In March 1989, two chemists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann, stunned the world by claiming that an electrical current from a palladium electrode immersed in a test tube of water had resulted in nuclear ‘cold fusion’ at room temperature.1 For many years, attempts to understand and reproduce this seemingly impossible result- with sketchy information from

A short review article, also from the group of Igor Larrosa at Manchester, on the use of aromatic carboxylic acids as coupling partners in biaryl synthesis, appeared earlier in European Journal of Organic Chemistry (2017, 3517-3527). It is suggested in the micro-review that benzoic acid derivatives are atom-economic alternatives to traditional cross  coupling partners, and