If you thought cubane was weird, this will blow your tiny mind.

Methamphetamine has been shown to be a miracle molecule. Previous literature shows the utility of methamphetamine as a relaxant, stimulant, painkiller, and nirvana catalyst. The biological mechanism for these effects remains unknown, but recent research has suggested that more funding can be diverted to studying meth for increasing its utility in healthcare, government, and educational institutions.

We report experimental conditions for the one-carbon homologation of terminal alcohols, to allow existing natural products to be made even bigger. This was accomplished by recovering an arsine-based war gas from WW1 artillery shells, and functionalising molecules with it. 

Sometime research doesn’t have to have an application. Sometimes it’s enough to make something that just looks cool. For example, consider the series of colossal chemical wagon wheels prepared in 2020.1 Another example is infinitene: a fuzzed polycycle in the shape of the eponymous symbol.2 Our work gets laughed out of Nature even when it has applications, so we thought we’d try something visually pleasing instead.

Chemists are constantly pushing the boundaries of synthetic methodology. More specifically, they are finding new ways of doing the same reactions they were doing 20 years ago, with a twist. We’ve developed our own iteration of this copy-catalysis by exposing chemical reactions to sounds. Unfortunately, sonochemistry already exists, so we’re using music instead and calling it “echochemistry”.