College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences

EARTH.COM - or years, one rule in chemistry class seemed simple: certain high-energy carbon species, like vitamin B1, fall apart in water. That’s why many reactions take place in specialized organic solvents instead of the most common solvent on Earth. A new study puts a crack in that rule. It shows that a reactive carbon...

EARTH.COM - Scientists once dismissed a 1958 hypothesis about vitamin B1, or thiamine, as unlikely. The idea was that this vitamin, vital for basic metabolic functions, might turn into a very reactive intermediate during certain biochemical processes. Now, researchers have shown that the hunch was correct. Prof. Vincent Lavallo from the University of California, Riverside...

CHEMISTRY WORLD - A new ‘super-shielded’ carbene is stable in liquid water solutions. The US team that made the carbene claims that it ‘unambiguously confirms’ that it is possible to generate carbenes in an aqueous environment – validating a hypothesis put forward almost 70 years ago by the famed organic chemist Ronald Breslow. In the...

SCIENCEALERT - You often need a lot of patience to be a scientist, and that's certainly been the case for researchers who have now found solid evidence for a hypothesis around vitamin B1 (or thiamine) that was first put forward almost 70 years ago. In 1958, Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow proposed that vitamin B1...