A particle of Ebola-Zaire virus is made of only ten proteins, locked together in what looks like a tangle of string.
Contained in its own universe, yet part of mine, sharing space on my 5-year-old daughter's dresser with a few stray cards from a Crazy Eights deck, a tangle of string, some mismatched socks and a magnetic music box.
The front-runner for a "theory of everything," which would corral all the known forces and particles into a single equation, is a mathematical tangle of "strings" that wander through 10 dimensions.
Proteins are giant jumbles of amino acids shaped like a tangle of curled ribbons and crimped strings.
By the time she noticed, it was too late, the leg a tangle of fibre, and she pulled the string the rest of the way to end it, rather than have the infant grow up maimed.
The piece is largely strung around a tangle of duets – the standouts are Edward Watson and Melissa Hamilton's wrigglesome opening number and an oddly constructivist encounter between Eric Underwood and Lauren Cuthbertson, their limbs steeled like girders, all offset by statuesque figures who enter from the back.
In the one-room Net bar in Kashgar, where eight personal computers were strung together with a tangle of wires, the coal-burning stove spewing black smoke was not enough to keep my fingers from becoming too cold to type.
Speaker wire crisscrosses the room, strung from one bookshelf to another, from the ceiling to the floor, a tangle of dozens of attempts to mine the sounds of the past.
The ending is a tangle of violence.
There follows a tangle of misunderstandings.
