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Comment by snitty | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Not sure why you were downvoted. I love the breathless enthusiasm of the article, but I still have no idea why (or if) this is important. What did you learn from Opus?

And quartz of course.

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.

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