The answer’s to these questions can be found here. Day 4 of the quiz can now be found here.

On the third day of Christmas… Well, you get the idea. It’s day 3 of the Chemistry World quiz.

Today’s first question is: Why was this (erroneous) structure of a chemical, isolated from fungi found on a dead log in Siberia, back in the news this year, after first causing controversy back in 2006?

What is this structure?

Who became president of the Royal Society of Chemistry in July? 

And now the answers to yesterday’s quiz. The giant of organic synthesis who joined Rice University was none other than K C Nicolaou.

The nerve gas that researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory figured out how to destroy safely using computer simulations was VX. Nicholas Cage’s approach to dealing with VX in the film The Rock could be described as rather more hands on! Finally, for the bonus point, the chemical name of VX is (O-ethyl S-[2-(diisopropylamino)ethyl] methylphosphonothioate). Very well done if you got that. You can read about the LANL scientists’ work here.

As always, don’t phone, it’s just for fun!

                  

Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2012/12/05/chemistry-world-quiz-day-3/