Rogue Scholar Posts

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Published in chem-bla-ics

It was on my radar for some time already, but did not get around to finishing it. But I completed all five modules of the NASA Transform to Open Science (TOPS) Open Science 101 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.10161527). This Open Science 101 consists of several modules, starting with The Ethos of Open Science , via Open Tools and Resources , Open Data , and Open Code , to Open Results . Now, since I have been

Published in Corin Wagen

This post assumes some knowledge of molecular dynamics and forcefields/molecular mechanics. For readers unfamiliar with these topics, Abhishaike Mahajan has a great guide to these topics on his blog. Although forcefields are commonplace in all sorts of biomolecular simulation today, there’s a growing body of evidence showing that they often give unreliable results.

Published in Henry Rzepa's Blog

In exploring one-electron carbon-carbon bonds, I had noted previously[cite]10.59350/88k04-2×509[/cite] that both hexafluoroethane and ethane itself could each lose an electron to produce such species. A discussion developed in which a molecule isoelectronic with ethane, namely the methyl-λ1-borane radical (H 3 B-CH 3 ) was proposed by Jacob.

Published in Henry Rzepa's Blog

In the previous post, I looked[cite]10.59350/xp5a3-zsa24[/cite] at the recently reported[cite]10.1021/ja02261a002[/cite] hexa-arylethane containing a carbon-carbon one-electron bond, its structure having been determined by x-ray diffraction (XRD). The measured C-C bond length was ~2.9aÅ and my conclusion was that the C…C region represented more of a weak “interaction” than of a bond as such. How about a much simpler system,

Published in Henry Rzepa's Blog

More than 100 years ago, before the quantum mechanical treatment of molecules had been formulated, G. N. Lewis proposed[cite]10.1021/ja02261a002[/cite] a simple model for chemical bonding that is still taught today. This is the idea of the three categories of bond we know as single, double and triple, comprising respectively two, four and six shared electrons each, at least for the very common carbon-carbon bond.

Published in chem-bla-ics

Division 1 of our Institute of Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism (NUTRIM) held a meeting last week which had a panel discussion on the use of patents to bring research to the market, aimed at PhD candidates of the institute. Patents are one of the routes to make research output more sustainable. For example, the research output into a new method to study something or make something often needs the development into a product.

Published in Corin Wagen

Abhishaike Mahajan recently wrote an excellent piece on how generative ML in chemistry is bottlenecked by synthesis ( disclaimer: I gave some comments on the piece, so I may be biased ). One of the common reactions to this piece has been that self-driving labs and robotics will soon solve this problem—this is a pretty common sentiment, and one that I’ve heard a lot.

Published in chem-bla-ics

If you read my blog, it should not surprise you that I have long experimented with technologies to improve knowledge dissemination, for example in HTML. And I have blogged about publishing from an author and researcher, and editor perspective, for many years (see this longer list on my old blog). Also, in the Journal of Cheminformatics we pushed for innovation, including ORCID and GitHub adoption and Citation Typing Ontology adoption.

Published in Henry Rzepa's Blog

Calicheamicin was noted in the previous post as a natural product with antitumour properties and having many weird structural features such as  an unusual “enedidyne” motif. The representation is shown below. A partial structure shown below for Calicheamicin replaces the -(CH 2 )4- substructure with a four carbon chain that includes two sp 2 centres instead of two sp 3 centres.

Published in chem-bla-ics

Scholarly articles provide context to the factualness of statements in Wikidata, similar to the [citation needed] in Wikipedia. And just like the cited references in each scholarly article itself. The citation network is general seen as an essential part of (doing) science, even without citation intention annotation.