No Added Chemicals

This time, it is less than a week until Christmas and it is quite appropriate if this time we are digging one of the stories around Christmas, which is the adoration of the magi. The magi, sometimes they are called the wise men or kings, travelled from far east to Bethlehem following the Star of Bethlehem to pay homage to the Infant Jesus. They also brought three gifts to be given to the King of kings: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. This story and the gifts they brought are immortalised in several Christmas carols, one of them is  "We Three Kings " by John Henry Hopkins. We Three Kings  arr. Martin Neary and sung by King's College Choir at 2012 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. For lyrics, click here . This time, for Christmas special, we'll see the chemical significance of those gifts for the Infant Jesus.

Chemical synthesis has become a great tool in exploring interesting structures such as natural products. However, this is not only limited into the natural products, the ultimate designed in miniaturisation can also be attained such as nanocar . Researchers from Houston, USA successfully created a new class of 2 nm-tall human-like, anthromorphic, compounds. This class of compound is dubbed as NanoPutians, after Liliputians from Jonathan Swift's classic Gulliver's Travel. The first edition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travel  

Bartlett's oxidation of Xe using PtF 6   The noble gas compounds have been a great interest since the creation of its kind, XePtF 6 , in 1962. Since then, many xenon compounds with direct bonds to fluorine, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, xenon itself, and chlorine have been established. However, all these bonded atoms are electronegative main-group elements but there have been several indications that metal-xenon bonds can be formed and detected such as (CO) 5 Mo...Xe. Besides that, The Au-Xe + has been detected by mass spectroscopy and has been calculated with a best estimate for the bond distance of 257 pm. Researchers from Germany successfully created the first metal-xenon square planar compound with direct Au-Xe bond.