The Science education unit at the ACS publication C&EN publishes its list of molecules of the year (as selected by the editors and voted upon by the readers) in December. Here are some observations about three of this year’s batch.

Around 1996, journals started publishing what became known as “ESI” or electronic supporting information, alongside the articles themselves, as a mechanism for exposing the data associated with the research being reported and exploiting some of the new opportunities offered by the World Wide Web. From the outset, such ESI was expressed as a paginated Acrobat file, with the Web being merely a convenient document delivery mechanism.

In 2023, we very much take for granted that everyone and pretty much everything is online. But it was not always so and when I came across an old plan indicating how the chemistry department at Imperial College was connected in 1989, I was struck by how much has happened in the 34 years since. Nowadays all the infrastructures needed are effectively “built in” to the building when it is constructed and few are even aware of them.

“And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it. It was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.” –Revelation 10:10 As machine learning becomes more and more important to chemistry, it’s worth reflecting on Richard Sutton’s 2019 blog post about the “bitter lesson.” In this now-famous post, Sutton argues that “the biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that

I took a pistol course in undergrad, and while I was a poor marksman I enjoyed the experience. In particular, I was surprised by how meditative the act of shooting was. As our instructor explained, much of good shooting comes down to not doing anything when you pull the trigger.

I am a member of the  Royal Society of  Chemistry’s Historical group. Amongst other activities, it publishes two editions of a newsletter each year for its members.

This week the next WikiPathways NAR Database issue paper was published (doi:10.1093/nar/gkad960). It is the next paper in a series of papers about the evolution of the Open Science project for making biological pathways available in a Open and FAIR way. This year, it described that significant move away from MediaWiki.

“Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth.” –Psalm 127:4 What if our most fundamental assumptions about parenting were wrong? That’s the question that Michaeleen Doucleff’s 2021 book Hunt, Gather, Parent tries to tackle.

Quantum computing gets a lot of attention these days. In this post, I want to examine the application of quantum computing to quantum chemistry, with a focus on determining whether there are any business-viable applications today.

In 2019, ChemistryWorld published a “wish list” of reactions for organic chemistry, describing five hypothetical reactions which were particularly desirable for medicinal chemistry. A few recent papers brought this back to my mind, so I revisited the list with the aim of seeing what progress had been made.