A feature of a blog which is quite different from a journal article is how rapidly a topic might evolve. Thus I started a few days ago with the theme of dicarbon (C2), identifying a metal carbide that showed C2 as a ligand, but which also entrapped a single carbon in hexa-coordinated mode.

The title of this post summarises the contents of a new molecular database: www.molecularspace.org and I picked up on it by following the post by Jan Jensen at www.compchemhighlights.org (a wonderful overlay journal that tracks recent interesting articles). The molecularspace project more formally is called “The Harvard Clean Energy Project: Large-scale computational screening and design of organic […]

A comment made on the previous post on the topic of hexa-coordinate carbon cited an article entitled “Observation of hypervalent CLi6 by Knudsen-effusion mass spectrometry” by Kudo as a amongst the earliest of evidence that such species can exist (in the gas phase). It was a spectacular vindication of the earlier theoretical prediction, that such 6-coordinate […]

C2 (dicarbon) is certainly interesting from a theoretical point of view. Whether or not it can be described as having a quadruple bond has induced much passionate discussion,,,. Its occurrence in space and in flames is also well-known. But does it have what might be called a conventional chemistry?

A reader asked me about the mechanism of the reaction of 2-picoline N-oxide with acetic anhydride to give 2-acetoxymethylpyridine (the Boekelheide Rearrangement). He wrote ” I don’t understand why the system should prefer to go via fragmentation-recombination (… the evidence being that oxygen labelling shows scrambling) when there is an easy concerted pathway available (… a [3,3]sigmatropic shift). Furthermore, is […]

The blog post by Rich Apodaca entitled “The Horrifying Future of Scientific Communication” is very thought provoking and well worth reading. He takes us through disruptive innovation, and how it might impact upon how scientists communicate their knowledge.

A little while ago, I set out some interpretations of how to push curly arrows.

Many moons ago, when I was a young(ish) lecturer, and much closer in time to my laboratory roots of organic synthesis, I made some chemistry videos. One of these has resurfaced, somewhat  (to me at least) unexpectedly.

In a time of change, we often do not notice that Δ = ∫δ. Here I am thinking of network bandwidth, and my personal experience of it over a 46 year period.

A few years ago, we published an article which drew a formal analogy between chemistry and iTunes (sic). iTunes was the first really large commercial digital music library, and a feature under-the-skin was the use of meta-data to aid discoverability of any of the 10 million (26M in 2013) or so individual items in the store.‡ […]

This is a follow-up to comment posted by Ryan, who asked about isocyanide’s role (in the form of the anion of tosyl isocyanide, or TosMIC): “In Van Leusen, it (the isocyanide) acts as an electrophile”. The Wikipedia article (recently updated by myself) shows nucleophilic attack by an oxy-anion on the carbon of the C≡N group, […]