Y4s also require significant supervision, and all of this will be pushed onto research groups. Regardless of pursuit of Chemistry research afterwards or not, the transferable skills from the lab experience are what we're all really after, regardless of institution.

...without significant lab time, repeated exposure, building familiarity/confidence and complexity gradually. Reducing lab experience further jeopardises the performance level of final year students significantly, as I have seen from supervising project students at the end of Y1, Y2 and Y3.

What I would say is that lab teaching needs to be carefully crafted to maximise the student experience to ensure value for money. However, it also needs to give students the time to think, to explore, work problems out, perform complex operations safely and proficiently. You can't do all that...

It's a great point for discussion with students about potential issues with the algorithm (massively overshooting if you are near a stationary point, and you may find a different minimum from the one you are closest to)

The slight issue with that description is it doesn't find the minimum quickly if you're a long way away from the lowest point. So instead, you move slightly from your first point if you're on a steep slope, and a longer way if the slope is shallow.

But it becomes a good discussion point with students - can they see any potential issue with that sort of algorithm? (Multiple minima, and being near stationary points means you end up moving very far away from your initial guess)

Unfortunately, CoPilot was hopeless. I spent hours refining my query and correcting its output suggestions and I just gave up. Gemini couldn't solve my problem either, and I'm a big fan of Gemini!

When you get to the point at the bottom, everywhere you look is on an uphill slope, so you must be at the bottom. This is the (local) lowest energy state.

Haha yes. It you have a graph and you want to find the lowest point, what do you do? Well, you look at your local environment, and if you seem to be on a downhill slope, it's likely moving a bit further will keep going downhill. So, move down the hill a bit, and then repeat reassessment.

Interestingly, I was trying to do the data analysis for Theo's VICEPHEC poster in Excel, but found it quite challenging to get the data analysed. I was going to turn to Python, but I was curious to see if CoPilot would be able to solve my problem in Excel...

My approach to this work was to relate minimisation algorithms to things I did at school, and Newton-Raphson and numerical analysis seemed like a good tie-in.

It doesn't have to be Excel, but the logic behind coding, data organisation, commands - skills that are used in algebraic manipulation - these are the maths skills I think everyone should have, if not in chemistry specifically

Has Jackie Weaver moved Handforth Parish Council over yet?

So, after adding over 50 g of PhBr and thinking it was reacting smoothly and only slightly exothermically, I got a shock when it suddenly turned black and started foaming spectacularly, shooting all the way up - and out - the condenser. A black mini-fountain of Mg, benzene and PhMgBr.

I needed to make a large batch of phenylmagnesium bromide, which needed over 100 g of bromobenzene. I'd made the Grignard reagent a reasonable number of times on scales up to 30 g, so thought this would be fine. This time, what I thought was reaction initiation wasn't though...

A lovely 3D model to show E2 elimination of a bicyclic ring system - so satisfying to examine the structure!