The carbon-hydrogen bonds in alkanes — particularly those at the ends of the molecules, where each carbon has three hydrogen atoms bound to it — are very hard to ‘crack’ if you want to replace the hydrogen atoms with other atoms. Methane (CH(4)) and ethane (CH(3)CH(3)) are made up, exclusively, of such tightly bound hydrogen atoms. A team of researchers has now described how they break these bonds while forming new carbon-nitrogen bonds (amidation).