Neil Withers
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neilwithers.bsky.social
Neil Withers
@neilwithers.bsky.social
1.5K followers 860 following 230 posts
Features Editor for Chemistry World, Twitter refugee. Tractor fan
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neilwithers.bsky.social
Can't wait to see the write-up of the MOF/[porous] coordination polymer/whatever nomenclature debate on the BBC!!!
Screenshot of text: However, while the term ‘coordination polymer’ had been in use since 1916,25 no established definition of this field existed at the time. Therefore, different terminology was being used to describe similar structures while the area matured. For example, ‘infinite polymeric frameworks’, ‘coordination networks’, or ‘network structures’ were used in addition to coordination polymer. The wildly popular term ‘metal–organic framework’ and its abbreviation ‘MOF’ appeared in the second half of the 1990s,21,26 while the alternative phrase ‘porous coordination polymer’ (‘PCP’) was introduced in the early 2000s.27 For clarity, the currently recommended terminology from IUPAC distinguishes the following structures:28 a coordination polymer is ‘A coordination compound with repeating coordination entities extending in 1, 2, or 3 dimensions.’; a coordination network is ‘A coordination compound extending, through repeating coordination entities, in 1 dimension, but with cross-links between two or more individual chains, loops, or spiro-links, or a coordination compound extending through repeating coordination entities in 2 or 3 dimensions.’; and a metal–organic framework is ‘A metal–organic framework, abbreviated to MOF, is a coordination network with organic ligands containing potential voids.’ Within this classification system, MOFs constitute a subset of coordination networks, which in turn constitute a subset of the overall group of coordination polymers.
October 8, 2025 at 11:17 AM
neilwithers.bsky.social
I always say that although the Nobel gets criticised it is definitely good for one thing: getting some proper chemistry* in front of people's eyeballs, once a year.

So it's great to see this real in-depth reporting from the Guardian:
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Oh.

*and biology
A screenshot of a very short news story: "The Nobel prize in chemistry 2025 has been awarded to three scientists for developing revolutionary porous materials for applications ranging from gas storage to drug delivery. Susumu Kitagawa, at Kyoto University, Richard Robson, at the University of Melbourne, and Omar Yaghi, at the University of California, Berkeley, share the 11m Swedish kronor (about £871,400) prize announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. The trio were honoured “for the development of metal-organic frameworks”."
October 8, 2025 at 10:57 AM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Electrons go wheeee
In a normal conductor, the electrons jostle with each other and with the material. When a material becomes a superconductor, the electrons join up as pairs, Cooper pairs, and form a current where there is no resistance. The gap in the illustration marks the Josephson junction. Cooper pairs can behave as if they were all a single particle that fills the entire electrical circuit. Quantum mechanics describes this collective state using a shared wave function. The properties of this wave function play the leading role in the laureates’ experiment. ©Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
October 7, 2025 at 9:55 AM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Well that's perfectly clear.

WTF??
Section of text with the following highlighted: "An English teacher took me aside and drew a rectangle on a piece of paper, placed a shooting arrow on each corner of the rectangle, plus one halfway along the horizontal top line, and a final arrow, in the same position, down below."
September 24, 2025 at 12:59 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Well that's perfectly clear.

WTF??
Section of text with the following highlighted: "An English teacher took me aside and drew a rectangle on a piece of paper, placed a shooting arrow on each corner of the rectangle, plus one halfway along the horizontal top line, and a final arrow, in the same position, down below."
September 24, 2025 at 12:59 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
NB, I have evidence of him defacing RSC property (OK, signing his own book in the library) for future blackmail
Professor Matthew Hartings signs a copy of his book Chemistry In Your Kitchen (RSC 2016 RRP £19.99) in the RSC library.
August 12, 2025 at 1:31 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
It’s amazing who you bump into on a sunny day in London… #ChemSky
A selfie of Matt Hartings (left) and Neil Withers (right) in the sun outside a pub; two middle aged men with adjacent tastes in shirts and hairlines
August 12, 2025 at 12:36 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Congrats! Please enjoy my Venn diagram that proves the potential existence of Wout van der Poel(s)
A badly own drawn Venn diagram showing three sets Wout, van and Poel(s), and the positions of cyclists Wout van Aert, Wout Poels and Matthieu van der Poel
June 18, 2025 at 1:21 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Yes indeed - although I always assume it’s by Joseph Wright! And here’s what the Bedlam furnace looked like in 2023. (I grew up ~15 miles away and now inflict the regular visits I had as a child on my own kids!)
A ruined blast furnace, mainly of brick with many arches and openings. It is covered by a roof to protect it from the weather, and railings in front
June 3, 2025 at 8:31 AM
neilwithers.bsky.social
I’m not convinced by some of the chemistry in one of the museums though - that’s not how atomic numbers work!
A museum display sign that says ‘Iron for LiFe26’
June 2, 2025 at 3:19 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Here’s the bridge from some more recognisable angles
The Iron Bridge, nowaways painted brown, over the river Severn, itself looking quite brown and muddy, with bright green trees on either bank. A view of the Iron Bridge from further along the Severn, the water looking bright and reflective, and the bridge just poking out from the town
June 2, 2025 at 3:08 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
The streets of Ironbridge (and Coalbrookdale) are paved (well, kerbed) with iron (if you look closely right at the bottom of the pic)
With the famous Iron Bridge in the background, a photo of some brick paving with an iron kerb by the road
June 2, 2025 at 3:04 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Amazed /impressed to see while re-reading The Log from The Sea of Cortez that John Steinbeck knew perfectly well that scientific discovery isn’t neutral, but ‘warped’ by race and personality.

