Around the time of the 2012 olympic games, the main site for which was Stratford in east London, I heard a fascinating talk about the “remediation” of the site from the pollution caused by its industrial chemical heritage. Here I visit another, arguably much more famous and indeed older industrial site.
Archive for the ‘Interesting chemistry’ Category
The dark satanic mills (of the industrial revolution?)
Sunday, March 18th, 2018Is (hν)3 an allotrope of light?
Friday, February 23rd, 2018A little while ago I pondered allotropic bromine, or Br(Br)3. But this is a far wackier report[cite]10.1126/science.aao7293[/cite] of a molecule of light.
London: set to become a National Park City in 2019.
Friday, February 9th, 2018Last year, I showed photos of wildflower meadows in west London close to where we live, evolving as the seasons changed. Today we hear the announcement that London itself is set be declared the world’s first National Park City in 2019.
Multispectral Chiral Imaging with a Metalens.
Saturday, January 6th, 2018The title here is from an article on metalenses[cite]10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b01897[/cite] which caught my eye.
Can any hypervalence in diazomethanes be amplified?
Saturday, December 23rd, 2017In the previous post, I referred to a recently published review on hypervalency[cite]10.1039/C5SC02076J[/cite] which introduced a very simple way (the valence electron equivalent γ) of quantifying the effect. Diazomethane was cited as one example of a small molecule exhibiting hypervalency (on nitrogen) by this measure. Here I explore the effect of substituting diazomethane with cyano and nitro groups.‡
Are diazomethanes hypervalent molecules? Probably, but in an unexpected way!
Saturday, December 23rd, 2017A recently published review on hypervalency[cite]10.1039/C5SC02076J[/cite] introduced a very simple way of quantifying the effect. One of the molecules which was suggested to be hypervalent using this method was diazomethane. Here I take a closer look.
A form of life that can stably store genetic information using a six-letter, three-base-pair alphabet?
Saturday, December 2nd, 2017For around 16 years, Floyd Romesberg’s group has been exploring un-natural alternatives (UBPs) to the Watson-Crick base pairs (C-G and A-T) that form part of the genetic code in DNA. Recently they have had remarkable success with one such base pair, called X and Y (for the press) and dNaMTP and d5SICSTP (in scholarly articles).[cite]10.1073/pnas.1708259114[/cite],[cite]10.1073/pnas.1205176109[/cite] This extends the genetic coding from the standard 20 amino acids to the possibility of up to 172 amino acids. Already, organisms engineered to contain X-Y pairs in their DNA have been shown to express entirely new (and un-natural) proteins.
The di-anion of dilithium (not the Star Trek variety): Another “Hyper-bond”?
Saturday, September 16th, 2017Early in 2011, I wrote about how the diatomic molecule Be2 might be persuaded to improve upon its normal unbound state (bond order ~zero) by a double electronic excitation to a strongly bound species. I yesterday updated this post with further suggestions and one of these inspired this follow-up.