material!'

Whilst MOFs are similar to traditional microporous materials, such as inorganic zeolites or the activated carbons used to filter drinking water or air, they typically have a surface area ten times greater and can be processed at much lower temperatures. MOFs can also be built from a wider range of metal ions and organic links so that the desirable characteristics, such as pore size and its functionality, can be 'fine-tuned'.

Unlike activated carbons, MOFs are highly crystalline and this means that their 3D crystal structure can be precisely determined using diffraction techniques, such as X-rays and neutrons. Accurate 3D representations of MOF structures are central to computational modelling studies.

'It has been suggested for some time that the practical functionalities of each specific MOF material is intrinsically controlled by its elastic responses and collective vibrations of the porous framework (called 'lattice dynamics') down at the molecular scale,' Matthew explains.

In a study recently published in Physical Review Letters the team, led by Oxford's Professor Jin-Chong Tan, reports a new method for investigating how MOFs vibrate. They tested their ideas on a subclass of MOF materials: Zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks (ZIFs).

Their method used Density Functional Theory (DFT) to unravel the complete vibrational nature of the frameworks at the molecular level. These calculations were so demanding that they could only be accomplished on state-of-the-art supercomputers (at ARC in Oxford, SCRAF at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell, and the SuperMUC Petascale System near Munich). The theory was then confirmed using high-resolution spectroscopic experiments at Diamond Light Source and the ISIS Pulsed Neutron & Muon Source at Harwell, Oxford.

The team found that the experiments closely matched the theoretical DFT predictions across the entire vibrational spectra and discovered that the most exciting MOF framework vibrational behaviour was located in the low-energy or 'Terahertz (THz) region'.

'We demonstrated for the first time that the Terahertz modes not only show the standard lattice vibrations, but also reveal all of the physical characteristics unique to the specific MOFs we studied (ZIF-4, ZIF-7 and ZIF-8),' Matthew tells me.

'Our results revealed intriguing Terahertz vibrational modes [watch animations here], which include co-operative 'gate-opening' and 'breathing' of the nano-sized pores of MOFs, crucial for the understanding of gas separation, storage, and sensing.

'Significantly, this study enabled us to gain new insights into mechanical properties of MOFs, elucidating possible phase change mechanisms (called 'soft modes') through which the porous framework may destabilise, distort or even collapse when subject to mechanical forces, thereby completely destroying their functionality. Furthermore, soft modes may give rise to anomalous and counter-intuitive mechanical behaviour, such as negative thermal expansion and auxeticity.'

By studying the Terahertz vibrations in MOFs the researchers believe they could pinpoint and overcome deformation mechanisms that could otherwise make them difficult to use commercially.

Understanding how MOFs vibrate, change shape, and 'breathe', could also make it possible to enhance how they trap specific gas molecules – such as greenhouse gases – and help to tailor them for the targeted delivery of anti-cancer drugs.

'Interestingly, the latest research into MOFs has concentrated on other less conventional applications of porous materials: everything from microelectronics and information storage, to water splitting for sustainable hydrogen production and solar energy harvesting (photovoltaics) for clean electricity generation,' Professor Tan comments.

'Engineers, materials scientists and chemists have a big role to play to ensure the future success of MOFs. Discovering more about the mechanical properties and long-term durability of these materials will be key to realising their full potential and making the leap from the laboratory into large-scale commercial applications.'

Adventures on the Bookshelf is a popular blog for school students interested in studying French at university. It is run by Oxford's Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and has received more than a quarter of a million hits in its first year, with readers in more than 100 countries.

In a guest post for Arts Blog, Dr Simon Kemp, whose research interests are in the French novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, explains the difficulty of translating the Harry Potter books into French.

'I know from my students that for many people wanting to have a first go at reading a book in a foreign language, translations of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are the gateway to reading books in French.

They’re a good place to start: if you’re familiar with the stories already from the books or films in English, then you’ll always have a rough idea what's going on if the language gets tricky, plus it’s always entertaining to find out how a Crumple-Horned Snorkack or a Dirigible Plum comes out in a foreign language.

