The discovery of a bimetallic palladium(III) complex that can catalyse formation of carbon-heteroatom bonds adds a new facet to our understanding of the chemistry of one of the most widely-used metals in catalysis, say US chemists.Tobias Ritter and David Powers from Harvard University, Massachusetts, have shown for the first time that a palladium(III) complex is responsible for conversion of a C-H bond to a C-Cl bond. While such reactions were known before, the nature of the catalyst had not been studied in detail. 'This work was about analysis of how this kind of transformation works,' says Ritter, 'and we found this Pd(III)...