Still alive

My apologies for the lack of posting. Flu (or something) kept me mostly horizontal for a few days. Then, thanks to losing those precious days, I was busy doing some reactions I wanted to get done before Christmas. It just feels nicer to go on a holiday when the intermediates are done. And it’s especially [...]

Oddity #1

I’ve got a new category again. It’s called “Oddities”. I will put there chemical stuff that I find odd/weird/surprising/etc. They probably aren’t odd, weird or surprising to many of you but they are something that made me go “eh… wtf?”. This is the first oddities post.
The sulfone shown below is an intermediate I had during [...]

Kharash-Sosnovsky allylic oxidation

Today is the opening day of our new category, “Name reactions”. Here I’m going to write about well… name reactions. I don’t have any particular system how to choose the reactions but I’ll concentrate on reactions that are not so well-known. I think most of my readers (n=1? I know Milo was here) know so [...]

Sodium borohydride/iodine reduction

Lately I’ve been doing quite a few asymmetric Michael additions using a chiral oxazolidinone, or one of the thio variants, as a chiral auxiliary. Some of the auxiliaries are commercially available but far too expensive for my taste. They can be easily synthesized from amino alcohols which are also commercially available but they too cost [...]

And so it all began…

I know what you are thinking: “Seriously, is there really need for a new chemistry blog?”. Actually, I don’t know if you are thinking that but at least I was just a few hours ago. I’ve been an avid reader of chemistry blogs for months and now I just felt that I want to have [...]