Mystery Molecule: the trail is getting colder

It’s three days since the mystery molecule was announced and although I’ve had local interest in Cambridge there’s only been one external post. You must know that in police work it is critical to make rapid progress in the first 48 hours. After that the trail gets colder. So if you had fed me with comments, there might have been some more clues.
I have confirmed that Peter’s approach works. It actually mirrors much police work – careful systematic collection of large amounts of small pieces of data. If this were a matter of national interest or there were a finiancial reward it would have been solved by now.
Remember that your posts can be anonymous. And not to give the mystery away.
But perhaps it’s simply that it’s not worth blogging chemistry – I have an interesting Open Access item that I must post later today and will certainly get some feedback.
P.

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2 Responses to Mystery Molecule: the trail is getting colder

  1. Propter Doc says:

    Well I spent a good bit of last night trying to figure things out, but never got anywhere close enough to post a comment. I would say that there was very little logic in my approach which ranged from guessing ‘orange stuff we’d encountered as undergrads’ and looking up wikipedia, to searching web of science for your previous papers to see if there were any clues there.

  2. pm286 says:

    (1)Thanks very much for posting. Although everything I reported in the original post was correct, the molecule is a bit of a chameleon and dark red is not its commonest colour which is yellow. I’ve probably acted like too many murderers, priding themselves on their undetectability, while gradually giving away more information. There is now enough information on these pages to solve it, given all that has been written and to know that the result is almost certainly correct.

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