Have you ever stuffed up a reaction so badly that it was more interesting than the original experiment?

Scientists are very fond of talking about the importance of serendipity in research. This usually means one of two things. The first thing is “sure, my work appears to be incredibly niche and pointless, but don’t discount the possibility that I’ll stumble over a cure for cancer in the rectums of these worms I’m studying”. The second is “sometimes fuck-ups are salvageable, if you keep an open mind”. This paper is the latter sort of serendipity.

We report the development of a novel C-C decoupling reaction mediated by a palladium/bis(phosphine) catalyst system. This methodology is the first of its kind, and allows for the chemoselective scission of Ar-Ar bonds to give aryl halides and arylboronic esters. 

We report a quantum leap forward in the field of nanocomputing, with the development of a fully-operational molecular computer. Our device, the DORF4000, contains discreet processing, storage and signal input/output domains, all in a volume smaller than the tip of a pin. To benchmark the DORF4000’s performance, we demonstrate that it is capable of running the video game Doom (1993).