Yeah, they’re selling this as a sustainable reaction because the second product is apparently formic acid instead of CO2. But of course that means less hydrogen per molecule of methanol and the efficiency using sunlight also seems to be low. So I would agree, sustainable in theory but absolutely nowhere near practical for anything.
When you are talking about large molecules like biologics (antibodies, most vaccines, etc.), there are a whole bunch of other things that can go wrong, but not this.
For protein based drugs there are prions: misfolded protein isoforms able to catalytically convert correctly folded proteins, basically following the same logic as the examples of smaller molecules. So far I guess we only know of one group of proteins that do this (like the mad cow disease one) but theoretically it could always happen to others we just don’t know about yet. :)
Sorry if that made anyone feel worse again…
It is tin pest, an autocatalytic transformation of tin, and it is absolutely in the video and related to the topic (see Lvxferres comment). Just to calm down everyone who wants to get angry about clickbait before having watched the video.
Private equity still generally sucks tho.
I am a chemistry buff and also had a look at the original research paper. Aticle is open acess if anyone is interested https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-025-02055-9. So here is the way too long explanation.
Sadly no, they didn’t discover an entirely new class of double bonds that are stable in this bent configuration. Instead those bent double bonds are very reactive and therefore can’t exist for very long. But they are reactive in a specific way that proved useful for attaching those big 3D shapes to something else in interesting ways. That means that the double bonds are “used up” in the reaction and are no longer present in the new molecules they made.
The clickbait headline in general just puts way too much emphasis on the unusual double bonds. It is not a new concept in organic chemistry at all that double bonds can be strained (=bent out of plane) and that they become more reactive when they are. The perfectly flat case is just the most stable geometry for double bonds, which makes it more difficult to have molecules that force them to be bent. Because of this the bonds in this case could also be more accurately described as one-and-a-half bonds than “true” double bonds.
Brendt’s rule (roughly, that you cannot have molecules where double bonds are strained this much) was not considered an unbreakable “principle that had stood for more than a century” at all. The first counter examples, including the ones in the article, already popped up in the eigthies, around 60 years after he established that rule. The remaining of the article actually represents the research paper pretty accurately, just the headline and first two paragraphs are heavily sensationalized.
TLDR: The molecules in the article are just two pretty extreme cases of bent double bonds that have been known for decades. The researches here “just” (this is still impressive work) managed to use these weird edge cases of double bonds for some interesting new reactions that provide a shortcut to structures that would be a pain to synthesize in another way. Is this actually immediately useful for drug discovery? Maybe. Someone made some interesting new shapes in an easier way for other scientists to play around with. Maybe that helps with something, maybe it does not. But now we have one more tool in the chemistry toolbox to try and make new helpful molecules.
Also not who you replied to, but I had a quick look at what I could find online.
It is a pretty deep system, where factions take their actions in the background in turns every ingame month or adventure. They all have their own stats, bases of operation, assets, goals, etc. and can attack each other, expand, gain influence or wealth and a whole lot of other things.
Basically its a “the GM plays a strategy game by themselves behind the scenes” approach. Personally, I think its a bit too involved for its purpose unless you really enjoy playing that solo game in addition to all the other game prep.