From the fourth Harry Potter book onwards, once the saga’s French translator, Jean-François Ménard, was most definitely not translating the work of a little-known British children’s author any more, his working routine was the same.

The publisher's paranoia about plot leaks meant that translators were refused advance access to the English original. Ménard's copy arrived on the day of publication of the English-language version. Two months later he would be expected to present the publishers with the French text to be rushed into print for millions of impatient francophone readers.

Every day of those two months would be spent translating J. K. Rowling’s prose, starting at 6 a.m. and finishing at midnight, barring a long lunch-break to refresh his brain and a weekly trip to the physiotherapist to ward off writer's cramp.

Translating Harry Potter presents unusual challenges. What to do with the latiny riddle-language of Rowling’s spells, which allows English-speaking readers to work out that wingardium leviosa implies 'wings' and 'levitation', or that the cruciatus curse will bring excruciating pain?

What to do with the names of people and places, with their hidden jokes and clues? Let’s take a look at a few, so that we can appreciate what Ménard was up against. In the original, Hogwarts school is divided into the four houses, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin.

In Ménard's translation, L'École de Poudlard ('Poux-de-lard', or 'bacon lice') is divided into Gryffondor (‘Gryffon d’or’, or ‘golden griffin’), Serdaigle ('serre d’aigle', or 'eagle talon'), Poufsouffle (which suggests 'à bout de souffle', or 'out of puff') and Serpentard (which contains the word serpent, meaning snake).

Some are quite different, presumably because literal translations of Hogwarts ('verrues de porc') and Ravenclaw ('serre de corbeau') are not as mellifluous, or as funny-sounding, in French as in English.

A little of the subtlety is lost from Slytherin, who are now bluntly linked to snakes, and even the name which stays the same, Gryffindor/Gryffondor, is different, since the French allusion in the original becomes a straightforward label in the translation.

The characters become an exotic mix of French and English names, with Dumbledore, Harry, Hermione and Ron remaining unchanged, but now finding themselves sharing classrooms with Neville Londubat ('long-du-bas', or 'long-in-the-bottom'), Severus Rogue (‘haughty’), and Olivier Dubois, who has to be repatriated from his original identity as Oliver Wood to accommodate a gag about Professor McGonagall needing to 'borrow Wood', which Harry misunderstands as an implement for punishment.

This oddly franco-British establishment becomes odder still with the introduction of an actual French school of witchcraft, Beauxbatons, in the fourth book, leaving us wondering why the French-named students enrolled in Scotland. And talking of French names, Rowling's own liberal use of them gives the translator an extra headache.

Fleur Delacour may sound sophisticated to English ears, but to a French reader it means the rather more ordinary-sounding Yard Flower. Similarly, Voldemort transforms from a figure of fear and mystery to a comic-book villain when his name simply means ‘Deathflight’ (or 'Death-theft') to the reader of the translation.

And it would not escape the notice of the French audience that a surprising number of Rowling's bad guys have French names, such as Malfoy or Lestrange. Rowling perhaps meant them to sound like ancient, aristocratic Anglo-norman families. French readers who missed the implication might have felt a little hurt.

In a project fraught with difficulty, and scattered with no-win situations pitting sound against sense, or humour against consistency, Ménard pulls off a sterling job seven times in succession. I wonder how many French readers realize just how much Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers and its sequels owe, not just to J. K. Rowling, but to J.-F. Ménard as well?'

This blog was originally posted on Adventures on the Bookshelf.  Subscribe here to receive updates from the blog.

Over the last few days, media outlets from Fox News to Russia Today have reported on a new book claiming to have uncovered a previously censored ‘fifth gospel’ which they say reveals that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and they had two children. In The Lost Gospel, which is published today, Professor Barrie Wilson and writer Simcha Jacobovic claim to have translated a manuscript dating from around 600 CE and written in Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language spoken by Jesus.

Jonathon Wright, a DPhil student in Oxford University’s Oriental Institute, has studied the Syriac version of the ancient story of Joseph and Aseneth, on which these claims are based. He assesses the sensational claims in a guest post for Arts Blog and concludes that they are not at all credible.

