In a time when large (molecules) are considered beautiful (or the corollary that beauty must be big), it is good to reflect that small molecules may teach us something as well. Take ethane. Is there anything left which has not been said about it already? Well, consider the reaction below, in which two hydrogen atoms mutually hop from one carbon to the other. The dyotropic reaction of ethane.

This story starts with a calixarene, a molecule (suitably adorned with substituents) frequently used as a host to entrap a guest and perchance make the guest do something interesting. Such a calixarene was at the heart of a recent story where an attempt was made to induce it to capture cyclobutadiene in its cavity.

Reactions in cavities can adopt quite different characteristics from those in solvents. Thus first example of the catalysis of the Diels-Alder reaction inside an organic scaffold was reported by Endo, Koike, Sawaki, Hayashida, Masuda, and Aoyama[cite]10.1021/ja964198s[/cite], where the reaction shown below is speeded up very greatly in the presence of a crystalline lattice of the anthracene derivative shown below. A Diels-Alder reaction.

Unravelling reaction mechanisms is thought to be a 20th century phenomenon, coincident more or less with the development of electronic theories of chemistry. Hence electronic arrow pushing as a term. But here I argue that the true origin of this immensely powerful technique in chemistry goes back to the 19th century.

Lactide is a small molecule made from lactic acid, which is itself available in large quantities by harvesting plants rather than drilling for oil. Lactide can be turned into polymers with remarkable properties, which in turn degrade down easily back to lactic acid. A perfect bio-renewable material!

Car transmissions come in two types, ones with fixed ratio gears, and ones which are continuously variable. When it comes to chemical bonds, we tend to think of them as being very much of the first type. Bonds come in fixed ratios; single, aromatic, double, triple, etc. OK, they do vary, but the variations are assumed as small perturbations on the basic form. Take for example the molecule shown below.

A conjugated, (apparently) aromatic molecular trefoil might be expected to have some unusual, if not extreme properties. Here some of these are explored. The first is the vibrational spectrum. With 144 atoms for this molecule, it has 426 vibrational modes, but one is highlighted below. This is the mode that moves the atoms in accord with the Kekulé resonance. If real, this mode resists such alternation.

Stoyanov, Stoyanova and Reed recently published on the structure of the hydrogen ion in water.

Like benzene, its fully saturated version cyclohexane represents an icon of organic chemistry. By 1890, the structure of planar benzene was pretty much understood, but organic chemistry was still struggling somewhat to fully embrace three rather than two dimensions. A grand-old-man of organic chemistry at the time, Adolf von Baeyer, believed that cyclohexane too was flat, and what he said went.

The scheme below illustrates one of the iconic reactions in organic chemistry.