Chemist Henry Rzepa muses about a scholarly paper called “Mindless Chemistry” that appeared in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A Letters . He begins: The (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) title Mindless chemistry was given to an article reporting an automated stochastic search procedure for locating all possible minima with a given composition using high-level quantum mechanical calculations. “Many new structures, often […]
Tag: chemistry
‘Poisoner’ author reviews Period Table Table inventor’s app
Deborah Blum, author of the book The Poisoner’s Handbook, reviews “The Elements“, the ipad app created by Theo Gray, the Ig Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the four-legged periodic table table: … Gray’s sequel to this success is a print book, Theodore Gray’s Element Vault, which includes actual samples of elements, such as gold leaf, and replicas of […]
Converting cocaine into sugar, tequila into diamonds
The Synthetic Remarks blog tells of a new study about how to convert sugar into cocaine: Cocaine from sugar If your local dealer insists on cutting your dope with sugar, you should be aware that there is a fix for it now. Specifically, if the sugar is pure D-ribose and the desired dope is (—)-cocaine, which is […]
Wild about thallium, not about head wax
From the short essay “Periodic Craziness“, about Deborah Blum’s probably-unique attempt to get her son to enjoy chemistry: I say. “Tl, that’s thallium. Incredibly cool poison. Almost perfect if you wanted to kill someone. Except for one thing. Guess what that is?” Silence. Minor eye roll. My son knows I’m going to tell him anyway. “It […]