Researchers in Europe have developed a hydrogen storage material based on porous magnesium borohydride that can safely adsorb large quantities of the gas via both a physical and a chemical mechanism. They used X-ray diffraction, infra-red and Raman spectroscopy to investigate this material. via Infrared - Your Guide to IR, FTIR and NIR spectroscopy.
boron
Novel nanosensor platform for direct detection of a cancer biomarker in blood - In a recent development, scientists in Spain have developed a rapid nanochannel-based immunoassay capable of the filtering and subsequent detection of proteins in whole blood without any sample preparation. This is the first time that a simple assay to detect proteins in […]
Space ice goes against the grain - Space ice made from a mixture of methanol and water expands under pressure, and shrinks when heated - the opposite behaviour to most solids. Dominic Fortes at University College London, UK, is interested in the internal structures of icy moons like Saturn’s Enceladus, which is thought to have […]
These are my reactive links for October 9th from 13:37 to 13:50: What did science journalists make of this years science Nobel Prizes? - Knight Science Journalism Tracker discusses the chemistry Nobel and more Sunny side up - Spire Semiconductor has set a new world record for solar cell efficiency. The company, which has been […]
Chemistry textbooks will tell you that you need at least two different elements to produce an ionic material. So, what to make of a paper in the journal Nature by Artem Oganov of the Swiss research center, ETH Zurich, and colleagus have simulated a superhard form of boron that contains ionic bonds. The team was […]