Fascination with nano-objects, molecules which resemble every day devices, is increasing. Thus the world’s smallest car has just been built. The mechanics of such a device can often be understood in terms of chemical concepts taught to most students. So I thought I would have a go at this one!
Henry Armstrong studied at the Royal College of Chemistry from 1865-7 and spent his subsequent career as an organic chemist at the Central College of the Imperial college of Science and technology until he retired in 1912.
An attosecond is 10-18s. The chemistry that takes place on this timescale is called electron dynamics. For example, it is the time taken for an electron to traverse the 1s orbit in a hydrogen atom. And chemists are starting to manipulate electrons (and hence chemistry) on this timescale;
How one might go about answering the question: do alkenes promote anomeric effects?
My previous post introduced the interesting guts of taxol. Two different isomers can exist, and these are called atropisomers; one has the carbonyl group pointing up, the other down.
Most of the chemical structure diagrams in this blog originate from Chemdraw, which seems to have been around since the dawn of personal computers!
Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the evolution of computing hardware, and it is often interpreted in terms of processing speed. Here I chart this rise in terms of the size of computable molecules.
My previous post on the topic of mauveine left the outcome dangling. Put simply, λmax is measured at about 549nm for mauveine A, but was calculated at about 440nm using a modern method for predicting colour (TD-DFT). According to the colour table below, that would make it orange, not mauve.
As the title hints, I have been here before. The SN1 solvolysis mechanism of t-butyl chloride was central to the flourishing of physical organic chemistry from the 1920s onwards, and it appears early on in most introductory lecture courses and text books. There we teach that it is a two-stage mechanism.
I have for perhaps the last 25 years been urging publishers to recognise how science publishing could and should change.
Organic chemists have been making (more or less pure) molecules for the best part of 180 years. Occasionally, these ancient samples are unearthed in cupboards, and then the hunt for their origin starts. I have previously described tracking down the structure of a 120 year-old sample of a naphthalene derivative.