SciTechDaily;

UCLA chemists have discovered a major flaw in a fundamental rule of organic chemistry that has held for 100 years. They say it’s time to rewrite the textbooks.

Organic molecules, which are primarily made of carbon, have specific shapes and arrangements of atoms. Molecules called olefins contain double bonds, or alkenes, between two carbon atoms. Typically, these atoms and their attached groups lie in the same 3D plane, and deviations from this structure are rare.

The rule being questioned, known as Bredt’s rule, was established in 1924. It asserts that molecules cannot have a double bond at the “bridgehead” position—the junction of a bridged bicyclic molecule—because this position would distort the geometry of the double bond. Bredt’s rule has constrained the design of synthetic molecules by preventing chemists from creating certain structures. Since olefins play a critical role in pharmaceutical research, Bredt’s rule has limited the types of molecules that scientists could envision, potentially holding back innovations in drug discovery.

h/t

Everything is Amazing:

This is one of the great underlying wonders of practical modern archaeology: how fantastically incomplete it is, and how much has still to be discovered.

Easter Island findings change everything we know about the Earth’s mantle.

Geoffrey Kabat;

In 2003, UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom and I published a study of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)—also called “secondhand smoke” or “passive smoking”—in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Using data from the American Cancer Society’s prospective study of 1 million adults, we concluded that ETS exposure was not associated with increased mortality.

Since that conclusion flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that had long driven state and local bans on smoking in public places, our study understandably sparked a controversy in the public health community. But the intensity of the attack on us in the pages of a medical journal—by critics who were certain that our study had to be wrong but typically failed to provide specific evidence of fatal errors—vividly illustrates what can happen when policy preferences that have taken on the status of doctrine override rational scientific debate.

A recent study by American Cancer Society (ACS) researchers underscores that point by showing that, contrary to what our critics asserted, the cancer risk posed by ETS is likely negligible. The authors present that striking result without remarking on it, which may reflect their reluctance to revisit a debate that anti-smoking activists and public health officials wrongly view as long settled.

Because there’s no grift in “likely negligible”.

Mysterious ‘Dark Oxygen’ Discovered at Bottom of Ocean Stuns Scientists

Chugging quietly away in the dark depths of Earth’s ocean floors, a spontaneous chemical reaction is unobtrusively creating oxygen, all without the involvement of life.

This unexpected discovery upends the long-standing consensus that it takes photosynthesizing organisms to produce the oxygen we need to breathe.

A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe challenge established ideas about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.

Led by researchers from Penn State and utilizing the NIRSpec instrument on JWST as part of the RUBIES survey, the international team identified three enigmatic objects dating back to 600-800 million years after the Big Bang, a time when the universe was just 5% of its current age. They announced the discovery on June 27 in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The scientists analyzed spectral measurements, or intensity of different wavelengths of light emitted from the objects. Their analysis found signatures of “old” stars, hundreds of millions of years old, far older than expected in a young universe.

I was expecting an earth shattering Kaboom: China Finds Something Strange in Sample Retrieved From Moon

My gut says “no”. but whatever: An interstellar cloud may have caused an ice age on Earth.