/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2008-06-09T08:08:57-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/06/09/an_impressive_nanolist_of_nanocitations.php Time for just a brief piece this morning, about a topic I've mentioned before which is getting more noticeable all the time. If you follow the papers coming out in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (known as "Jay-ay-cee-ess"... 73354@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2008-06-09T08:08:57-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/15/copper_a_gentlemans_disagreement.php I was running a copper-catalyzed coupling reaction the other day when my summer intern asked me how it worked. I showed her the mechanism that the authors of the paper had proposed, but pointed out that it was mostly hand-waving.... 73303@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Inorganic Chemistry 2008-05-15T07:28:47-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/21/new_tricks_with_glassware.php Courtesy of Steve Ley’s group, here’s a lab trick I’d never come across before. They were trying to purify a nasty mixture of closely related isomers, and found that the best chromatographic separation came from a long, long, run in... 73122@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2008-02-21T08:19:29-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/12/dna_forklifts_dna_pliers.php Manipulating nanoscale objects is a very hot research area these days, but no one’s quite sure whether it should be called physics or chemistry. The single-atom stuff (like the famous 1989 spelling of I-B-M using an early scanning tunneling microscope... 73107@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2008-02-12T08:20:41-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/12/17/le_dernier_cri.php There are plenty of chemical reagents and reactions that go in and out of fashion over the years, and even entire elements. For the last couple of years, it’s been gold – ten years ago, gold-catalyzed reactions were a backwater,... 72948@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2007-12-17T08:34:25-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/11/02/one_for_the_brave.php I was interested to see a recent paper in Organic Letters on a class of compounds I'd never seen before: 1,2-dihydro-1,2-azaborines. There's the structure, in case that doesn't immediately call something to mind. These things, which are isoelectronic with benzene,... 72832@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2007-11-02T09:36:23-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/10/10/ertl_wins_down_with_witchcraft.php As some had speculated, the Nobel in chemistry did take a turn toward physical chemistry this year, for the first time in some while. Gerhard Ertl has won for his work on reactions that take place on solid surfaces, an... 72764@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2007-10-10T07:21:28-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/10/01/all_sorts_of_holes.php One of the things I like most about science is how thoroughly you can be taken by surprise. A good check on a field’s vigor is whether or not its practitioners are being ambushed by new data. By that standard,... 72727@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2007-10-01T20:05:54-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/08/08/steve_ley_azadirachtin_and_me_very_much_in_that_order.php The latest issue of Nature has an article (subscriber-only) on Steve Ley's long-anticipated total synthesis of azadirachtin, which can be read, again subscriber-only, here and here at Angewandte Chemie. (For a open-source look at the synthesis, try Totally Synthetic). I'm... 72569@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2007-08-08T19:08:38-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/03/27/acs_meetings.php The semi-annual American Chemical Society meeting is underway in Chicago this week. I'm not there, since duty calls here at Stately Pipeline Manor. (At one point a few months ago, I'd been invited to participate in a symposium that was... 72170@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2007-03-27T20:07:25-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/03/04/calcium_a_backwater.php We've had a hundred years or so of nonstop love directed toward organomagnesium compounds (from Victor Grignard, patron saint of getting the reaction named after you and not your supervisor, right on down). So I've always found it interesting that... 72095@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2007-03-04T21:30:57-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/09/26/smell_the_vibrations.php Mentioning the C. S. Sell article on odors and molecules the other day leads me to talk about Luca Turin. I don't think you can seriously take up the topic of chemicals and their smells without mentioning him, although those... 66184@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2006-09-26T18:30:27-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/08/13/six_chemgeek_questions.php OK, some of this is going to sound like Sanskrit to my non-chemistry readership, but here goes: 1. When's the last time you held a paper copy of JACS in your hand? For me, I think it's been at least... 63668@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2006-08-13T21:50:48-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/07/23/hexacyclinol_rides_again.php The hexacyclinol controversy has taken a very interesting new twist, which I learned about on Friday from Dylan Stiles. To recap: the molecule is a complex natural product, which was the subject of a total synthesis paper earlier this year... 62314@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2006-07-23T21:09:51-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/06/05/hexacyclinol_or_not.php There's an interesting scandal brewing in synthetic organic chemistry - well, actually, more than one, but I haven't covered the Sames matter at all. This is a new one. Back in February, Angewandte Chemie, one of the most prestigious outlets... 59488@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Scientific Literature 2006-06-05T19:54:54-05:00