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1000 results for “organic_chemistry”
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Really impactful work to make alkyl lithium reagents dramatically less dangerous to use. #chemistry #polymers #deprotonation #labsafety
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Meet our Managing Editor Dr. Marc Kielmann Bolten at the Chemiedozententagung 2026 next week.
📅 March 2–4
📍 Essen, Germany➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/news/LHUDWJM4HPY4LHS5FACPEYFKDA?M=y
Feel free to reach out to Marc to set up a meeting at the #CDT2026, or just say “Hi” when you see him. He is looking forward to chat with you and discuss topics such as organic chemistry, scientific publishing, and open access.
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Australia's Massive Wildfires Shredded the Ozone Layer--Now Scientists Know Why
Massive wildfires that raged across southeast Australia in 2019–20 unleashed chemicals that chewed through the ozone layer, expanding and prolonging the ozone hole.
A study, published today in Nature, describes how smoke combined with chlorine-containing molecules in the stratosphere — remnants of chemicals that are now banned — to cause the destruction.
The Australian fires produced the largest smoke plume on record, releasing roughly one million tonnes of smoke to heights of up to 30 kilometers.
That’s well into the stratosphere, the portion of the atmosphere that contains the ozone layer, which protects Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays, says study co-author Kane Stone, an atmospheric chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.
In the months after the wildfires, the hole in the ozone layer, which appears annually over Antarctica, was larger and lasted longer than in previous years.
About 80% of the chlorine in the atmosphere is a legacy of #chlorofluorocarbons, chemicals used in aerosol sprays and as refrigerants starting in the 1930s.
Their use has mostly been phased out since an international treaty was implemented in 1987. Remnant chlorine is bound up as #hydrochloric #acid and #chlorine #nitrate, which are harmless to the ozone layer.
But when #hydrochloric #acid dissolves in #water droplets, it forms reactive ozone-depleting molecules.
That doesn’t usually happen away from the poles, because the air is too #warm, says Stone.
The team used a computer model to predict how various organic acids contained in smoke particles would alter the solubility of hydrochloric acid.
The changes produced in the simulations mirrored the changes to stratospheric chemistry that were observed after the fires.
Solomon says that #hydrochloric #acid latches onto the #surface of the #smoke #particles and reacts with other molecules to produce #molecular #chlorine, which is broken down in sunlight to highly reactive ‘ozone-eating’ chlorine #ions.
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Why I’m a reductionist
The SEP article on scientific reductionism notes that the etymology of the word “reduction” is “to bring back” something to something else. So in a methodological sense, reduction is bringing one theory or ontology back to a simpler or more fundamental theory or ontology. The Wikipedia entry on reductionism identifies different kinds: ontological, methodological, and theory reductionism. I think the ontological one is the most interesting here, the proposition that all of reality consists of a small number of building blocks.
Most reductions aren’t particularly controversial, at least not in science. There aren’t many arguments that chemistry doesn’t reduce to physics, or geology to both those sciences. Today it’s not controversial that biology reduces to them as well, although this is a relatively recent development.
As late at the early 1900s there were people arguing that life was somehow different, that it was distinguished by a vital force, an ancient idea. Few talk about vital forces today. Biologists learned about evolution through natural selection, genetic inheritance, proteins, DNA, RNA, and overall organic chemistry. Life is now seen as largely a molecular chemical enterprise, albeit a hideously complex one.
This raises an important point. Most reductions are conservative, retaining the reduced concept, but not all. Sometimes it’s eliminative, as in the case of a vital force, or other things like phlogiston or a luminiferous ether. It seems to depend on whether the reduced concept remains useful.
Today there remain at least two areas where people tend to resist reductionist accounts: consciousness and quantum measurement.
The consciousness one goes back to Rene Descartes’ famous distinction between mental and physical substances. Descartes saw no issue with a mechanistic understanding of reality, except for the mind, which he could not conceive of being reducible to mechanisms. He was far from alone. Gottfried Leibniz presented his mill thought experiment, that if the mind were a mill which we entered, we wouldn’t find anything there that explained perception. The mind, he agreed with Descartes, had to be a different kind of thing entirely.
