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nipple-ointment.bsky.social

@nipple-ointment.bsky.social
15 followers 9 following 96 posts
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
and will continue waiting in the wings, together with ionic liquids... It is a niche category of deeply unpleasant solvents that aren't particulalrly useful (unles you need a viscous goop that you do not worry about removing from the reaction mix, like when search for a battery electrolyte)
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
of course there is also pentazolate anion N5(-), a surprisingly stable stuff - as a sodium or cesium salt - and not shock sensitive. (Silver pentazolate however is something else, entirely, IS < 0.5N)
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
My collegue wanted to use 1 L of py.9HF; he was running diazotation of aminopyridines in neat Olah's reagent 200 mL, to get fluoropyridines. It was horrendous to work with, there were exotherms, py.9HF is also expensive to buy and ship, so they eventually came up with an alternative scaleup route
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
DMSO is not as universal: many lipophilic compounds (hydrocarbons, phospholipids) have negligible solubility in DMSO. Also DMSO is a participating nucleophile in SN2 (its alkylation rate accelerating effect comes from this), DMSO is incompatible with acylations, heat unstable with tBuOK, NaH, HCl
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
maybe they can turn the smoke-tainted wine into brandy!
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
As a grad student, Brian Stoltz prepared his bis-indol starting material for staurosporine total synthesis by a large-scale melting in neat tBuOK at 280 C. Then he optimized the next step (which refused to work) up to 45% yield, with using tBuCOMe as a solvent, after testing > 50 solvent candidates
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
It is a horrible way to die, and HF can cause disfiguring injuries. At a biopharma company, when our safety learned that chemists planned liter-scale use of Olah's reagent py.9HF, they wrote operating procedures, spill procedure, obtained antidotes, notified burn unit at a hospital and poison center
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Not even the authors red their stuff. The publishers business model is based on bundled subscriptions, paywalls and publication fees; the published research quality is not a concern. I have seen an electrochemistry review written by AI, in a RCS journal orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2025/12/23/a...
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
the tallest hills in FL are the leftover CaSO4.2H2O from processing phosphates. The waste gypsum contains a trace of radium 226 (from the decay of naturally occurring U in the phosphate ore) which makes this "phospho-gypsum" undesirable for making drywalls.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
there is an unpredictable static electricity and self-ignition risk with powdered sulfur: cargo boats and river barges really do not like to transport solid sulfur as a cargo. And liquid S8 has low viscosity at low temperatures and is quite easy to load by pumping
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
when I was commuting to Tampa FL, I passed many tanker trucks full of molten sulfur - it is transported as a hot liquid, for production of sulfuric acid used in phosphate mining (there are extensive phosphate deposits in FL with open pit mining, the ore is leached with sulfuric acid made on site)
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
TNT itself is really insensitive and you can burn it in a stove (it is toxic and low melting, but does have massive safety margin against accidental detonation). Trinitro tert-butylbenzenes are used as artificial musk in perfumery
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
just use a wooden pencil as a rolling pin
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
fat oxidation and decomposition products are pro-inflammatory, lead to cardiovascular disease. Interestingly, Japanese eat plenty of deep-fried foods - tonkatsu, tempura and fried tofu are super popular - and they are healthier by the Western standards, with low incidence of CV disease and obesity
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
yours is just a poor choice of method, and a column type
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
missing in the study: polyamines like diethylene triamine H2NCH2CH2NHCH2CH2NH2 which are known to be very active for Knoevagenel, I used Merrifield resin with attached polyamines as a heterogennous catalyst (which can be readily removed by filtration), you can easily make it or buy it from Aldrich
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
the system complete overhaul is overdue; I just hope it is done by the future administration (since the Trump team is a circus run by corrupt incompetent flakes, ideologues and sellouts, with a demented Nero-like villain in the Oval office wearing adult diapers and spewing nightly tweets of rubbish
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
when it finally cools down and solidifies, they will have a hundred ton monolith of plexiglass. It will not be fun to try to cut it into pieces - I would recommend to leave it in situ, just to polish the surface. Like a transparent flak tower.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
pentamethylbenzene works even better for aryl benzyl ether and benzyl ester cleavage with acids - it goes at much milder conditions, and the presence of scavenger also protects debenzylated phenols from ring C-benzylation
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
there is another trick if you need to avoid fluorinated solvents like HFIP because of their cost, or the cost of waste disposal on scale. For Cbz acidolytic removal, add pentamethylbenzene 2 equivs as a benzyl scavenger. Both pentamethylbenzene and its benzylated product are crystalline, nonvolatile
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Alfred Bader was a great person - we never met but he paid for my grad school
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
"I don’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die.”
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
...with the alchemist artwork on the cover. Alfred Bader was a great guy - He paid for my grad school scholarship.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
In 1993, our only NMR spectra plotter in a small biotech company got ruined by some inconsiderate user; in consternation, our NMR guy was saying he'd break the arm of a person who did it. It turned out, the culprit was a one-armed chemist with a prosthetic hand, nicknamed "Captain Hook"...
