Most visitors to London use the famous underground trains (the “tube”) or a double-decker bus to see the city (one can also use rivers and canals). So I thought, during the tourism month of August, I would show you an alternative overground circumnavigation of the city using the metaphor of benzene.

The anomeric effect is best known in sugars, occuring in sub-structures such as RO-C-OR. Its origins relate to how the lone pairs on each oxygen atom align with the adjacent C-O bonds. When the alignment is 180°, one oxygen lone pair can donate into the C-O σ* empty orbital and a stabilisation occurs.

Previously, I showed how conjugation in dienes and diaryls can be visualised by inspecting bond lengths as a function of torsions. Here is another illustration, this time of the mesomeric resonance on a benzene ring induced by an electron donating substituent (an amino group) or an electron withdrawing substituent (cyano).

Here is another exploration of simple chemical concepts using crystal structures. Consider a simple diene: how does the central C-C bond length respond to the torsion angle between the two C=C bonds?

Management of research (data) outputs is a hot topic in the UK at the moment, although the topic has been rumbling for five years or more.

This post is prompted by the appearance of a retrospective special issue of C&E news, with what appears to be its very own Website: internet.cenmag.org.

I recently received two emails each with a subject line new approaches to research reporting. The traditional 350 year-old model of the (scientific) journal is undergoing upheavals at the moment with the introduction of APCs (article processing charges), a refereeing crisis and much more. Some argue that brand new thinking is now required.

I recently followed this bloggers trail; link1 → link2 to arrive at this delightful short commentary on atom-atom bonds in crystals by Jack Dunitz. Here he discusses that age-old question (to chemists), what is a bond? Even almost 100 years after Gilbert Lewis’ famous analysis, we continue to ponder this question.

This is a little historical essay into the electronic structure of naphthalene, presented as key dates (and also collects comments made which were appended to other posts).

Previously on the kinetic isotope effects for the Baeyer-Villiger reaction, I was discussing whether a realistic computed model could be constructed for the mechanism. The measured KIE or kinetic isotope effects (along with the approximate rate of the reaction) were to be our reality check.

Peter Edwards has just given the 2015 Hofmann lecture here at Imperial on the topic of solvated electrons. An organic chemist knows this species as “e–” and it occurs in ionic compounds known as electrides; chloride = the negative anion of a chlorine atom, hence electride = the negative anion of an electron.