Gold Steps Up

Update, 4/5/14: On Twitter, Yunus chimes in to recommend this Hashmi paper , showing a mononuclear Au(I) catalyst - with crazy adamantyl app...

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"Everything is Catalytic," Scientists Claim

For Immediate Release 4/1/14 Grand Rapids, MI : Troublesome chemical reactions? Try adding a pinch of...anything. Reporting today in the jou...

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'March Madness' - Cobalt Catalysis?

Catalysis fads come in waves. This shouldn't surprise - when one group finds almost-too-good-to-be-true reactivity, everyone jumps on to...

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Rhodium Gets It Done

Interesting, informative intermediates from Rh(I) silylation In this week's Science , Hartwig and Cheng disclose some pretty swanky C-H...

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Cyclobutanone Déjà vu

Didn't I just see that reaction? [ rubs eyes ] From the laboratory of Prof. Nicolai Cramer ( EPF Lausanne ) comes some really neat examp...

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Bruceollines: Short and Sweet

You can't put your finger on it, but sometimes you just feel compelled to read a paper. This one , from Org. Lett. ASAP , scratched all ...

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Friday Fun: Super-Calcium!

Super-Calcium Source: Niggemann Group, RWTH Aachen I like to stroll through journals on quiet mornings, over coffee. After a few months, you...

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"Crystalline" CO - Saccharin's New Trick

Seems I'm posting an awful lot about artificial sweeteners these days ! This latest example, from the always entertaining and informa...

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Pyramid Power!

Atop the energy barrier between hardcore synthetic jocks and dyed-in-the-wool physical chemists lives a dedicated group: the molecular archi...

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Precious Serendipity

Serendipity often drives scientific inquiry. Ask a famous scientist - Feynman, Archimedes, Fleming, to name a few beneficiaries - they'd...

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Elsewhere...

Chemophobia got you down? Need a laugh? Call the Chemistry Avengers ! Hey, check it out: Blog Syn  #002 is live ! (And I hear that #003 is w...

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Pd Bites Back! Isopropyl Surprise

Although we don't always admit it, we chemists love a good surprise. That's the feeling I got reading through a recent JACS ASAP , ...

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Cutting-Edge, Nobel-Worthy Chemistry

After all the early fuss about the merits of the 2012 Chemistry Nobel Prize, I noticed this challenge, couched in an earlier Chemjobber comm...

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Methylamine Pseudoscience

Please see updates, posted below original piece. Thanks! Pseudoscience strikes again. About a month ago, over at Slate's Brow Beat  cult...

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Great Expectations for 'Metal-Free' Reactions

Reading through some recent "metal-free" coupling literature, I came across a fantastic footnote. Check out the lengths chemists C...

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Chemistry "Hacks" (The Good Kind)

My hackathon drink of choice, coffee! (And hey, ACS, why no more mugs?) Last week, a fascinating  article , "The 48-Hour Startup,"...

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The 2011 Organometallics Roundtable – Peering into the Future

( Note: I’m publishing this post concurrently with my blog bud Chemjobber . Hop on over to his site to read about the industry / academia tr...

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Keith Fagnou - Eternal Authorship

If you died tomorrow, would someone continue your work? ...even up to publication? Prof. Keith Fagnou Credit: U. of Ottawa This thought gave...

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ESPN Anchormen - Secret Chemists?

Just in time for Super Bowl 46 (XLVI, for those playing in ancient Rome ), The New York Times recently published a humorous collage of ESPN...

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The Future is Now

The Graf Zeppelin. Source: Ad Orientem I’ll admit it: I love to look at antiquated predictions of how the world will be in 50 or 100 years. ...

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