The end of unun*iums is announced
So that’s it, then. Four new elements, ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium [1] are to be officially named nihonium (symbol Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts), and oganesson (Og),...
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A Guide to Psychoactive Plants
Humans were consuming, growing and trading (in this order) the psychoactive plants and derived substances since time immemorial. Most governments tried (and failed) to control and restrict them....
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An electron wire in formylmethanofuran dehydrogenase
The first step of biological methane formation from carbon dioxide is the reduction of CO2 to form N-formylmethanofuran from methanofuran. This reaction is catalysed by formylmethanofuran...
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Cork polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
In the spirit of both Christmas and recycling, I decided to build a Christmas tree by gluing together wine corks accumulated during this year. In addition, if you needed one, the intermediates of this...
View ArticleElemental haiku
My, the year is almost gone and I, busy with other stuff, didn’t publish a single post. Luckily, I came across Elemental haiku — a periodic table of haikus, one per element, plus one for a...
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What are compounds anyway?
According to Oxford English Dictionary, “compound” (in chemistry) is a substance formed from two or more elements chemically united in fixed proportions. (1) I quite like this definition. There are...
View ArticleStoichiometric names
The Red Book [1, p. 5] uses the term compositional nomenclature to denote name constructions which are based solely on the composition of the substances or species being named, as opposed to systems...
View ArticleBinary-type, extended
Binary-type nomenclature can be extended beyond simple stoichiometric names. Let’s have a look at the compound with empirical formula HKO. If we were trying to come up with purely stoichiometric name,...
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Addi(c)tive names
Let’s have a look at uranium hexafluoride, UF6. As you remember, in binary-type nomenclature both formulae (e.g. UF6) and names (e.g. uraniumhexafluoride) are divided in two parts, electropositive (or...
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Dealing with dinuclear and polynuclear entities
The additive names are easy to construct for mononuclear entities, that is, when we have to describe an entity with just one central atom. What if we have two? (a) [ClO2] OClO•dioxidochlorine(•)...
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Substitutive names and parent hydrides
Let’s try to name a structure (a). (a) CBr4carbon tetrabromide (compositional)tetrabromidocarbon (additive)tetrabromomethane (substitutive) We can give it a binary namecarbontetrabromide. We can name...
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Functional parents
There is a small number of relatively simple organic entities containing at least one characteristic group that also could be treated as parent structures. These entities are known as functional...
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Skeletal replacement nomenclature
So, in substitutive nomenclature we take a parent hydride or a functional parent, whose name form a root of a term to be created, and replace the hydrogens with substituents, whose names become...
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Functional replacement nomenclature
Organic molecules are often thought of as comprising a skeleton, for example a chain or a ring, adorned by functional groups. Having just read about skeletal replacement, you might think that...
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Subtractive names
In compositional and additive nomenclatures, we build the names more or less from scratch. The more complex the structure, the longer the name. With substitutive nomenclature, we take the names of...
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Nornames
A variant of subtractive nomenclature employs the prefix ‘nor’. Probably the most famous example is the neurotransmitter noradrenaline aka norepinephrine(a): (a)(b) noradrenaline (trivial +...
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Homonames
Both skeletal replacement and ‘nor’-type subtractive naming methods can be considered subtypes of skeletal modification nomenclature. And there are more. Consider homocysteine(a): (a)(b) homocysteine...
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Cyclo and seco
The prefix ‘cyclo’ is used in chemical names to indicate a ring structure. In additive nomenclature, this prefix is usually italicised and followed by a hyphen, as we have seen for polynuclear...
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Radicofunctional names
I’m sure you came across names such as “ethyl alcohol” or “vinyl chloride”. Do they remind you of binary-type names so common in inorganic chemistry? This is because they also consist of two words....
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Conjunctive names
Here is the eternal problem of organic nomenclature: which part of the molecule is a skeleton and which is a substituent? Let’s have a look at the structure C6H5–CH2–COOH (a). (a)(b)(c) phenylacetic...
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