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The shortest route to strychnine

Editor’s note: following on from their previous groundbreaking publication on this blog – in which they provided a comprehensive overview of chemical-free consumer products – Drs Goldberg and Chemjobber submitted another manuscript to Nature Chemistry. Despite being summarily rejected by the editor, many (many) months later – and in the wake of some poetic exchanges on Twitter – the manuscript (and cover letter) are now both posted here on the blog with the permission of the authors. In the spirit of the Christmas papers published by the BMJ, consider this (tongue-in-cheek?) comment on synthetic chemistry by Alex and CJ a holiday-season gift to our readers!  Read more

Another four bricks in the wall (part III)

Another four bricks in the wall (part III)

Editor’s note: this post written by Brett Thornton and Shawn Burdette is a follow-up piece to the blog post ‘New kids on the p-block‘, the Commentary article ‘Another four bricks in the wall‘ published in the April 2016 issue of Nature Chemistry, and the blog post ‘Another four bricks in the wall (part II)‘.  Read more

One ring to bind them all

One ring to bind them all

Editor’s note: the January 2015 issue of Nature Chemistry features a Thesis article ($) from Michelle Francl that looks at chemists’ fascination with benzene. It is illustrated with a range of different representations of benzene and benzene-containing compounds drawn by Michelle’s own fair hand. Here is a short accompanying blog post by Michelle, including a quiz!  Read more

Five years of polling the computational chemistry community

Five years of polling the computational chemistry community

At Nature Chemistry we all love Density Functional Theory and we all love polls – so what could be better than a poll on DFT? Marcel Swart, Matthias Bickelhaupt, and Miquel Duran have, for the last five years, been running a poll to find out which functionals the computational chemistry community like or dislike. The results of the the 2014 poll are now out and we have a guest post from the three of them to explain a little more about it.  Read more