33 questions · 23 sources · 0 syntheses
Organic Chemistry
The chemistry of carbon-based compounds.
Source-derived questions
Questions extracted from the papers in this topic, excluding the curated questions above.
- How are carotenoid pigments in foods like carrots and egg yolks chemically related to vitamins A, B2, and B6?
- How did Fritz Pregl redesign combustion analysis to work with milligram-sized samples instead of grams?
- How did Haworth determine the ring structure of vitamin C and name it ascorbic acid?
- How did Mayu Yamamoto extract vanillin from cow dung?
- How did Odd Hassel prove that cyclohexane forms a 'chair' shape rather than lying flat?
- How did Robinson's 1917 synthesis of tropinone in three steps outperform the approaches chemists had used before?
- How did Wallach's structural work on terpenes end up underpinning the rubber industry?
- How did the Woodward-Hoffmann rules change how synthetic chemists plan new reactions?
- How did this discovery, prompted by questions about interstellar chemistry, establish a third form of pure carbon?
- How does buckminsterfullerene fit as a third allotrope of carbon alongside diamond and graphite?
- How long did it take von Baeyer to work out indigo's molecular structure and achieve synthesis?
- What are non-classical, bridged carbocation structures, and why did they provoke controversy among chemists?
Show 21 more questions
- What chemical phenomena, like the colour of organic dyes or the stability of aromatic rings, could molecular orbital theory explain that older models could not?
- What did Karrer discover about the relationship between beta-carotene and vitamin A?
- What did von Baeyer's work on hydroaromatic ring structures contribute to organic chemistry?
- What evidence from isomers and optical behavior supported Werner's octahedral bonding model?
- What happened when the vanillin extracted from dung was served at a New York dessert fair?
- What happens chemically during olefin metathesis, and why was the mechanism puzzling for decades?
- What is the chemical connection between terpenes found in plants like turpentine and steroid hormones in the body?
- What is the electronic theory of organic reaction mechanisms that Robinson developed, and why does it still underpin undergraduate chemistry?
- What is the isoprene rule and what common building block does it reveal in terpenes?
- What is vanillin and how is it normally produced at industrial scale?
- What made nineteenth-century terpene chemistry so confused before Wallach's work?
- What made the structures of alkaloids like morphine and strychnine so difficult for nineteenth-century chemists to determine?
- What organic molecules did Philae detect during its sixty hours of operation, and why did they matter to origin-of-life questions?
- What other areas of food chemistry did Virtanen work on alongside his silage research?
- Which everyday scents come from the terpenes Wallach studied?
- Why are enzymes so particular about which mirror-image form of a molecule they will bind?
- Why can two molecules with identical atoms and bonds behave completely differently inside the human body?
- Why did thalidomide's two mirror-image forms have such different effects on the body?
- Why did the protective effect appear specific to pizza rather than to tomato products in general?
- Why does the carbon-fluorine bond make PTFE so chemically inert and heat-resistant?
- Why was it so difficult to bond carbon atoms together predictably before palladium catalysis?
Sources
- Discovery of Teflon (PTFE)
- Discovery of buckminsterfullerene (C60)
- Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry