Cover Picture: Thermal Activation of Methane and Ethene by Bare MO.+ (M=Ge, Sn, and Pb): A Combined Theoretical/Experimental Study (Chem. Eur. J. 35/2011)

摘要

A competition between hydrogen-atom abstraction and oxygen-atom transfer, two important elementary steps in many chemical transformations, is presented in the Full Paper by H. Schwarz, X. Zhang et al. on page 9619 ff. A gas-phase study at atomic level may provide intrinsic information for a catalytic system. However, as reminded by Gerhard Ertl and a Chinese old saying, “a baguette is more than the sum of its crumbs” or “one cannot appreciate the wisdom of a whole game from a single move”.