A recent article by the Curchod group on the photochemistry of thiophenone, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, has recently been highlighted in Derek Lowe’s blog post ‘In the pipeline’, published by Science. The article reported on a joint theory-experiment effort to understand the complex photochemistry of thiophenone, combining time-resolved ultrafast electron diffraction and nonadiabatic molecular dynamics simulations. Dr Lowe suggests that the photoexcited thiophenone molecule can be pictured as ‘extremely drunk and full of caffeine’, explaining the rather unexpected chemical transformations taking place both in the excited and the ground electronic state.