When we think about the new materials of the future some names may come to mind: pure carbon, in the form of graphene or nanotubes or buckyballs or any other exotic allotrope; or some kind of oxide of these carbon allotropes; or some strange combination of metal oxides, manufactured via processes that remind us of […]
Most leaves are various shades of green. This is due to the chlorophylls. The name chlorophyll comes from the Greek words chloros (green) and phyllon (leaf). There are six types of chlorophylls in plants. The two main chlorophylls are chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b. Chlorophyll a absorbs purple and orange light the most. Chlorophyll b […]
The way a carbon atom binds to other atoms is what make this element so important. Apart from its capacity to bind to a wide range of different atoms, most remarkable is the way it can form long chains of carbon atoms with different kinds of covalent bonds between them . Biologically, for instance, the […]
Technology is all around us. There are a lot of acts that we perform daily that involve much more technology than we can imagine. Take for example removing the lid of a diary product; you would expect that the lid will offer some resistance but not so high as to make it impossible to open […]
It was reported last year that the carborane superacid H-(CHB 11 F 11 ) (see Fig. 1) was synthesized and that its primacy of the strength over all other known superacids was confirmed . This is an extremely sensitive to moisture solid which was prepared by a treatment of the [(C 2 H 5 ) […]
There are people that have the feeling that if they get to know what something is made of automatically thay have learned something. This attitude is called reductionism. But take water, for example: how knowing that water is composed of molecules and that each of these molecules is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and […]
Imagine there is another world in the universe similar to the Earth, where there are mountains, rivers and seas. There are also winds, volcanoes, clouds and rains… science fiction, no, such a world does exist and not too far from the Earth if one considers the scale of the universe. This is the largest moon […]
Boron, in the periodical table situated in the 13 group (group III according to the former nomenclature), is a semiconductive element with properties between that of a metal and a nonmetal. Boron compounds are widely used materials in various branches of industry. Recent studies show its importance in biology as for example to various metabolic […]
The SN2 reaction is one of the most important processes in organic chemistry and has been the subject of numerous experimental and theoretical investigations . The designation SN2 stands for substitution nucleophilic bimolecular. The reaction’s equation, X + R-Y → X-R + Y, summarizes bond formation by the attacking nucleophile X with the moiety R […]
It seems to be useful to begin this short article with the following quote: ¨ with courageous simplification, one might assert that the chemistry of the last century was largely the chemistry of covalent bonding, whereas that of the present century is more likely to be the chemistry of noncovalent binding¨. There are different terms […]