[snitty]

>Move over cyclopentadiene anion—there’s a new five-membered aromatic ring in town, and this one is made of silicon.

CHEM-Es are build a little different from the rest of us.

[nerdsniper]

Chemists really. Chem-E’s basically just play IRL Factorio at work. The graphs in Factorio look almost exactly like OSI PiSoft charts, which basically every chemical plant uses.

[gilleain]

Cyclopentadiene is a great molecule - it can form 'metallocene' compounds where two cyclopentadiene (Cp) rings 'sandwich' a metal ion between them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallocene

Like Cp--M--Cp where the '--' are an unusual kind of 'bond' which is somewhat like five carbon-metal bonds, although I'm sure there is a more accurate orbital description of the interaction.

[theideaofcoffee]

The ‘--‘ is a ligand bond, a fundamental aspect of coordination and organometallic chemistry.

[bonzini]

"The average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars" (https://xkcd.com/2501)

[moffkalast]

And quartz of course.

[robwwilliams]

Perfect! I read this “heart-warming” overview of two papers in Science and learned zero about why this is of any significance. The discovery is significant but I had to probe Opus 4.6 to find out why.

The personal focus is a distraction. It would be great if science writers could focus on the science and significance of the advance.

[theideaofcoffee]

Nah, this is just a strict chemical synthesis problem, no need for the engineers yet, until you want to make ten thousand tons of the stuff.