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Nessa the Chemist

@SuperScienceGrl

Chemistry Things I Think Are Cool

dodecahedrane by Benjah-bmm27

There was a meme going around Twitter recently, based on sharing 'cool chemistry' – according to the writer’s own definition. The premise is that for each user who clicks the ‘like’ button on the original post, the writer will share one, sub-140-character snippet about something that is both cool and chemistry-related. It looks something like this:

As you can see, the meme appears to have been started by the fantastic Dr Raychelle Burks, aka @DrRubidium. Other popular threads were started by @psi_organa and Olefin the Husky.

But here is my contribution. Some of them are frivolous, some of them are complex, all of them are chemistry.

I did not completely stick to the rule of omitting context from the commentary:

(No offence to aluminium chemists.)

Check out p. S-3 of the Supporting Info here for one method of short-chain silica modification.

I expect this one is due to solvate isomerism:

Yes, I know this is a nickel paper. He’s versatile on transition metals (£):

Just to reiterate from Point 32, Amanda is a genius.

The link is to What’s Cooking in Chemistry?: How Leading Chemists Succeed in the Kitchen – a series of recipes prepared by well-known chemists.

Dodecahedrane synthesis is brilliantly summarized by BRSM.

Movassaghi and coworker’s report on Robinson’s synthesis, 96 years later (£).

Andy Brunning has a neat explanation of drug discovery from start to finish.

Here’s a Noah Burns total synthesis paper proving that polychlorosulfolipids are, indeed, cool (£).

I’m referring to this conformational change.

Here’s a great paper from the Nakajima group of lithium acetylide addition to ketones and aldehydes in up to 98.5:1.5 er (£).

As John Campbell pointed out, that is a typo for 15N labelling – 14N wouldn’t be much use!

18F is important as a positron source for PET scanning. It requires special modes of synthesis due to its short half life of 110 minutes.

This is actually the sulfate, but it’s visually similar:

bright, light green praseodymium sulfate crystals

With apologies to Nicki Minaj.

Betaine with his brother Ylid:

Two adorable ratties

As always, e-EROS has a useful summary of nickel boride’s use as a reagent (£). Wikipedia offers a non-subscription alternative.

test tubes of product fluorescing bright green, and starting material fluorescing bright blue

There were a lot more likes than I expected! Hope you learned something from the list. I found it instructive to write!