Putting the Spotlight on the Host-Guest Equilibrium Elephant

This week's JACS ASAP reports the discovery of a new beast, the Host-Guest Equilibrium Elephant.


The Host-Guest Equilibrium Elephant enjoys basking in colored lights arranged in an equilateral triangle. It also appears to play a critical role in maintaining the delicate balance between regular old tetrahedra and special tetrahedra with endohedral green spheres that are so rarely seen in our ecologically-ravaged, uber-technological world.

One theory claims that the Elephant is an allusion to the fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant. This, however, does not explain the role of the trichromatic lighting display - it is clearly pointless to illuminate an elephant for blind men, since it is obvious that doing so would be completely ineffective in rendering the ineffable Elephant comprehensible to such sensorily-deprived individuals.

I prefer the simpler explanation: everyone knows that elephants are an auspicious way to herald in a new decade, and the lights are there because the parade's starting in a couple of hours.

Reference: C. Sgarlata et al., "External and Internal Guest Binding of a Highly Charged Supramolecular Host in Water: Deconvoluting the Very Different Thermodynamics", J. Am. Chem. Soc. doi:10.1021/ja9056739