In August 2016, the launch of a chemistry pre-print service ChemRxiv was announced. I was phoned a day or so later by a staff journalist at C&E News for my opinion.

This is a follow up to my earlier post about C⩸N ⁺ , itself inspired by this ChemRxiv pre-print[cite]10.26434/chemrxiv.8009633.v1[/cite] which describes a chemical synthesis of singlet biradicaloid C ₂ and its proposed identification as such by chemical trapping.

Although the small diatomic molecule known as dicarbon or C ₂ has been known for a long time, its properties and reactivity have really only been determined via its very high temperature generation. My interest started in 2010, when I speculatively proposed here that the related isoelectronic species C⩸N ⁺ might sustain a quadruple bond.

Previously, I explored (computationally) the normal vibrational modes of Co(II)-tetraphenylporphyrin (CoTPP) as a “flattened” species on copper or gold surfaces for comparison with those recently imaged[cite]10.1038/s41586-019-1059-9[/cite]. The initial intent was to estimate the “flattening” energy. There are six electronic possibilities for this molecule on a metal surface.

The topic of this post originates from a recent article which is attracting much attention.[cite]10.1038/s41586-019-1059-9[/cite] The technique uses confined light to both increase the spatial resolution by around three orders of magnitude and also to amplify the signal from individual molecules to the point it can be recorded. To me, Figure 3 in this article summarises it nicely (caption: visualization of vibrational normal modes ).

Students learning organic chemistry are often asked in examinations and tutorials to devise the mechanisms (as represented by curly arrows) for the core corpus of important reactions, with the purpose of learning skills that allow them to go on to improvise mechanisms for new reactions.

The title of this post comes from the site www.crossref.org/members/prep/ Here you can explore how your favourite publisher of scientific articles exposes metadata for their journal. Firstly, a reminder that when an article is published, the publisher collects information about the article (the “metadata”) and registers this information with CrossRef in exchange for a DOI.

The Book of Kells is a spectacularly illuminated gospel manuscript dating from around 800AD and held in Trinity College library in Dublin. Some idea of the colours achieved can be seen below.  I thought it would be of interest to list how these colours were achieved. Black ink was made from oak-galls mixed with iron sulfate and acetic acid from wine or vinegar.

Linear free energy relationships (LFER) are associated with the dawn of physical organic chemistry in the late 1930s and its objectives in understanding chemical reactivity as measured by reaction rates and equilibria.

There is emerging interest in cyclic conjugated molecules that happen to have triplet spin states and which might be expected to follow a 4n rule for aromaticity.[cite]10.1002/anie.201705228[/cite] The simplest such system would be the triplet state of cyclobutadiene, for which a non or anti-aromatic singlet state is always found to be lower in energy. Here I explore some crystal structures containing this motif for possible insights.