Unusual bonds are always intriguing, and the Xe-Xe bond is no exception.

In his famous lecture in 1959, C. P. Snow wrote about the breakdown in communications between the “two cultures” of modern society — the sciences and the humanities (arts). That was then. This is now, and the occasion of my visit to a spectacular “city of arts and sciences complex” in Europe.

In 1986 or so, molecular modelling came of age. Richard Counts, who ran an organisation called QCPE (here I had already submitted several of the program codes I had worked on) had a few years before contacted me to ask for my help with his Roadshow.

Steve Bachrach has blogged on the reaction shown below. If it were a pericyclic cycloaddition, both new bonds would form simultaneously, as shown with the indicated arrow pushing. Ten electrons would be involved, and in theory, the transition state would have 4n+2 aromaticity.

As a personal retrospective of my use of computers (in chemistry), the Macintosh plays a subtle role.

Computers and I go back a while (44 years to be precise), and it struck me (with some horror) that I have been around them for ~62% of the modern computing era (Babbage notwithstanding, ~1940 is normally taken as the start of the modern computing era). So indulge me whilst I record this perspective from […]

A scalemic molecule is the term used by Eliel to describe any non-racemic chiral compound.

A little while ago, I speculated (blogs are good for that sort of thing) about hexavalent carbon, and noted how one often needs to make (retrospectively) obvious connections between two different areas of chemistry. That post has attracted a number of comments in the two years its been up, along the lines: what about carboranes?

It is not often that an article on the topic of illusion and deception makes it into a chemical journal. Such is addressed (DOI: 10.1002/anie.201102210) in no less an eminent journal than Angew Chemie.

The last two posts have played a game of find the electrons. We saw how the dyotropic rearrangement of ethane borrowed electrons from the C-C bond, and how 1,2,dibromoethane went ionic on us. How about this mixed system, in which a hydrogen and a BH2 swap their positions?

In the previous post,  I discussed what we could learn from ethane by forcing it into a pericyclic dyotropic rearrangement. We saw how it voraciously scavenged two electrons from the  C-C bond to achieve this. What if we give it more electrons? Thus 1,2-dibromoethane undergoing the same reaction.