Archive for December, 2009
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December 31st, 2009
Drinkable gold…!
A fascinating paper has been published in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal concerning drinkable gold, which in ages long past was used as an elixir to preserve youth. The article was penned by a team of French scientists and medics, and describes their analysis of the remains of Diane de Poitiers, a 16th courtesan and mistress of King Henri II of France. Dianes remains were shown to have unusually high levels of gold, something they say would only be possible on ingesting significant quantities of the metal…We love identifying new uses of gold here at the WGC, but certainly wouldn’t recommend drinking such large quantities of it – take a look at our scientific homepage for some alternative uses instead!
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December 29th, 2009
Nice nanomedicine blog
I came across this really nice post written by Aaron Saenz and thought I would mention here. He has commented on the recently released NIH roadmap to nanomedicine, which outlines how millions of dollars in funding can be awarded to key centres around the USA to promote frontiers of nanotechnology used to cure human illness. He has supplemented this with lots of nice links to interesting gold nanotechnology research around the USA – including a couple of nice youtube offerings… Well worth a look!
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December 23rd, 2009
Gold Bulletin online now
The latest issue of Gold Bulletin 42(4) has just been published online. This issue is a really special one – to acknowledge the magnificent contribution of Dr David Thompson to the development and promotion of the science of gold catalysis. David, co-author of the book Catalysis by Gold and Technical Editor of Gold Bulletin worked tirelessly in this field for many years. A full appreciation of his life can be found here.Blogging will be a bit lighter over the next week or so, with Christmas and the New year celebrations…
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December 21st, 2009
New Book – Gold Science and Applications
I’m excited to announce that a new book ‘Gold – Science and Applications’ has now been published.
There have been many excellent books written on certain aspects of the science and technology of gold, most notably the book of the Hanau gold conference, held in 1996 (“Gold. Progress in Chemistry, Biochemistry and Technology”, edited by Hubert Schmidbaur and published in 1999) and there are several new books covering specific sectors of gold science e.g. on catalysis, chemistry and nanotechnology (see here). However, for those seeking a broader reference source on gold and covering all technical sectors, the most appropriate book on gold, Gold Usage by Bill Rapson and Theo Groenewald, was published over 30 years ago in 1978. The world of gold has changed considerably since then. A few years ago Chris Corti and I believed it was time for an updated book that reflects the more recent developments.
With the co-operation of some of the leading experts in their field, we have attempted to produce a book that is a worthy successor to ‘Rapson’ and to provide an authoritive source of information. We have attempted to cover all the main scientific areas as well as the main areas of application. In some cases this has required some very detailed scientific chapters; other fields require less specific detail and have focused more on the practical application. In addition, to help readers place this science and technology in the context of a much wider gold market, a chapter on the supply, demand and pricing of gold is included. Taken together, our aim for the book is to appeal to both those working in academia and industry.
If you are interested, your can read more and purchase it here .
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December 18th, 2009
Chemistry World’s elemental countdown….
The RSC’s countdown to Christmas focuses on a daily podcast about a specific element. Yesterday it was gold’s turn here…..
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December 16th, 2009
Angewandte Chemie gold
Angewandte Chemie, the field leading journal of the German Chemical Society, often carries high quality gold-related articles (indeed, I have commented on this before). However, recently they have gone a step further with the publication of 5 excellent communications and articles in a single issue! What really struck me about this was the sheer diversity of the work - there is a catalysis paper from Masatake Haruta, a GNP-based DNA detection offering from Jin Zhu at Nanjing University and the cover illustration (see left) which was taken from a gold nanorod paper written by Luis M. Liz-Marzán in Vigo.A fantastic illustration of the strength and depth of gold-based research at the moment.
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December 14th, 2009
Update – Au Nanoclad
My last post on the use of gold coated stainless steel bipolar plates for fuel cells was here. Since then, Ford researchers have published this paper describing in detail the testing of this material. It looks very promising.At the same time, according to Daido Steel, the 10 nanometre gold coated stainless steel provides good impact resistance, formability, recyclability. Volume and weight reduction of a PEM FC can be achieved by using this material compared to a carbon separator plate.
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December 11th, 2009
Medical nanotechnologies making strides
Two recent press releases have illustrated the ongoing progress of nanotechnology in the fields of therapeutics and diagnostics. In the first AuraSense LLC, the company spun out of Northwestern University by Chad Mirkin, has raised $2.5 million in funding to commercialise technology that employs gold nanoparticles to help treat cardiovascular disease.
The second release details the progress of MagForce Nanotechnologies, which has culminated in the German organisation applying for European regulatory approval of its Nano-Cancer® therapy. This therapy allows the targeted destruction of tumors using superparamagnetic nanoparticles to generate heat.
Both of these announcements are exciting, and illustrate tangible progress in the commercialisation of medical nanotechnologies. We are looking forward to seeing plenty more positive reports of this sort in the coming months!
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December 10th, 2009
MRS Fall meeting 2009
I’ve spent the week at the Materials Research Society Fall meeting, and have been really impressed by much of the research presented. Gold-related work has been prominent, with literally hundreds of oral presentations and posters on offer. In fact, I’ve not been able to see everything!
There have been many highlights – Michael Natan gave an excellent overview of Oxonicas work on SERS active particles. Naomi Halas (and students) from Rice University have given a series of good presentations on plasmonics and nanotechnology, and Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli spoke about her groups work at MIT on gold nanorods. There was also an entire session devoted to gold catalysis, with contributions from the labs of Kung, Haruta and Flyzani-Stephanopoulos.
All in all an excellent meeting… Look out for a more thorough review in the next issue of Gold Bulletin.
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December 7th, 2009
Paying for electronics recycling
Reading The Times on the way to work this morning, I was intrigued by a story (‘Redundant meters offer a harvest of precious metals’) about how Britian’s utility companies are starting to replace gas and electricity meters in people’s homes. This is so that new ‘smart meters’ can be installed.What’s interesting from a gold perspective, is that there are 26 million electricity meters and 21 million gas meters to be replaced and each one contains about 0.01g of gold. So that’s well over £10 million of gold that can be reclaimed from this obsolete eletrical equipment and used to cover the cost of recycling. This is a really important point – not just in this particular example, but in the wider recycling of waste electronics like computers and mobiles phones. The recycling of gold from waste electronic materials is a critical component of the economic driver for recycling. Gold represents 65% of the value of typical PC-circuit board waste and 67% of the value of end-of-life mobile phones (‘Improving metal returns and eco-efficiency in electronics recycling’ Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment). I hope the story in The Times, helps to highlight the unique role gold plays in the electronics recycling industry…..
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
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