8 
Admittedly, I did spend my childhood playing with explosives. But I certainly never had as much success as 10-year-old Clara Lazen (not pictured), who accidentally created a new energy storing molecule, tetranitratoxycarbon, that could be used as an explosive.
Using one of those molecular modeling sets we all messed with in school, Clara forged a combination of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms that stumped her teacher. So he put the call out to Robert Zoellner (pictured) at Humboldt State University to see if it was indeed a real molecule. His searches through an online chemical database returned no exact matches, which meant that Clara had in fact discovered a brand new molecule.
Tetranitratoxycarbon, as it’s called for short, uses the same combination of atoms as nitroglycerin, and also has a knack for storing energy. So if it were synthesised, it could be used to create a fairly hefty boom. As a result of her discovery, Clara, and her teacher Kenneth Boehr, are both listed as co-authors on a research paper published by Zoellner about the molecule. Also, I suspect she’s probably getting an A on that piece of coursework. [Humboldt State University via The Mary Sue]
That’s a bright spark! I had one of those chemistry sets you could get from Argos back in the day. Most of the stuff in it was watered down, so the worst you could do was make something fizz a bit like flat cola
She’s not a bright spark, she was making pretty patterns and accidentally made a configuration nobody had gotten round to before.
Isn’t that how most scientific discoveries are made?
Yes, but they are usually those scientific discoveries are made by someone who is already a scientist, or works with these things for a living. I don’t see why this is getting so much praise, it just happens to be very rare that a new molecule could be formed.
Heaven forbid we should praise a child for something; if we carry on doing that sort of thing, they may end up doing something useful with their lives.
It’s not rare to make new molecules. Synthetic chemists like me make probably several hundred a day
Why exactly does the board have the Schroedinger Equation on it? >_>
What? didnt you learn that when you were 10?
Humph. So much for “we all messed with in school”. I’ve only messed with one once, and that was only for hydrocarbons. Since when did children aged ten do molecular structure anyway? I fail to understand how this is so good. If she was messing around with it, surely there’s no genius behind that? At the most it is a puzzle.
You can see why it’s so energetic, those are some well pumped up electrons in those clouds wanting to relax.