A Taste Of Chemistry

Chemists—God love 'em—have a fondness for polysyllabic terms that most other people struggle to pronounce, much less understand. Who else but a chemist could make pentaphenylcyclopentadienyltris(di-methylamido)zirconium roll off the tongue on the first try?

So when more than 12,000 chemical professionals converged on Atlanta in late March for the American Chemical Society's national meeting, they brought with them their arcane lexicon of molecules and methods.

That lexicon includes fluorinated polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes, a family of highly hydrophobic materials; mannopeptimycins, a promising new class of antibiotics; and a technique called Penning ionization electron spectroscopy that is literally going out of this world. These topics are more than linguistic mouthfuls—they represent some of the intriguing research tidbits uncovered at the Atlanta meeting. Read on to find out more.