Not only Angewandte Chemie celebrates a 125th anniversary this year, it is also the 125th anniversary of the discovery of liquid crystals by F. Reinitzer, Prague: T. Geelhaar and colleagues summarize the history of these intriguing materials in an Essay. In a Review, E.-K. Fleischmann and R. Zentel discuss liquid-crystalline ordering as a concept in materials science: How can liquid crystals be used in the design of semiconductors and stimuli-responsive devices? In a second Review, C. Tschierske summarizes the complexity of liquid-crystalline structures discovered recently. P. Kirsch et al. shed some light on the development of liquid-crystal materials for display applications, and the required synthetic chemistry at Merck. How do you pass on enthusiasm for chemistry to young people? B. Haran and M. Poliakoff explain their approach, a YouTube channel, in an Editorial.
The Highlights deal with compounds with high nitrogen content (Q. Zhang and J. M. Shreeve) and asymmetric hydrogenations (J. N. H. Reek et al.).
In the Communications section, L. Latos-Grażyński et al. present a porphyrin skeleton that contains a palladacyclopenadiene (see picture). V. S. Oganesyan et al. show how to probe columnar liquid crystals by EPR spectroscopy and Q. Li et al. demonstrate light-driven reversible handedness inversion in helical superstructures of chirally doped liquid crystals. F. Giesselmann et al. found a lyotropic analogue of the ferroelectric smectic C* mesophase. C. Hertweck et al. describe regiodivergent N–C and N–N aryl coupling reactions of indoloterpenes.
