Archive for the ‘nuclear chemistry’ Category
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
(1688 Views)
Note 1: It is an unfortunate consequence of the internet age to be forced to address public misconceptions of research that is published by press-release rather than peer-review. Society & science are not served well from the absence of even cursory peer-review. It should be noted that some of the ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
(280 Views)
Does anyone remember the E. Coli breakout back in 2006? I do. There has never been a quicker way to convince a 19-year-old to eat vegetables until you take lettuce out of their sandwiches for a couple of months.
According to the LA Times report[1], these greens are washed in potent ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry, science news | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
(342 Views)
In recent years, time traveling has been not only a scenario in science fictions and Hollywood blockbusters, but also a scientific possibility due to the rapid developments of quantum theory. Tidbits on the possibility of achieving time traveling has sprouted up in news in the past couple of weeks.
The soon ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry, science news | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
(341 Views)
The discovery of a new isotope of Bohrium, by Nelson et al. (I'm a coauthor as well), was published yesterday in PRL. In total, 8 events of 260Bh were reported. Unfortunately, the new isotope is not long-lived enough to be of practical chemical interest. A summary of the decay properties ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry | No Comments »
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
(151 Views)
Earlier this week a paper by L. Soderholm et al. in Angewandte Chemie may have solved the great plutonium polymer mystery. Plutonium polymer is the ubiquitous noun often spoken by plutonium chemists in regards to the un-extractable ill-defined hydrous oxides of plutonium that will form in any solution of aqueous ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007
(124 Views)
Baumann et al. have recently reported the discovery of three new isotopes 40Mg, 42Al, and 43Al. The discovery is notable for producing an isotope that neither the finite range droplet model (FRDM) nor the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB-8) predicted should be bound.
Of the 3 isotopes, the discovery of 42Al is an unexpected ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
(108 Views)
Morita et al.1 have recently published the details of their confirmation experiment of the German's claim for the discovery of element 112.2,3 The paper reports similar decay properties to the Germans, and for all intents and purposes it looks like element 112 has now been confirmed. Unfortunately, the paper is ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry | No Comments »
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
(93 Views)
In a recent article in C&EN, Steve Ritter writes about a cold fusion presentation at the recent ACS Chicago meeting. The article can potentially be read as lumping the loony-toony crack-pot conspiracy theorists cold fusion with the very real and valid field of low-energy nuclear reactions dealing with cold fusion. ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry | No Comments »
Thursday, December 28th, 2006
(79 Views)
So why study elements at the extreme of the periodic table? Because we want to learn about their Chemistry! This has been made easier with the recent work of Dvorak et al. The work created 4 atoms of the heaviest element we can currently do Chemistry with, element 108(not sure ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry | No Comments »
Friday, December 22nd, 2006
(49 Views)
Like Albert, I've also been asked to fill in for Mitch while he's gone. Since Mitch is a nuclear chemist, I wanted to do something related to that. Unfortunately, in the process, I realized that most of what I know about nuclear science, I learned from the Simpsons. ...
Posted in nuclear chemistry | No Comments »
Addressing Marinov’s Element 122 Claim
on