'The story referred to is commonly called Joseph and Aseneth. It was originally written in Greek and translated into a number of ancient languages. The story deals with Genesis 41.45, which says Pharaoh gave Aseneth, the daughter of a pagan priest, to Joseph as a wife. 

It seems Jews and Christians worried about how Joseph could marry a presumably idol-worshipping woman, especially as the children were the ancestors of two tribes of Israel. Joseph and Aseneth tells us that Aseneth was converted to worshipping God through repentance and fasting after meeting Joseph.

Let us consider two of the sensationalist claims made in the book. First, “the story is about Jesus.” For early Christians, their Bible was the same as that of Jews. Important figures in the Old Testament came to be seen as types of Jesus. Christians saw in a popular figure like Joseph some elements of Jesus’ ministry. 

The book's authors claim the story is about Jesus all along, but there is no evidence for this in the text, or any of the 90 or more manuscripts still existing today- indeed in the Armenian tradition it is often in the Old Testament. Joseph in the story does not do anything we associate with Jesus. The story was probably often copied because it was not controversial and because Christian beliefs about repentance and conversion were portrayed in an apparently Jewish story. 

Secondly, “the story was censored.” A good conspiracy theory always helps improvable claims. In the oldest Syriac manuscript, the end of a letter from the translator and the first chapter is lost. It appears that this letter was just about to provide some interpretation about the story. The authors of this book suggest it was torn out because it said that Joseph really was Jesus. 

We can strongly doubt this! It is much more likely that the page was lost through wear. There are several other places this has happened in the manuscript. The story was copied into another Syriac manuscript in the middle ages, and this included the opening chapter, so the page still existed hundreds of years after it was written. This later manuscript has many works of the Church Fathers which would absolutely dispute that Jesus was ever married. Probably, the copyist thought the message of the work was clear enough and not controversial.

The one good aspect of this book is that hopefully more students will want to learn Syriac and discover the wealth of literature which extends to the present day. With the war in Syria and Iraq at the moment, a poignant fact is that many truly remarkable stories and histories have probably been lost forever as a result of Islamic State, not to mention the human cost to a culture with roots stretching back to shortly after the time of Jesus himself.'

The Lost Gospel by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson was published on Wednesday 12 November by Pegasus Books.

Sunday 9 November was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The event was marked by thousands of illuminated balloons installed along the former course of the wall. On Sunday evening, the balloons were released into the sky.

'It's a significant anniversary because it means a generation has now come to adulthood with no memory of living under the GDR (East Germany),’ says Karen Leeder, Professor of Modern German Literature in Oxford’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.

One might expect that people’s connection with the GDR would be falling as time passes, but Professor Leeder says more young people have connected with the culture of the GDR in recent years. She says: 'Nostalgia for the GDR is becoming more prevalent.

'GDR-branded goods such as Spreewald gherkins are popular and young people have re-established the Jugendweihe celebrations (a secular coming of age ceremony practised by 14 year olds), which were common under the GDR, to mark the end of their exams. Young writers who were children when the Wall came down are writing books which draw on their connection to the GDR.

'This is also reflected in politics. Die Linke, the left-wing party which descends from the former socialist unity party under the GDR, received 30% of the vote in Berlin in the last election (and 45% in the Eastern part) including a strong youth vote. At demonstrations you see a curious combination of the old guard who lived under the GDR and young people who were born in the 90s.'

Professor Leeder says disaffection with modern Germany is also increasing among older people who lived in East Berlin. 'Every so often there are questionnaires in which people are asked if they preferred life under the GDR and a large percentage still say yes,' she says. 'A lot of people continue to live a segregated life, staying in their own areas and rarely venturing into the west of the city.'

Professor Leeder says this increasing disaffection is partly due to the struggles of former-GDR areas in recent decades, which have suffered from high unemployment, low household income and a 'brain drain' of young qualified people moving to the west. But she argues that a key reason is that the reality of life under the GDR is being written out of the official narrative of post-war Germany.

'There is a divide between this local and regional connection to the GDR on the one hand, and the official narrative of modern Germany on the other,' says Professor Leeder. 'Germany and its political institutions present themselves today as having totally obliterated the GDR.

