Hey guys, I could really use your help. I have devised this wonderful novel route that gives desired in much fewer steps than before – with a small caveat. The final compound has a tin too many. As I cannot show you exact structures, this image will have to suffice. R is actually lots of […]

Important message to all computational chemists: DO NOT MIX COMPUTERS AND CHEMICALS

It may end bad. At least it did so in our hand for this keyboard when exposed to an unintentional splash of dichloromethane.

Someone please call 911… wait.

I am a chemist. I own a couple of mobile devices. If you must know, they all begin with lower-case i.

The question is simple. I have a few chemistry apps that I really like and use, but I have not actively looked for new ones in quite a while. These are the ones […]

Most people have probably heard of the idea that everybody is on average six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in six step or fewer. This is commonly referred to as the theory of […]

This is my contribution to the competition outlined in “A Birthday Surprise for K. C. Nicolaou” over at BRSM. In short, we celebrate the grandmaster of colorful graphical abstracts with creations of our own. This is my gift to all of mankind.

First, let me clarify how I created this fine piece of […]

Unlearn everything you thought you knew about selectivity and the Wacker oxidation. Grubbs comes out of the Nobel closet and gives us the anti-Markovnikov Wacker. Awesome!

Org. Lett. Article ASAP (DOI: 10.1021/ol301240g)

Under strikingly simple conditions, Grubbs and co-workers are able to oxidize styrenes to give the […]

I desperately need this reaction I am running now to work (a reductive detriflation). It is the last step in a long linear sequence. There were way too many hits in the literature on similar transformations, so I dissolved my starting material in DMF and added 22 equivalents of triethylamine and 20 equivalents of formic […]

A cascade, fifteen or so step, one-pot reaction yielding one freak heterocycle as the main product, with more sulfurs in it than … I dunno what.

Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 1997, 36, 281-283. (DOI: 10.1002/anie.199702811)

Listen to this. Hünig’s base acts as a reactant and electrophilic sulfurs play the main characters. I […]

Frequent readers know I have voiced my concern about fluorinated organic compounds, especially those containing aliphatic fluorides, from time to time. New fluorination recipes pop up all of the time, and more and more pharmaceuticals contain one or several very stable C-F bonds, which may or may not spell trouble for future generations. In the […]

Of all the widely accepted ones out there, according to you, which is it? I vote for the free radical scavenger they put in ethers to avoid peroxide disasters

BHT – Butylated HydroxyToulene

It is preposterous. Because:

1. ‘Butylated’ implies butyl groups were added to a core structure (synthetically), which is not the case