Archive for the ‘General’ Category

The chemistry of scents: Vetifer oil.

Sunday, February 28th, 2021

I have occasionally covered the topic of colours here, such as those of flowers and minerals, since it is at least possible to illustrate these using photographs or colour charts to illustrate the theme. But when Derek Lowe took a break from his remarkable coverage of the COVID pandemic to highlight a recent article on the active smelling principle in Vetifer oil[1] I could not resist adding a tiny amount to his must-read story.

(more…)

References

  1. J. Ouyang, H. Bae, S. Jordi, Q.M. Dao, S. Dossenbach, S. Dehn, J.B. Lingnau, C. Kanta De, P. Kraft, and B. List, "The Smelling Principle of Vetiver Oil, Unveiled by Chemical Synthesis", Angewandte Chemie International Edition, vol. 60, pp. 5666-5672, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.202014609

Question for the day – Einstein, special relativity and atomic weights.

Saturday, July 25th, 2020

Sometimes a (scientific) thought just pops into one’s mind. Most are probably best not shared with anyone, but since its the summer silly season, I thought I might with this one.

(more…)

Silicon drug analogues.

Sunday, January 14th, 2018

I don’t normally write about the pharmaceutical industry, but I was intrigued by several posts by Derek Lowe (who does cover this area) on the topic of creating new drugs by deuterating existing ones. Thus he covered the first deuterated drug receiving FDA approval last year, having first reviewed the concept back in 2009. So when someone introduced me to sila-haloperidol, I checked to see if Derek had written about it. Apparently not, so here are a few details.

(more…)

Two stories about Open Peer Review (OPR), the next stage in Open Access (OA).

Thursday, October 5th, 2017

We have heard a lot about OA or Open Access (of journal articles) in the last five years, often in association with the APC (Article Processing Charge) model of funding such OA availability. Rather less discussed is how the model of the peer review of these articles might also evolve into an Open environment. Here I muse about two experiences I had recently.

(more…)

Wild flowers in West London.

Monday, July 24th, 2017

Bees are having a tough time around the world. Oddly, they are surviving very well in cities. One reason are the wild flower meadows in London and for some summer relief I thought I would tell you the story of the one shown below.

(more…)

Open science and the chemistry lab of the future.

Thursday, February 9th, 2017

The title refers to an upcoming symposium on the topic on 22-24 May, 2017.  I quote here some of the issues tabled for discussion:

(more…)

OpenCon (2016)

Friday, November 25th, 2016

Another conference, a Cambridge satellite meeting of OpenCon, and I quote here its mission: “OpenCon is a platform for the next generation to learn about Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data, develop critical skills, and catalyze action toward a more open system of research and education” targeted at students and early career academic professionals. But they do allow a few “late career” professionals to attend as well!

(more…)

What's in a name? Carbenes: a reality check.

Sunday, September 11th, 2016

To quote from Wikipedia: in chemistry, a carbene is a molecule containing a neutral carbon atom with a valence of two and two unshared valence electrons. The most ubiquitous type of carbene of recent times is the one shown below as 1, often referred to as a resonance stabilised or persistent carbene. This type is of interest because of its ability to act as a ligand to an astonishingly wide variety of metals, with many of the resulting complexes being important catalysts. The Wiki page on persistent carbenes shows them throughout in form 1 below, thus reinforcing the belief that they have a valence of two and by implication six (2×2 shared + 2 unshared) electrons in the valence shell of carbon. Here I consider whether this name is really appropriate.

(more…)

Journal innovations – the next step is augmented reality?

Wednesday, August 17th, 2016

In the previous post, I noted that a chemistry publisher is about to repeat an earlier experiment in serving pre-prints of journal articles. It would be fair to suggest that following the first great period of journal innovation, the boom in rapid publication “camera-ready” articles in the 1960s, the next period of rapid innovation started around 1994 driven by the uptake of the World-Wide-Web. The CLIC project[1] aimed to embed additional data-based components into the online presentation of the journal Chem Communications, taking the form of pop-up interactive 3D molecular models and spectra. The Internet Journal of Chemistry was designed from scratch to take advantage of this new medium.[2] Here I take a look at one recent experiment in innovation which incorporates “augmented reality”.[3]

(more…)

References

  1. D. James, B.J. Whitaker, C. Hildyard, H.S. Rzepa, O. Casher, J.M. Goodman, D. Riddick, and P. Murray‐Rust, "The case for content integrity in electronic chemistry journals: The CLIC project", New Review of Information Networking, vol. 1, pp. 61-69, 1995. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614579509516846
  2. S.M. Bachrach, and S.R. Heller, "TheInternet Journal of Chemistry:A Case Study of an Electronic Chemistry Journal", Serials Review, vol. 26, pp. 3-14, 2000. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2000.10764578
  3. S. Ley, B. Musio, F. Mariani, E. Śliwiński, M. Kabeshov, and H. Odajima, "Combination of Enabling Technologies to Improve and Describe the Stereoselectivity of Wolff–Staudinger Cascade Reaction", Synthesis, vol. 48, pp. 3515-3526, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1055/s-0035-1562579

Oxane oxide: a tautomer of hydrogen peroxide.

Friday, April 15th, 2016

 If H3N+-O is viable compared with its tautomer H2N-OH when carrying water bridges, then why not try H2O+-O vs HO-OH?

(more…)