Following reports that graphene oxide (GO) and reduced graphene oxide show weak magnetism at room temperature, and that GO modified by aminoferrocene (1) shows tunable magnetic properties, El-Gendy published an article claiming colossal superparamagnetic behaviour of GO 4 modified by intercalation of aminoferrocene at room temperature. Herein we show the reported synthetic claims bear no real scrutiny and that the conclusions from the computational studies to describe the putative material and its magnetic properties derive entirely from artefacts introduced by the choice of model for GO adopted. Fig. . shows a redrawing of the published synthesis. Contrary to the claims, step 1 -the nitration of ferrocene (2) using the classical nitrating mixture of concentrated nitric and concentrated sulfuric acid -is well known to fail. The authors were well aware of this: they state "nitration of ferrocene has been deemed un-attainable" before citing Woodward's classic 1952 paper which explains precisely why direct nitration fails. At this point a thorough (or even a cursory) reading of the literature from the last 70 years, or even any good textbook on the subject, would have firmly established that this is indeed the case: electrophilic aromatic substitutions of 2 fail when the electrophile is strongly oxidising. It is precisely because nitroferrocene 3 cannot be produced by direct nitration that alternative synthetic strategies have been developed. For reasons which remain unclear to us, the authors decided to ignore the corpus of knowledge on ferrocene's reactivity and instead concluded that since ferrocene is aromatic it must surely be susceptible to direct nitration with the nitronium ion to produce 3. There was no work-up described for 3 and no attempt made to characterise the material obtained. However, in a subsequent personal communication from El-Gendy, in which key new information was provided that was unfortunately absent from both the published methodology and from the PhD thesis from which the methodology was drawn, it was claimed the product from the nitration was isolated from a suspension and washed. If this is the case, there is no reason why the authors should not have properly characterised this material. Despite all the precedents to the contrary, we decided to investigate whether reproducing the authors methodology would indeed lead to the formation of 3. There is some discrepancy in the paper as to the reaction temperature, 5 the (limited) experimental clearly states the reaction is performed using an ice bath, while the Figure reported suggests the reaction temperature was -30 °C. In the first attempt, we assumed that what was written in the experimental was correct and slowly added ferrocene to the HNO3/H2SO4 mixture at 0 °C. CARE! Addition of > 10 mg portions at a time led to spontaneous ignition, indeed as the reaction progressed even addition of this amount led to ignition. Within the first few seconds of the first addition, a blue coloration was observed, consistent with the formation of the ferrocenium ion [2] + , followed by a rapid change to green and then the formation of a brownyblack mixture which remained throughout the remainder of the addition. After ~ 50 mins we had added a total of ca. 200 mg of ferrocene and decide in light of the ongoing ignitions that this was more than enough for our purposes. After a total of ~ 1 hour reaction time, the mixture was carefully diluted with water and the organic components were extracted with ethyl acetate. Removal of the solvent from this mixture under reduced pressure gave a low yield of 28 mg of a brown solid. Separately, the aqueous phase was neutralised and then extracted (ethyl acetate) yielding an orange, gum-like residue (21 mg). The colours of the residues are not consistent with formation of nitroferrocene which is purple. Neither the 1 H or C NMR spectra (see Supplementary Information, Figs. S2, S3, S5, S6 ) of the residues are consistent with the reported spectra of nitroferrocene. The absence of nitroferrocene in the first fraction was further indicated by both IR spectroscopy (Figure ), which showed no peaks at 1507 cm -1 for the nitro group stretch of nitroferrocene, and ESI-MS (Figure ) which showed no peaks at m/z = 231 consistent with the anticipated or reported mass spectrum of 3. Subsequently, based on a series of answers to specific questions raised by us, the authors provided a further information regarding the methodology. In particular they stipulated that the reaction was performed at-80 °C to -30 °C under an inert atmosphere, details omitted from the original publication. Accordingly, in our second attempt, we cooled the HNO3/H2SO4 mixture under a nitrogen atmosphere to -80 °C. This mixture was too viscous to stir at this temperature so we allowed the bath to warm to the point at which stirring could commence (ca. -50 to -40 °C) and the bath was then maintained at this temperature for the addition of the ferrocene. In the first attempt we used a total of 190 mg of ferrocene, which yielded trace amounts (~ 4 mg) of precipitated material despite the authors claiming that the 'product' forms as a suspension and can be collected and washed. The rest of the material stayed in solution, the dark blue coloration of which was indicative of the formation of the ferrocenium ion. The lack of reasonable amounts of isolable material may have been a consequence of the reduced scale of our attempt. So, for the third attempt we planned a reaction on the same scale as the authors, unfortunately, the addition of the first portion of ferrocene led to rapid thermal runaway and spontaneous ignition, at which point further attempts to reproduce the purported synthetic protocol(s) or variations on them were abandoned in the interest of safety.