Posts Tagged ‘Igor Alabugin’

Can a cyclobutadiene and carbon dioxide co-exist in a calixarene cavity?

Friday, November 19th, 2010

On 8th August this year, I posted on a fascinating article that had just appeared in Science[cite]10.1126/science.1188002[/cite] in which the crystal structure was reported of two small molecules, 1,3-dimethyl cyclobutadiene and carbon dioxide, entrapped together inside a calixarene cavity. Other journals (e.g. Nature Chemistry[cite]10.1038/nchem.823[/cite] ran the article as a research highlight (where the purpose is not a critical analysis but more of an alerting service). A colleague, David Scheschkewitz, pointed me to the article. We both independently analyzed different aspects, and first David, and then I then submitted separate articles for publication describing what we had found. Science today published both David’s thoughts[cite]10.1126/science.1195752[/cite] and also those of another independent group, Igor Alabugin and colleagues[cite]10.1126/science.1196188[/cite]. The original authors have in turn responded [cite]10.1126/science.1195846[/cite]. My own article on the topic will appear very shortly[cite]10.1039/C0CC04023A[/cite]. You can see quite a hornet’s nest has been stirred up!

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