We have a Junior Qualifying Exam at Reed, which in our department takes the form of an oral exam based on a recent paper from the primary literature for each student.  I just finished picking 4 papers for this year's crop of inorganic junior quals.  The students have 3 days to learn everything they can about the paper before the oral exam in front of 2 faculty.  Several of these choices were inspired by talks I heard at the ACS Salt Lake City meeting.

Although these literature papers are not yet fully developed learning objects, for my students they draw on many of the themes that we have discussed in class.  Perhaps they might be useful for someone else to use as the basis of a class discussion or problem set questions.  If you do develop a learning object from these, I hope you will post it back to VIPEr!

Arguably, some of these might be considered organometallic chemistry topics, but I thought this forum might be a more general place to put the collection. 

1)  Brandi M. Cossairt, Mariam-Céline Diawara, Christopher C. Cummins, “Facile Synthesis of AsP₃,” Science 2009, 323, 602.

This paper is very short, but the supporting information provides a lot of good material for discussion questions.

 2) Cristina Femoni, Maria Carmela Iapalucci, Giuliano Longoni, Stefano Zacchini,* and Salvatore Zarra, “New Findings in the Chemistry of Iron Carbonyls: The Previously Unreported [H_4-nFe₄(CO)₁₂]^n– (n = 1, 2) Series of Clusters, Which Fills the Gap with Ruthenium and Osmium,” Inorg. Chem. 2009, 48, 1599-1605.

3)  Neal P. Mankad, Matthew T. Whited, and Jonas C. Peters, “Terminal Fe^I–N₂ and Fe^II ···H–C Interactions Supported by Tris(phosphino)silyl Ligands, ” Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 2007, 46, 5768-5771.

4) Jian-Zhong Wu, Filippo De Angelis, Thomas G. Carrell, Glenn P. A. Yap, John Sheats, Roberto Car, and G. Charles Dismukes, “Tuning the Photoinduced O₂-Evolving Reactivity of Mn₄O₄⁷⁺, Mn₄O₄⁶⁺, and Mn₄O₃(OH)⁶⁺ Manganese–Oxo Cubane Complexes,” Inorg. Chem. 2006, 45, 189-195.