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Polymers

Chemistry In Pictures

From failure to flowers

by Brianna Barbu
March 5, 2025
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Credit: Vanessa Tabernero Magro

Sometimes, failure can be beautiful, thought Vanessa Tabernero Magro, an inorganic chemist at the University of Alcalá, as she looked in this flask containing a reaction gone awry. She captured this image after trying but failing to make a biobased anethole polymer using a silicon-based catalyst. While the alkyl silicon catalyst didn’t give her the product she wanted, the gunk that came out of the unsuccessful reaction had a strange beauty to it. From a certain angle, the streaks of blue, green, and brown in her flask bore an uncanny resemblance to the famous Irises paintings by Vincent van Gogh. The lesson, Tabernero Magro says, is that even when things in the lab don’t work, it is important to stay optimistic and never stop trying, because “chemistry will always, always surprise us.”

Submitted by Vanessa Tabernero Magro

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