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Comment by subnaught | Hacker News Reader

An organosilane is basically any molecule with a Si-C bond. This reaction step creates the Si-C bond, so you could (in theory) use it to prepare any organosilane by starting with the correct Si- and C- containing fragments. Organosilanes currently find wide use in industry as hydrophobic coatings, adhesion promoters, and as useful intermediates in drug synthesis.

It's a little hard to describe just how unbelievable this discovery is. Before this, if you were to propose research in this area, you would most likely be laughed at. It's a bit like if you discovered a hard drive could also be used as a microprocessor. In both cases, there seem to be very good reasons why it could never work. In this case, however, those reasons just happened to be wrong.

EDIT: Free access to the original paper here: http://rdcu.be/cmm5

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Don't know if you were thinking of this with your reference, but you CAN use your hard drive as a microprocessor, even a whole new computer!

https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

Thanks for that link, it's an interesting read. One particular story there is so great it bears posting:

"what I found was a thread from a guy called Dejan on the HDDGuru forums. Dejan had managed to corrupt the internal flash of his hard disk in some way and wanted to know if there's a way to either boot the controller from external flash, or a method to re-write the flash. For five days, he doesn't get a reponse, but the guy is inventive: the next thing he posts is the message that he has found the pinout of the JTAG-port. That's a major find: the JTAG-port can be used to control a controller like a puppet. You can stop it, restart it, modify memory, set breakpoints etc with it. Dejan then figures out how to dump the boot ROM of the controller, figures out there's a serial port on one of the hard disk headers and manages to restore his flash ROM. He then dumps a few more bits and pointers about the flash update process before finally disappearing into the mists of the Internet again. "

So what will happen now ? since we no longer know how (some) catalysts work, will this start a race of scanning materials(i.e. combinatorial chemistry) to find catalysts ?

> since we no longer know how (some) catalysts work

It's not like we ever knew exactly how things work at the molecular level. Chemistry is still an expanding field, there are theories to explain molecular combinations in most cases but there is not fixed, absolute theory behind it that explains everything in every single case.

> race of scanning materials(i.e. combinatorial chemistry) to find catalysts

What for ? There's tons of literature already available (more than you can absorb in a single lifetime), and experiments need to be carefully planned and understood, and not just randomly thrown at multiple targets.

>experiments need to be carefully planned and understood, and not just randomly thrown at multiple targets.

Well, if you automated the process...

Makes me want to build a real life GLaDOS

> Well, if you automated the process...

Problem is, the understanding cannot be automated at this stage. Combinatorial experiments are great to optimize an existing process, it's not that great at finding new stuff or new insights.

> [...] will this start a race of scanning materials(i.e. combinatorial chemistry) to find catalysts ?

It will be like the race to find high-temperature superconductors all over again :-)

Thank you!

I have to say, I'm all for making science articles more accessible, and I like that science journalism is more widely reported, but it really annoys me when an article both doesn't go into the technical details in any depth, and doesn't provide a noticeable link to the primary source.

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