UPDATE: March 2025 – Almost a decade since I last mentioned this, they are now way past 200 million…219 million, in fact.
One little bit of chemistry news that I always try to cover are the milestones as the Chemical Abstracts Service announces the next “round number” in its database of chemical structures. It was September 2007 when I mentioned their reaching 50 million structures, but I am fairly sure I wrote about their 10 millionth in newscientist back in the early 1990s…
This week, CAS announced the 100 millionth chemical substance in its registry in the service’s 50th anniversary. That is quite astounding, 100 million chemicals! On average a new substance registered every two and a half minutes since 1965, although three quarters of the entries were added only in the last decade.
