Untangling of braided loops and coronal heating over filamentary structures. Panel a: is an HRI_EUV snapshot that captures coronal loops with complex braided structuring over cooler filaments in the southern portion of the core of AR-I (see box AR-I.2 in Fig. 1). The white box outlines the footpoint regions of the loops. Panels b, d, and e: are snapshots covering roughly the same region as in panel a, but with EUV passbands of SDO/AIA as indicated. Panels c and f: are nearly simultaneous snapshots from a pair of soft X-ray channels of Hinode/XRT. Panels g–j: a zoomed-in view of the footpoint regions of the loops as seen with HRI_EUV (white box in panel a). The red contours outline apparent blob-like features that are observed near the footpoints of the braided loops. The contours enclose regions that exceed a certain intensity threshold in each snapshot and are overlaid mainly to guide the eye. All the snapshots are displayed on a square-root scale. See Sect. 4 for a discussion. Animations of panel a and panel g are available online.