Page 2!! 1941!!
A photo of page 2 from the introduction to The Log from The Sea of Cortez, highlighted text saying ‘We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities.’ The cover of Steinbeck’s The Log from The Sea of Cortez in paperback, with a picture of a red fishing boat by a beach
May 2, 2025 at 4:34 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
These fields covered in solar panels are so dammed ugly, aren’t they?

Oh no wait, those are crops covered in plastic, as is increasingly common.
In the flat fenland landscape, fields of rich brown - almost black - earth are covered with shiny white plastic sheets under a clear blue sky.
May 2, 2025 at 1:53 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Here’s one I prepared earlier!
A black and white photograph of a hedgehog eating from a white ramekin in a back garden hedgehog house
May 2, 2025 at 8:42 AM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Then we had this visitor to our hedgehog house later on
A black and white video capture of a hedgehog in a wooden hedgehog house putting its nose into a white ramekin of food
April 29, 2025 at 2:04 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Cutting edge chemistry in this week’s Phoenix comic!
A comic strip with new elements, including cow-cium (concentrated cow farts), pantium (makes up most pants), curryium (the tastiest element) and redpandium (the jerkiest of all elements - I think that might refer to a character elsewhere in the comic)
February 27, 2025 at 3:49 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Mostly Seville, plus some lemons and homegrown yuzu
Three Lemons, six small yuzu and two large Seville oranges
February 17, 2025 at 9:59 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Here’s last month’s batch!
Jars of lovely marmalade
February 17, 2025 at 9:29 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
I share a birthday with one of the incredibly famous people in this pic
David 'Fox Mulder' Duchovny in a black suit and tie next to #ChemSky superstar Stuart 'Stu' Cantrill
January 13, 2025 at 4:36 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Marmalade! (I forgot to mention or indeed photograph the boiling, slicing, water and sugar, reboiling steps)

Happy new year everyone.
On a white kitchen table, three large jars of marmalade
January 6, 2025 at 11:15 AM
neilwithers.bsky.social
What do you get if you mix 1kg of Seville oranges, 450g of lemon and 150g of *home-grown* yuzu?
On a wooden worktop, three lemons, six small warty yuzu and two Seville oranges
January 6, 2025 at 11:13 AM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Such sad news about Fraser, what an incredible figure in world chemistry. I feel lucky to have known him, and those he raised and mentored who then influenced me: his daughter Ali and @stuartcantrill.bsky.social
A smiling Fraser Stoddart holds three gold Nobel medals (two replicas, one real!£
December 31, 2024 at 4:09 PM
neilwithers.bsky.social
Thanks to all the writers, and of course our wonderful art & design team. I’ll leave you with a few of my signature woeful sketches that various artists turned into fabulous images this year!
A poor pencil drawing of a stick person at a desk with a pyramid of computers under the floor A superhero style supercapacitor holding up a car, like the cover of issue 1 of Superman, only really badly drawn Three overlapping circles with the words cell, globe and atom in them, with the word ‘text’ in the central intersection
December 20, 2024 at 11:35 AM
neilwithers.bsky.social
With the 12 laureates looking back, there's a great quote from Bob Lefkowitz about a reaction from a chemistry blogger to 'yet another biologist winning'...
o when our prize was announced, several of these pure chemists … were outraged. I remember there was one guy, I can’t remember who the hell he was, but he has a chemistry blog really into the Nobel prizes. So this guy stays up all night the night before the chemistry prize … spinning off comments about who he thinks is going to win. And he says, one minute to go until the announcement and then they announced Brian Kobilka and myself. And it reads, argh, another biology prize, what’s going on!
October 3, 2024 at 11:22 AM