Organic chemist Derek Lowe has put up a new installment in his "Things I Won't Work With" series.
An early favorite has appeared in my “most alarming chemical papers” file for this year. Thomas Klapoetke and Joerg Stierstorfer from Munich have published one with a simple title that might not sound unusual to people outside the field, but has made every chemist I’ve shown it to point like a bird dog: “The CN7 Anion”. The reason that one gets our attention is that compounds with lots of nitrogens in them – more specifically, compounds with a high percentage of nitrogen by weight – are a spirited bunch. They hear the distant call of the wild, and they know that with just one leap of the fence they can fly free as molecules of nitrogen gas. And that’s never an orderly process. If my presumably distant cousin Nick Lowe does indeed love the sound of breaking glass, then these are his kinds of compounds. A more accurate song title for these latest creations would be “I Love the Sound Of Shrapnel Bouncing Off My Welder’s Mask”, but that sort of breaks up the rhythm.
These Bavarian rowdies have prepared a series of salts of the unnerving azidotetrazolate anion. As they point out, the anion was described back in 1939 (in what I hope was a coincidental association with the outbreak of the Second World War), but its salts are “rarely described in the literature”. Yes indeed! People rarely spray hungry mountain lions with Worcestershire sauce, either, come to think of it.
Enjoy.
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