isomers

If chemists built cars, they'd fill a factory with car parts, set it on fire, and sift from the ashes pieces that now looked vaguely car-like. When you're dealing with car-parts the size of atoms, this is a perfectly reasonable process. Yet chemists yearn for ways to reduce the waste and make reactions far more precise.  Chemical engineering has taken a step forward, with researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the University of Regensburg in Germany, and IBM Research Europe forcing a single…

There's alcohol up in space. No, it's not bottles of wine discarded by careless astronauts; rather, it's in microscopic molecular form. Now researchers think they've discovered the largest alcohol molecule in space yet, in the form of propanol.  Propanol molecules exist in two forms, or isomers, both of which have now been identified in observations: normal-propanol, which has been detected in a star-forming region for the first time, and iso-propanol (the key ingredient in hand sanitizer), which has never been seen in…

Nobel laureate Otto Hahn is credited with the discovery of nuclear fission. Fission is one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, yet Hahn considered something else to be his best scientific work. In 1921, he was studying radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, Germany, when he noticed something he could not explain. One of the elements he was working with wasn’t behaving as it should have. Hahn had unknowingly discovered the first nuclear isomer,…