The phlogiston theory reigned for quite a while. It held that all combustible resources contain phlogiston, a substance without color, odor, taste, or mass* that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the “dephlogisticated” substance was held to be in its “true” form, the calx.

The theory made good sense for hundreds of years […]

In 2003, give or take a year or so, a fellow grad student showed me this hilarious paper. I’m 85% sure it was in JOC and by one of the top dogs; I mean Katritzky or someone like that. It was usually long, even for a full paper. One of the paragraphs towards the end […]

Just to be redundantly clear: The following artwork is a mere work of fiction (and some alone time with Photoshop).

But seriously, wouldn’t it be awesome if some of our dusty old applications were spiced up with a couple of Web 2.0 functions?

– Hey SciFinder, the time has come for you to […]

3. Kurt Vonnegut

Slaugtherhouse-Five is good. Really good. But how many of you would have guessed that in 1940, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – the world-famous author – majored in chemistry at Cornell University, NY?

2. Dolph Lundgren

In 1982 Hans “Dolph” Lundgren graduated with a M.Sc. in chemical engineering, […]

A thermal runaway is the chemical equivalency of a nuclear meltdown. It is scary stuff, believe me. Here is a horrible, real-life example:

Clearly, these guys had no idea of what forces they were dealing with. Going directly from 1 L to a 2500 gallon (roughly 10000 L) scale is bananas. Especially with […]

After work-up, LCMS, GCMS and HNMR agree: Pure desired product. Woho!

New reaction type, new mechanism (which we don’t fully understand yet), new conditions. A one-step alternative to what usually takes three or four steps, arriving at a very attractive heterocycle.

I can’t go into any details right now, but we are working on […]