Literally from Atoms to Galaxies

Imagine living in a world with three Suns, red jungles or endless night. These ideas have moved from fiction to reality as we discover more and more fantastic planets in our galaxy. This talk explains how we find such amazing worlds and how we know what they might be like.

Our ability to make bespoke molecules is vital for the development of new life-saving drugs. Molecules made of atoms arranged in a large ring are particularly valuable in this context; however, they are generally very difficult to make using existing methods and this can severely limit their use. I will explain why large rings are so important, what makes them difficult to make using traditional methods (through analogy to a classic toy, the ball-in- a-cup) and summarise recent work in our York research group to combat this by ‘growing’ large rings via an innovative system of reactions.