Although a lot of what these guys saw as irreducible has been reduced. Today, psychological concepts like memory and cognition are understood to be neural processes, albeit with still many unanswered questions. But contemporary philosophy of mind often draws a new line at perceived characteristics, typically called qualities or qualia. Because these characteristics are introspectively opaque, they seem irreducible. And studying some of them has proven hard, therefore many assume they’re fundamentally inaccessible to anyone but the subject.
The question is whether the notion of fundamental qualia really explains anything. Does it convey meaningful information? Certainly qualities understood as just perceived characteristics seem useful enough. But regarding them as fundamental seems to obscure rather than convey information.
As a reductionist, I think of qualities as categorizing conclusions. (If that seems radical, consider that the etymology of the Latin root phrase “qualis” is “of what kind.”) Our nervous system qualifies a stimulus for a category when a particular range of neural firing patterns trigger a galaxy of associations, some innate, but many learned, which collectively add to the richness of the experience of that perceived characteristic (redness, sweetness, pain, etc).
Am I completely confident this is the answer? No, but as an explanation, it seems like a more fruitful place to explore. I suspect future scientific studies will validate some aspects of it, but not others. But even if it’s completely wrong, these kinds of theories seem to spur more experimental work than simply assuming qualities are fundamental and inaccessible.
In the case of quantum mechanics, it’s observation that’s often taken to be fundamental. In its strongest forms, this ends up pairing with the idea of consciousness being fundamental. Although the more cautious variants see just measurement as fundamental (or interaction). This can be the idea that quantum states don’t really exist, that measurement itself creates reality, or that quantum states do exist but physically collapse in a measurement, a fundamental change in reality.
In the early years of quantum theory, something like these views seemed inescapable, and most of the physics community closed ranks around them. But there were holdouts, including Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrὅdinger, who kept digging, discovering the phenomenon of entanglement, which would later be used by David Bohm and Hugh Everett to posit mechanistic explanations for the disappearance of quantum effects. But it was the work of H. Dieter Zeh and Wojciech H. Zurek in the 1970s and 80s that really fleshed out the detailed explanation we now call decoherence.
Today, few question whether entanglement and decoherence happen, although many do continue to argue that they’re only useful mathematical tools. Even if they are real physical processes, whether they serve as a full explanation of what’s happening in measurement depends on your preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics. But the key thing is it’s an explanation that wasn’t found by those who were satisfied with measurement being fundamental.
Which gets to why I’m a reductionist. I can’t prove that ontological reductionism is true. Maybe there are unique aspects of reality that aren’t built on a few common building blocks. But there seems to be a lot of history showing that assuming it’s true is far more fruitful than assuming complex concepts are fundamental. From Thales positing that water was the fundamental substance to later Greeks assuming there were four fundamental elements, the history of assuming anything is fundamental seems cautionary at best.
Which is why when I hear “X is fundamental,” I’m reflexively skeptical. We can’t even confidently say that about “elemental” particles, quantum fields, space, or time. We only seem able to talk in terms of something being more fundamental or less fundamental. Scientific theories are always provisional, subject to change on new data. Absolute fundamentality seems like an assumption we can never justify. Calling something fundamental seems to say, “There’s nothing left to explain here. Stop digging.” A lot of progress seems to happen from the people who ignore these prescriptions.
What do I mean by “progress”? None of this is to argue that higher level concepts aren’t useful; thermodynamics, for instance, didn’t cease being a useful concept once it was reduced to particle physics. Or that holistic takes on phenomena can’t be beneficial. Or that in art or daily life, we can’t appreciate things without reducing them.
But reduction aids in acquiring more structurally or causally complete explanations, while assuming something is fundamental often seems to paper over structural or causal gaps. Closing these gaps, when achievable, provides more reliable knowledge, knowledge which gives us new abilities, abilities such as medical scanners, drugs, computers, and many other things. Yes, that does include nuclear weapons and other ills. It doesn’t seem like we can have the good without the bad, although usually the bad can be managed with more reliable knowledge.
At least that’s my view today.
