NNNS Chemistry Blog

A breakthrough article this week in the science supplement of the very respectable newspaper NRC Handelsblad. The topic is global cooling, the investigator is Bas van Geel, palynologist (yes, I had to look it up too) at the equally respected University of Amsterdam and the suspect: the sun. Van Gee

There is only one way to find out if a reaction developed at a small scale really works and that is repeating the reaction on a big scale. Not milligrams, not grams but KILOGRAMS. Wenjie Li et al. of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals report on the pilot plant synthesis of cyclopropyl-aminopyridin

Oil and gas company ExxonMobil is promoting its new and improved gasoline in a television ad that is accompanied by a website called fuelprogress.com. The company promises that the fuel is developed at a molecular level to clean up vital intake valves. The accompanying flash animation here gives u

It is a big hit in any chemistry class: the woosh bottle. Take a 25 liter polycarbonate water cooler water container, add 10 ml of ethanol or isopropanol (rubbing alcohol), rinse and then add a burning match. Amazing how little fuel can produce that much of an ignition. Youtube has dozens of clips w

What: enantioselective synthesis Target: Duloxetine Who: Yuta Suzuki et al. Publication: Journal of Organic Chemistry 2012 (DOI) Key feature: enantioselective Aldol reaction. Current commercial product is enantiopure and based on kinetic resolution and recycling with mandelic acid. How: step 1

Last year Alexander Grushow commented in The Journal Of Chemical Education that if it were up to him the hybrid atomic orbital (HAO) model would be abolished in favour of the molecular orbital model (MO) (see blog here) just as phlogiston theory some centuries ago. A long time nothing happened but i

And why would you try to separate the xylenes? The boiling points of the three isomers are separated by just 6°C so distillation is not an option unless you carry a lot of plates. Lusi and Barbour venture ahead anyway (DOI) and draw inspiration from an 50 year article on xylene separation by clath

Amides are important in organic chemistry but their synthesis involves more than a simple reaction between a carboxylic acid and an amine due to the unfavourable chemical equilibrium. In a variation called the Schotten-Baumann reaction the acid is activated as an acid chloride. You will not find est

So what is new in fingerprinting? Hazarika and Russel bring you up to speed in a Angewandte mini review (DOI). We have already seen in a previous episode of this blog how fingerprints can reveal the owners smoking or chewing gum habits with the use of coated gold nanoparticles. In a similar vein

Ronald Breslow has been taking some flack from the bloggosphere (here,here,here) not to mention twitter, for him mentioning dinosaurs in his JACS article on homochirality (DOI). Apparently dinosaurs sell. According to Breslow somewhere in the universe a planet exists inhabited by a life form with re

Jian Xiao does not get it. If you take an organocatalyst and combine it with a metal it no longer acts as an organocatalyst. It is just an organic co-catalyst. Look up the definition of an organocatalyst. The concept of merging organocatalysis with transition metal catalysis is silly. Unfortunately

This blog by now has a fishtank full of autonomous moving chemical entities (see making-it-move part VII) and the latest creature making the splash has been designed by Wilson/Nolte/van Hest as reported in Nature Chemistry (DOI). It is all about a polymersome which is a hollow vesicle in the micron

Szostak, Spain and Proctor have seriously investigated (11 JORG pages!) several procedures for the synthesis of samarium iodide, an important reagent in organic chemistry (DOI). A traditional method is reaction of 2-fold excess samarium metal with diiodoethane or iodine in THF with stringent exclu

Forget batteries: think supercapacitors. You can even power a bus with it. Key thing to remember: compared to a regular battery electron density is modest but charging a supercapacitor is a lot faster with much lower losses and more endurance. In a recent Science article El-Kady et al. describe the

Concept: Multiplet theory Invented by: Aleksei Balandin 1929 Principle: catalytic reaction takes place when key atoms in a substrate are optimally positioned in relation to key metal atoms. There is no distinct difference between homogeneous catalysis (one metal center) and heterogeneous catalysi

Ilija Coric and Benjamin List must have made the biggest chiral catalyst ever. The thing did not even fit on one of the pages of the letter to nature (DOI)and even in the supplemental information it looks highly distorted. Only enzymes are bigger but that is exactly what Corin and List had in mind:

Remember the good old days when heterogeneous catalysis was heterogeneous catalysis and homogeneous catalysis was homogeneous catalysis?. Take for example palladium: the metal itself is a well known heterogeneous catalyst and there is tris(dibenzylideneacetone)dipalladium(0), the soluble and homogen

Remember the good old days when an amorphous material was just amorphous and nothing else? Sorry, no long range order! Just last month we have been able to view for the first time amorphous silica on graphene via transmission electron microscopy (DOI). More recently though, Treacy and Borisenko ha

Today, on my way to a meeting I happened to pass the new (2007) Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam. I had some time to kill so I went in to have a look. They have some fantastic lamps in one of the main area's! Incidentally or purposely they are all hydrocarbon shaped. They must have some of the biggest

Remember the good old days when carbon atoms could bond together by not more than a bond order of three as in acetylene?. Sason Shaik et al. in this month's Nature chemistry argue that for dicarbon it can be four as well giving C2 a quadruple bond (DOI). In the conventional scheme of thi