NMR gets gamified
Lately, this Newscriptster has gotten very into playing Multiplet, a web puzzle game based on the experience of solving proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra.
As anyone who’s ever hurried through one on an organic chemistry exam knows, NMR problems can be very puzzling. “It’s this unique deductive logic,” Jeffrey Marvin, a polymer chemist and the game’s inventor, tells Newscripts.
In Multiplet, players are given a collection of shapes and tasked with arranging them in the correct structure. The number of sides a shape has determines how many connections it can make to other shapes (ranging from 1 to 6). A faux spectrum at the bottom provides clues about how the circles, representing hydrogen atoms, are arranged relative to one another and to the other shapes.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but playing through the 10 tutorial puzzles provides a decent crash course in the game’s visual logic.
Marvin says he was inspired to create Multiplet in 2020, after the meteoric rise of Wordle. His wife, a pharmacist who loves puzzles, helped him playtest early versions on paper. Once he was satisfied with the design, he coded the web version with help from the AI assistant Claude.
The trickiest part, Marvin says, was making sure the puzzles were satisfying and challenging regardless of whether players work with NMR every day or if they haven’t drawn a chemical structure since high school. A lot of people are intimidated by organic chemistry, but “it can be fun,” he says.
When a player completes the puzzle, a little window pops up that displays a link to a web page explaining how NMR works and the words “You just did organic chemistry without crying.”
Competitive spelling meets chemistry
Chemical vocabulary took center stage at this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, on May 28.
The word that clinched the championship for Shrey Parikh at the conclusion of a dizzyingly speedy spell-off round was bromocriptine, a molecule derived from ergot that mimics the activity of dopamine and is used to treat a variety of diseases, including Parkinson’s.
The spelling bee’s editorial director, Molly Becker, says her team chooses between 1,200 and 1,500 words from more than 400,000 in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary for judges to pull from during the national bee. It takes 12–18 months to compile the championship word lists.
“We have to be prepared for a lot of different situations,” Becker tells Newscripts. This year’s crop of national competitors was exceptionally well prepared, and “we need to come up with words that are going to challenge that group, and so that just means a very diverse list.”
The word bromocriptine has a couple of qualities that make it a good choice for a national-level spelling bee and for a speed round in particular. For one, it’s etymologically ambiguous—mostly Greek but infused with just enough Latin to spice things up. Becker says that it’s “cobbled together from different scientific elements, which makes it a lot harder for a speller to study.”
Despite its complexity, bromocriptine is straightforward to judge—a very important quality when contestants are racing to spell as many multisyllabic words as possible in 90 s, as Parikh and his spell-off opponent, Ishaan Gupta, were. There are no double letters, and there are no alternate spellings. “It’s pretty clear to tell if it’s correct or incorrect,” Becker says.
Having a list that pulls from many word origins and areas of study offers students opportunities to explore the English language and perhaps discover something new in the process, Becker says—for example the name of an Indigenous South American language or an unusual geographic feature. Or, just maybe, a semisynthetic alkaloid with medicinal properties.
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