What do you think? Are there benefits to non-reductive approaches I’m overlooking? Or drawbacks to reductionism I’m missing? If you think an alternative approach is better, what are the benefits of that alternative?
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #PhilosophyOfScience #reductionism #Science
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World’s first #sustainable #battery lasts 6,000 cycles, could offer 30-year life
The batteries transport electrons using three physical processes, thanks to an ultraporous carbon layer inside the cell.
by Georgina Jedikovska, Updated: Apr 11, 2025 11:02 AM EST
"#Ukrainian startup #SorbiForce has made a major breakthrough by transforming agricultural waste into a metal-free organic battery prototype in an attempt to combat the environmental impact of conventional batteries.
"Apart from #AgriculturalWaste, the Arizona-based energy storage company claims they used nothing but carbon, water, and salt to develop what they say is the world’s first truly sustainable battery.
"The team, led by material scientist Serhii Kaminskyi, SorbiForce’s CEO and co-founder, came up with the idea after realizing agriculture generates up to 2.1 billion tons of waste each year.
[...]
"However, what’s perhaps most striking is that at the end of a cell’s life, as much as 95 percent of the battery can be broken down into organic materials, while the rest of the components can later be reused.
"Additionally, Drolet remarks that, unlike #LithiumIon (Li-ion) batteries, which often become #toxic plastic waste or pose safety hazards when recycled, SorbiForce cells pose no risk of explosion, thermal runaway or toxic leaks thanks to their metal-free chemistry and #ClosedLoop design, even if cut in half."
Read more:
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/world-first-metal-free-battery-6000-cycles -
PKMYT1 is a promising target for #cancer #drug developmenent. While some inhibitors such as RP-6036 are available for some time, researchers from InSilico #Medicine have now introduced a novel #PROTAC degrader based on their computational design of a novel inhibitor. This study was now published in #Nature Communications (2025):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65796-8#drugdesign #chemistry #MedicinalChemistry #research #science
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Vitamin B12 (cyanocobalamin) is a chelated compound #vitaminb12 #b12 #chelation #organicchemistry
... Continue to: https://youtube.com/shorts/IvBP0AffgG4?si=rfzOhX_Bvnu-ELo4 -
Happy 15th Anniversary to our outstanding Editor-in-Chief, Professor Peter Seeberger, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, at at the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry! 🎉
🔗 https://tinyurl.com/4bafszm6
Since 2011, he has been a cornerstone of our success, empowering the #OrganicChemistry community to share high-quality research – FREE for authors, readers, universities and funders.
Thank you, Professor Seeberger, for your support and wise counsel over the years!
#BJOC 💎🔓 -
Did you know that the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry was among the first diamond open access journals in the field, started in 2005?
The journal has provided free, peer-reviewed access to fundamental and applied research for over 20 years, ensuring that neither authors nor readers are ever charged any fees.
Submit your latest research today to join our community of open science pioneers!
➡️ https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/publications/organic-chemistry/?M=y
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Meet our Managing Editor Dr. Marc Kielmann Bolten at the Chemiedozententagung 2026, 📅 March 2–4 in Essen, Germany.
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/news/LHUDWJM4HPY4LHS5FACPEYFKDA?M=y
Feel free to reach out to Marc to set up a meeting at the #CDT2026 to discuss topics such as scientific publishing, organic chemistry, and open access, or just say “Hi” when you see him in Essen.
#BJOC 💎🔓
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Our Managing Editor is heading to Japan 🇯🇵! We're thrilled to announce Marc’s participation in the prestigious Tateshina Conference on Organic Chemistry from Nov 14–16, 2025.
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/news/BELTEFKSO7GRGGLFZP3RY33T6U?M=Y
#EdiTours #OrganicChemistry #ScientificCommunity #ScientificPublishing #BJOC #DiamondOpenAccess 💎 🔓
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Meet our Managing Editor Dr. Marc Kielmann at the 11th Pacific Symposium on Radical Chemistry (PSCR-11) in Seoul 🇰🇷, 📅 June 15–19, 2025!
💬 Don’t hesitate to say “Hi” or chat with Marc at the symposium.
