Modern refineries can break up the heavier molecules in crude oil, using heat and pressure in a "cracking" reactor.
This allows the prediction of the geometric structure of a molecule using computational chemical programs to be almost routine.
It measures affinities between two molecules (often protein and DNA) using a filter.
Today this is an extremely difficult process, requiring manual manipulation of molecules using such devices as a scanning tunneling microscope.
I know that I can break methane off of organic molecules using acid/base reactions.
Diffraction can also be used to look at molecules using X-ray crystallography.
The authors fed these to the molecule using an scanning tunneling microscope tip.
The authors fed these to the molecule using an atomic force microscope tip" is wrong.
Thus, Lewis structures show each atom in the structure of the molecule using its chemical symbol.
The researchers made the molecule using dodecahedrane, which has the right 20-carbon structure as its core but comes with hydrogen atoms attached.