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Field of Science
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From Valley Forge to the Lab: Parallels between Washington's Maneuvers and Drug Development3 weeks ago in The Curious Wavefunction
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Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.3 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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Course Corrections5 months ago in Angry by Choice
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
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Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
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A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
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Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
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Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
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Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
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WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
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Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
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The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
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Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
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Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
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Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
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in The Biology Files
The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry
Chemistry is not a world unto itself. It is woven firmly into the fabric of the rest of the world, and various fields, from literature to archeology, thread their way through the chemist's text.
Protecting Groups
The whole family was at camp last week, living in tents, sleeping on cots, eating in the mess hall. Every camp has them, squirrels and chipmunks that survive on the crumbs of campers' treats (or sometimes the whole banana). We were warned - no food in the tents except in metal boxes.
The boys had the tent next door to ours. I came back from dinner one night to find a very happy squirrel just making off with a chip container from the kids tent. At which point I remembered the dried fruit I'd left in my pack after the morning hike. Whew...it was still there. The rodents had been attracted to the far more tasty snack leavings next door. The boys tent is serving as (a chemist would say) a protecting group.
Chemical protecting groups work similarly. Say you have two sites on a molecule that can react with a reagent, but you only want one to undergo the reaction. If you can put a protecting group on the site you want left unmolested, like a cover, you can run the reaction, change the other site and then take off the protecting group. (See the scheme for an example.)
It works wonderfully for many reactions, and is keeping my pack safe from marauders.
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