🔗 More info: https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/news/R6ZS75PAYGG2CQCVM6LV5XPYRU?M=y
#BJOC #DiamondOpenAccess 💎 🔓
#OrganicChemistry #OrganometallicChemistry #Catalysis #RadicalCatalysis #RadicalChemistry -
The Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Wrocław 🇵🇱 is hosting an online talk “Insights into a journal editor’s tool kit” by Dr. Marc Kielmann on May 8 at 5 pm CEST.
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/news/CRTPM3HWGRNEVKB2WN2RD3YCH4?M=y
#OrganicChemistry #ScientificPublishing #BJOC #DiamondOpenAccess 💎 🔓
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Meet our Managing Editor Dr. Marc Kielmann at Aromaticity 2025 in Mérida, Mexico 🇲🇽, Jan. 27–30, 2025. He is excited to chat with you about #OrganicChemistry, #ScientificPublishing and #OpenAccess.
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/news/M5CP5RLBB3CBT6Z4L4NMJFHTHA?M=y
#Aromaticity2025 #TheoreticalChemistry #ComputationalChemistry #OrganicChemistry #PhysicalChemistry #QuantumChemistry #ChemTwitter #CompChem #TheoChem #aromaticity
#BJOC 💎 🔓 -
Meet our Managing Editor Dr. Marc Kielmann at Aromaticity 2025 in Mérida, Mexico 🇲🇽, Jan. 27–30, 2025. He looks forward to chatting with you about #OrganicChemistry, #ScientificPublishing and #OpenAccess.
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/news/M5CP5RLBB3CBT6Z4L4NMJFHTHA?M=y
#Aromaticity2025 #TheoreticalChemistry #ComputationalChemistry #OrganicChemistry #PhysicalChemistry #QuantumChemistry #ChemTwitter #CompChem #TheoChem #aromaticity
#BJOC 💎 🔓 -
Submission deadline extended to 📅 Jan 15, 2025
Invitation to submit to the thematic issue “#Photocatalysis and #photochemistry in #OrganicSynthesis” edited by Timothy Noël, University of Amsterdam and Bartholomäus (Bart) Pieber, Institute of Science and Technology Austria in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry.
🔗 https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/series/139?M=y
#BJOC 💎🔓 -
Last but not least - We proudly present the 4th winner of the #YoungInvestigatorAward for his excellent publication “Novel route to enhance the thermo-optical performance of bicyclic diene #photoswitches for solar thermal batteries” in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry.
🎉 Congratulations to Ravinder Pawar 👏
https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/articles/20/93?M=y
#BeilsteinHarnessingLight2024 #BJOC -
🎉 Congratulations to Stefano Crespi, Christoph Kerzig Franco King-Chi Leung and Ravinder Pawar who received the #YoungInvestigatorAward 🏆 from the Beilstein-Institut for their outstanding publications in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry.
The winners present their work at the #BeilsteinHarnessingLight2024 Symposium and the FREE livestream 🎥 of the symposium is still ongoing this afternoon: https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/symposia/harnessing-light-energy/?M=y
#BJOC -
Another winner of the #YoungInvestigatorAward 🏆:
👏 Congratulations to Franco King-Chi Leung, Assistant Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, for his excellent paper “#Supramolecular assemblies of amphiphilic donor–acceptor Stenhouse adducts as macroscopic soft scaffolds” published in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry #BJOC: https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/articles/20/142?M=y
#BeilsteinHarnessingLight2024 #photoresponsive molecular #amphiphile #VisibleLight
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Congratulations 👏! Stefano Crespi, Assistant Professor at the University of Uppsala, received the #YoungInvestigatorAward for his outstanding paper “A fiber-optic spectroscopic setup for #isomerization quantum yield determination” published in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry #BJOC.
Join the free livestream 🎥 of his talk today at 5:05 pm:
Just register ➡️ https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/symposia/harnessing-light-energy/?M=y
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We’re very excited to welcome our new colleague Dr. Martí Recort Fornals!