'The Wall is gone and the buildings are gone. Last weekend’s ceremony featured illuminated balloons along the course of the Wall to demonstrate that Germany has left the dark and come into the light.

'There were of course terrible things about the GDR but lots of people grew up, raised families and spent half of their lives in East Germany and they feel that the state does not recognise this experience as legitimate. They have had their history packaged, commodified and rendered back to them.

People from the former west run the GDR museums and encourage tourists to buy pieces of the Wall, Soviet-style hats and Ampelman figures which were used on traffic lights in East Berlin. So it is no surprise that there is a divide in the politics and culture of Germany.'

Given Germany's relative economic strength and political clout in Europe, this diagnosis might surprise some people. Professor Leeder explains: 'Hosting the World Cup in 2006 allowed Germany the opportunity to find a way to be nationalistic without seeming aggressive, and the country has developed a much more dominant role in Europe.

'But while the nation has become outwardly more confident, inwardly it is still very much coming to terms with its split identity. With the drive to present itself as a united, central political player, there has been a strong urge to gloss over a lot of the ambiguities of modern Germany.'

Professor Leeder says this approach is not the way to unite Germany. She says: 'I am currently writing a book called ‘Spectres of the GDR’ and one of the fascinating things is that since 1990, ghosts and spectres from Germany’s past have become very prevalent in art, film, literature and photography.

'As the past is repressed, it comes back in various forms as a threat or a disturbance. Germany needs to address the reality of its history before it can lay these ghosts to rest.'

Spectres of the GDR will be published by Duke University Press in 2015.

An Oxford academic is working with an American theatre company to test her research into how actors would have rehearsed in the time of Shakespeare.

In a book published in 2000, Tiffany Stern presented new information about the way plays would have been rehearsed in Shakespeare’s time. Since then, Professor Stern of the Faculty of English Language and Literature has been working with a theatre company which is following this model.

'A lot of people have investigated how actors performed in Shakespeare’s time, but not how they rehearsed,' Professor Stern said. 'Companies put on different plays every day because London was too small to sustain audiences for the same play. They might put on forty different plays in a season so there is no way they could rehearse each play for four weeks the way actors do today.

'Surviving parts from actors of the time reveal that they were given only their own speeches and their cues, so they would have learned their lines without knowing the full, detailed picture of the play. This makes a lot of sense because paper and scribes were expensive and there was no copyright so, if a full manuscript of your play fell into the wrong hands, someone else could perform your play.'

Having published this research, Professor Stern then learned that some theatre companies were already adopting it. She was contacted directly by the American Shakespeare Centre in Staunton, Virginia, USA.

Professor Stern explains: 'I went to talk to the ASC and meet the actors and since then we have struck up a mutually beneficial relationship. It’s given me a laboratory to test ideas about how actors would have rehearsed and performed in Shakespeare's time.

'I was interested in the texts actors read aloud on stage to save them having to learn some lines – for example, when they read out a fictional letter. I asked the actors in Stanton about this and they tried it out and came back to me to suggest that actors would have written letters out themselves.

'They explained it is hard to read alien handwriting on stage for the first time -- while writing the words in advance would help them to approximate what was said if they were given the wrong document on the night! I then found evidence that this was the case.'

She added: 'They also came up with a number of other ways that actors could have saved themselves from rote learning all their lines, for example using hats and other props to secrete text.'

Professor Stern said this model of producing plays may be beneficial for the future of performances for small Shakespeare companies. She said: 'I think we will see more and more companies start to put on plays in this fashion, partly because it saves their paying for a director, but also because it gives their actors a lot more autonomy and responsibility.

There are also artistic advantages to an actor only learning their own part. Professor Stern said: 'If your part is a humorous one, or you have a comic line, then you will act comically. But if a modern actor is playing a humorous role within a tragedy, he or she is likely to act according to the mood of the play.

'If you perform having largely rehearsed just your own part, you are likely to deliver a much richer and more varied performance of the play.'

Professor Stern added: 'It also makes us look at Shakespeare's writing in a new way. He was conceiving plays not only as a full narrative arc, but as separate strips of text with their own internal logic.'