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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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    Complex 1a was prepared according to well-known synthetic procedures. The reduction potential of the complex was increased due to the nephelauxetic expansion of the occupied FMOs induced by photolytic epimerization of the auxiliary tetrahydrophosphazolidine sulfide ligand to enable a strongly σ-donating dihaptic coordination mode.

    translation: we made molecule 1a, we shouldn’t need to tell you how, it’s obvious, lmao, git gud. the molecule became less likely to gain extra electrons because shining light on it made one of its weird-ass totally-not-bullshit parts wiggle around a bit so that it could bind more strongly to the metal atom through two of its own adjacent atoms, making the metal atom’s relevant electrons floofier.





  • In grocery stores in many parts of the US at least, it is extremely hard not to find bread in plastic bags. Even the one of 3 near me that has its own bakery puts the bread in a plastic bag, and then in another bag that is paper with a plastic “window”, and the paper part has a PE wax lining for god knows what reason.


  • I feel your pain on sodium; anything convenient always has absurd amounts. One suggestion is street tacos with low-sodium tortillas (for me usually corn, though storebought suck and are bitter if not steamed immediately before serving) if you are willing to prep the toppings in advance. Lunch the day of is about as much effort as assembling a sandwich: reheat toppings on tortillas, and then add freshness (e.g., cilantro, citrus juice, raw onion). Chopped onions and lemons last maybe a week in the fridge but lose a bit of their pungency.

    For prep, I add a bit of oil and black pepper to chopped veggies like bell peppers, hot peppers, onions, garlic, or corn and char broil the lot in the oven. I also usually presoak 1 cup of black beans and then blast them in my instant pot for 1 h with 2.5-3 cups water, half an onion, a couple cloves of garlic cut in half, and a bayleaf or two (don’t bother chopping anything, remove before serving). Then, I add 3 oz tomato paste and mexican-adjacent seasonings and simmer until it thickens up. I like this premade salt-free spice blend, but I ran out recently and am using 1 tsp cumin, 1.5 tsp ancho chili powder, 0.5 tsp each of smoked paprika and hot chili powder, and < 0.25 tsp salt. The same mixes go well on e.g., chicken breast prepped however you like if you also want meat on your tacos.

    If you’re looking for ways to cut sodium but are annoyed by blandness, I’ve found that smokey things like paprika and the char on the veggies can go a long way toward compensating for reduced salt. Nutritional yeast is also maybe 70% of the way there umami-wise to high-sodium cheeses like parmesan.

    Also also, if you are reducing sodium for blood pressure reasons, and if you are not on ACE inhibitors, salt cut with potassium chloride (“low-sodium salt”) can help, as can foods rich in potassium like tomatoes and beans. If you are on ACE inhibitors, check with your doc; they make your body retain potassium and can cause problems if you eat to much of K.

    Sorry for the long post, it’s 01:00 and my rambling got the better of me.













  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyzme_irl
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    2 months ago

    Or when you ask for feedback on the structure and what to include before you polish a bunch of stuff that would be cut or rewritten, only to be returned a half-finished low-effort style (“grammar”) nit-pick of a draft with increasingly angry comments about repeated “errors”, culminating with swearing at you, how dare you waste his time, how dare you not read his Grammar_Lesson.docx (God help you, you did) and submit a draft that doesn’t follow its rules (it was largely compliant), you’re a native English speaker anyhow and should know better, and what the fuck is compound 12a, you didn’t define it anywhere but keep referring to it (it was defined in-text in the previous paragraph and in the figure above it), fix it all and the rest of the doc before you bother him again.



  • Good article, reactive web design notwithstanding (stop. breaking. my. scrolling). I’m not surprised that obtaining the chemicals was that easy, even accounting for the mislabeling and fake products. A lot of these chemicals are pretty simple and have pretty general use cases in the fine chemicals space. Hell, I had occasion to use (2-bromoethyl)benzene, aniline, and propionyl chlorde in school for making random precursors and ligands, albeit separately. I wonder if they are at all harder to procure nowadays because of the fentanyl epidemic.

    Edit: checked some of my old work, didn’t actually use (2-bromoethyl)benzene but did make a related compound as an intermediate for ligand synthesis using a very satisfying Appel reaction.