Martí will be supporting our Editorial Office and will help to ensure high quality #organicchemistry research is published in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry. In addition, he will be organizing and hosting many of our upcoming Beilstein Symposia.Welcome to the team, Martí 🚀
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/news/W43UIRHD47WRQVJLJJ5NACRSCM?M=y
#WelcomeToTheTeam #BJOC 💎 🔓 -
📢 Invitation to submit!
New thematic issue “Novel #macrocycles: from synthesis to #supramolecular function” edited by Prof. Pablo Ballester, Konrad Tiefenbacher, Carmine Gaeta, Carmen Talotta, Margherita De Rosa and Paolo Della Sala in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry:
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/series/142?M=ySubmission deadline 📅 March 31, 2025
#SupramolecularChemistry #catalysis #mechanomolecules #BJOC 💎🔓
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⏰ Submission deadline approaching ⏰
Thematic issue in “Emerging directions in #SupramolecularChemistry” edited by Joseph W. Meisel, The George Washington University, and Amar H. Flood, Indiana University, in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry is open for submission until Oct 1, 2024:
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/series/138?M=y
#BJOC 💎🔓
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Meet our Managing Editor Dr. Marc Kielmann at the Beilstein Organic Chemistry Symposium “Main-group Chemistry for Modern Catalysis and Synthesis” in Limburg, Germany, next week Sept. 10–12, 2024.
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/news/VJG32LGXFHE7PPVQYNRX53CTVE?M=y
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I was sad to learn that recently retired #McMasterUniversity #Chemistry Professor Willie Leigh died on February 4th after a brief illness. He was a passionate and talented physical organic chemist, as well as a dedicated #MacChem faculty member. My condolences to his family, former group members, and bandmates. 🪦
https://chemistry.mcmaster.ca/in-memoriam-professor-william-j-leigh-1953-2024/
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Good evening #Mastodon! In today's #Introduction #ConnectionList where I help to more richly connect the :fediverse:, I'd like you to meet:
@adms - The ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making + Society - does a lot of work on #privacy and #surveillance
@KathyNickels works with @adms. Their interests are in #Music #Art #Equestrian #Nature #Animals #Camping
@thorne is the admin at rants.au, a #nerd, #MotorCyclist and #catsofmastodon fan 👋
@chiarboni is a #PhD candidate #researcher #academic at #Erasmus in #Rotterdam 🇩🇪
@orsvarn is Lukas, based in 🇸🇪 and they are a technical #Artist for #Games, and have an interest in procedural #texture #texturing 👋
@matthras is a #maths #mathemaician, #cellist, #dev and #gamer and is an #a11y. Also into #knitting, because knitting is maths 💯 👋 (cc @web_goddess)
@Jaskey is a #leadership and #LifeCoach for #HigherEd
@MajdeckiMaciek is a #Chemistry #PostDoc a OIC_PAS looking into multitasking synthesis of organic materials ⚛️
@likeaword works in #data for a @SocialEnterprise and is interested in #openstreetmap and #Cymru (hylô!) 🇨🇾
Don't forget to curate your own #ConnectionList ❤️
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Broadening the Horizon of Organic On-Surface Synthesis
Using gold nanoparticles with surface-assembled monolayers (SAMs) to achieve highly selective hetero-Ullmann coupling
https://www.chemistryviews.org/broadening-the-horizon-of-organic-on-surface-synthesis/
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Gold nanoparticles coated with specific organic molecules can dynamically reorganize their large-scale two-dimensional arrangements at an air/water interface, exhibiting fluid, responsive behavior.
#Nanotechnology #MaterialScience #Chemistry #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/05/nt05132601.html -
Covalent Organic Frameworks Grown on Carbon Nanotubes for Potassium-Ion Batteries
Nanocomposite combines the high specific surface area of COFs with the conductivity of CNTs
https://www.chemistryviews.org/covalent-organic-frameworks-grown-on-carbon-nanotubes-for-potassium-ion-batteries/#nanotech #potassiumionbatteries #cofs #chemistry #chemistryviews #chemviews
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Porous Crystals Detect Nitric Oxide
Ultrasensitive detection of NO using a conductive 2D metal–organic framework
https://www.chemistryviews.org/porous-crystals-detect-nitric-oxide/