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A Swell Time For Gels
Paris (AFP) April 29, 2007 Japanese chemists have devised a gel that swells up to 500 times its size when in contact with solvents, an invention hailed as a breakthrough for absorbing dangerous industrial spills. The jelly-like substance is a successor to polyelectrolyte gels, which expand when in contact with water and are best known in nappies, also called diapers. Polyelectrolyte gels, though, are useless in tackling organic, or carbon-based, solvents. Their structure typically collapses because of the aggregation of charged atoms in such compounds, the only exceptions being "polar" solvents that are particularly water-loving. A team led by Kazuki Sada of Kyushu University found a way around these by adding tetra-alkylammonium tetraphenylborate, a substance that attracts less-polar solvents. The gel has been successfully tested on carbon tetrachloride, toluene, tetrahydrofuran and other common industrial solvents. Their work is published online on Sunday by the journal Nature Materials.
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New Family Of Pseudo-Metallic Chemicals Could Create New Electronic Materials
Columbia, MO (SPX) Apr 25, 2007The periodic table of elements, all 111 of them, just got a little competition. A new discovery by a University of Missouri-Columbia research team, published in Angewandte Chemie, the journal of the German Society of Chemists, allows scientists to manipulate a molecule discovered 50 years ago in such as way as to give the molecule metal-like properties, creating a new, "pseudo" element. The pseudo-metal properties can be adjusted for a wide range of uses and might change the way scientists think about attacking disease or even building electronics. |
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