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
After working with MeSeH - which stinks rather similar to MeSH but the reek is about thousand times stronger than with thiol - I believe the hypothesis that copper atom -containing smell receptors are responsible for strong odors of amines, phosphines, thiols, thioethers, selenols and olefins
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
it may be actually a shortage of acetone in Japan - but the same thing: the feedstock is cumene made from benzene and propene, both come from oil.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
it is not naphta based. Maybe it is acetone. Or just disruption of a supply chain: an intermediate lacking for production of dyes. Acetone is a byproduct of phenol manufacture. If the market prices of phenol do not justify production at current oil prices, the manufacturers idle their cumene units.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
a leading Japanese snack company Calbee has announced that their bags of potato chips will be packaged in black-and-white bags without pictures due to the supply disruption: paint used for printing on potato chip bags is not available x.com/TomasVilimec...
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
please - don't. Cheese is perfectly fine as is, not to be emulated with soy and lentils. For those who wish to live vegan miserable life, there is the world of tofu-related products
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
I hope the orange imbecile gets sent to his well-deserved nursing home rest soon. Here in Japan, there is a shortage of common lab solvents like iPrOH, Me2CO. My colleagues brother who has a construction company just lost a big paint job contract because they could not procure common paint thinner
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
the problem is biology: Nature is terrible at design, everything that it built is a total kludge, repurposed countless times over 3 billions years, cross-talk everywhere. For most genes we do not know what they do and how they are regulated. There is simply no data on which to train such AI tools.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
love the DMSO-I2 catalyst, it could be also useful for photocyclizations
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
Smaller is better. A minimalistic approach is less likely to run into intractable DMPK problems late in the project, and you can always add some small substituents for potency/selectivity. But subtracting them is harder. Another nice example is design of fluconazole (do compare it with itraconazole)
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
I do not like trinitromethyl-substituted heterocycles: they de-nitrate by hydrolysis to NO2(+) and dinitromethyl anion so easily. But the reported properties here look impressive. The preparation is a bit labor intensive though, for a practical HE.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
in 1943-4, the US seriously studied the option of using a dirty bomb - poisoning German food supply with radioactive waste, a byproduct from reprocessing irradiated nuclear fuel to make plutonium. Churchill, desperate to stop V2 attacks on London, proposed carpet bombing German cities with yperite.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
once you start gassing the soldiers in trenches with a poison, there is no equilibrium where decision-makers on all sides agree "now lets stop this, it's getting awful". No, they'll double down on developing more lethal chemical weapons (less the other side has them too - and uses them first).
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
but it is probably the wrong thing to do right now - young chemists should be instead interested in new chemical weapons, propellants and explosives - the world is growing darker again. You can be sure that the Chinese and Russians have such teams at work right now.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Napalm was invented by some US chemistry professor. But you don't write a morality story how "he threw it all away" by working for the military. Do you realize that the USAF ordnance people built mock-ups of Japanese civilian houses, to find out how to best incinerate them with napalm, Mg, white P?
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
the Manhattan project success was made possible by chemists who developed industrial scale manufacture of UF6 and Teflon, and explored a complicated chemistry + metallurgy of plutonium, solved its separation from irradiated fuel in a record time. A cutting-edge work, and they enjoyed it tremendously
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
you need to improve your sources, may I suggest Hodson, Derek (February 1987). "Victor Grignard (1871–1935)". Chemistry in Britain. 23: 141–142.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Fritz Haber got painted black only because he was on the losing side, and a Jew, later persecuted by the Nazis. The sad reality was that famous chemists on all sides - France, UK, Germany, later USA - were very enthusiastic about chemical warfare, inventing poisons and their delivery
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
this is a bullshit morality story repeated in books, a factoid. The first chemical weapons were introduced by French chemist Victor Grignard, of the Grignard reaction fame. Ethyl bromoacetate and dibromoxylene, then he optimized large scale phosgene manufacture, phosgene was the deadliest gas by far
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
the unit of effective cross section of a nucleus = 1 barn. When they first measured neutron cross section of boron-10 isotope, the Manhattan project people were shocked how huge it was. "This is big as a barn!"
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
don't show poor cow, you red herring - show a gas well or drilling platform, most methane comes from the natural gas exploration (if there is a leak, it is usually very difficult to seal it, so most companies if it does not affect the well operation, decide not to deal with it)
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
most people don't realize that sulfur primarily comes as a byproduct from refining crude oil; in Alberta, they have entire landfill hills made of pure sulfur from processing tar sands... Until now, it was unprofitable for them to ship all that surplus sulfur so they were just piling it up.
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
You would be surprised how many people never learned how to properly ride on the encyclopedia
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
overstoichometric Ni metal and a huge excess of HCl? No, thanks, I will take a pass. (TMS-Cl is a better source of anhydrous HCl in EtOH. Avoids any potential acetylation issues.) Also, for a clean reduction of NO2 to NH2 without ring dehalogenation H2 balloon/5% Pt-C in EtOAc has always worked fine
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
borohydride reacts with DMF when heated - I had once a runaway mishap of this kind: the erupting reaction mix stank up the lab with trimethylamine (= public urinal smell), I was not making myself popular with coworkers on that day
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
this could be actually quite useful, especially if there is any good way to do this without Ir photocatalyst (the SI suggest it may be hard to replace [Ir(dF(Me)ppy)2(dtbbpy)]PF6)
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nipple-ointment.bsky.social @nipple-ointment.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
also adding ethylaminoethyl sidechain is asking for trouble with hERG and resulting cardiotoxicity (QT prolongation) and also endosome accumulation-related organ toxicity. Not a nice design: seems like beginners mistakes that people in the biopharma industry tend to steer clear of
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