The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is held today (7:30 pm Boston time). This year’s theme is chemistry! The ceremony is broadcast live on the web. Here is the link.

This is awesome. Remember last year?

“The solution was stirred overnight.” — Why?

If you have a reaction going at a fixed temperature (especially room temperature), nothing remains to be added and all reagents and products are either dissolved or soluble, then what is the point of stirring?

This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know […]

This is flattering.

Nature Chemistry 3, 753 (2011) (DOI: 10.1038/nchem.1169)

To the best of my knowledge—the first link in the primary literature to this page. Hooray! Me and my crew, we are like this:

Organometallics, Article ASAP (DOI: 10.1021/om200070a)

1.

A “known” substance is, on closer inspection, unknown

2.

A compound is misdrawn

3.

A pipette surrenders to the weight of a solvent flask

Upon reading our own publication, ahem… twelve weeks late or so, I notice now that every instance of et al. has been changed to “and co-workers.” One occurrence of vide infra was left mostly unharmed (for some reason stripped of its italic type).

Oh, I miss et al. deeply already. You editors got a problem […]

I love medicine. To me as a layman, it appears as if there are more namnes for diseases than there are people on this Earth. (Please, do not quote me on that.)

Today I stumbled upon a rare condition called sulfhemoglobinemia. It means that your blood contains an unhealthy level of sulfhemoglobin […]

The underground, or the dark side of science if you will, is a much overlooked gold mine of top-notch information. We traditional medicinal, synthetic and process chemists in industry and academia have a lot to learn from our underground “colleagues.” A great deal of research and development in practically all aspects of organic synthesis and […]