The discovery of novel chemical compounds is a huge part of modern pharmaceutical research. The problem is, there aren't too many novel places left on the globe left to look. One of the least studied is at the deepest place on Earth, the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and that's just where researchers at the University of Aberdeen found some mud to play with. However, they weren't able to accurately identify the compounds found in the pile of trench goop they were analyzing. A call to scientists at IBM Zurich resulted in an opportunity to play with their atomic force microscope, a d