Author Archive
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July 26th, 2010
New Era for Gold Bulletin
I want to inform you of a very significant change to the publication of Gold Bulletin due to be implemented from 1st January 2011.
As you may be aware Gold Bulletin dates back to 1968, when the first issue was published by the Chamber of Mines in South Africa. Since 1987 the World Gold Council (WGC) has published the journal. A major change occurred in 2005 when Gold Bulletin became an e-journal and was published on its own website, www.goldbulletin.org . This change enabled the journal to increase in size and reach a larger and growing readership. The archive of back issues was also placed on the website, so enabling ready access to the complete set of volumes published to date. During recent years the journal has achieved some very impressive Impact Factors (IF). Our current IF is 2.324.
As the size of the journal has increased we have found that the costs of producing Gold Bulletin ‘in-house’ at World Gold Council have also substantially increased. We have also found that the world of academic publishing has become increasingly complex and specialised ; producing a journal that meets current demands has become very time consuming for the WGC team, who manage many other activities alongside Gold Bulletin.
With these challenges in mind we are announcing that WGC has signed an agreement with Springer www.springer.com to facilitate the publication of Gold Bulletin from the end of this year. The journal will be published by Springer through the sponsorship of WGC. Importantly, the journal will:
- remain a free, peer reviewed, open access journal
- continue to completely focus on the science and industrial applications of gold
- benefit from Springer’s wider distribution channels and academic publishing expertise
I confirm that I will be remaining as Editor of the journal next year and will be sharing this task with Dr Trevor Keel (who also works at WGC and who you may know from this blog). He will be joining me as Associate Editor, with a particular focus on the nanotechnology coverage in the journal. For those of you that do not know Trevor, he has extensive experience in pharmaceutical research having spent a number of years working for GlaxoSmithKline, the leading healthcare company. As such he has particular interest in the use of gold in the fields of medicine, diagnostics and nanotechnology.
Under the new arrangements for Gold Bulletin, Springer will be largely responsible for the technical production and editing of the publication and so, with sadness I confirm that Dr Patricia Harris will not be continuing in her role as Technical Editor at the end of 2010. I know that many of you have had considerable dealings with Dr Harris and will wish to thank her for a great contribution to the running of the journal over many years.
Further details on the launch of the new look for Gold Bulletin will be announced in due course.
If you have any comments on this announcement we will be pleased to receive them.
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June 30th, 2010
New memory devices
New flexible non-volatile organic memory devices have been developed on plastic substrates based on organic thin-film transistors embedded with self-assembled gold nanoparticles. The team working on this is led by Jang-Sik Lee, former Samsung researcher and now at Kookmin University in South Korea. This is really cutting-edge stuff and could open up a whole new area for gold in electronics. See Nano Letters for more details
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June 14th, 2010
Best of the web…….
A couple of gold science related stories catching the eye this morning:
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June 11th, 2010
Go easy on the Sprite
Like most parents I limit my children’s intake of fizzy drinks, not least because of the affect they can have on their teeth. This recent paper looked at how one popular make of drink affected the leaching of metal ions from gold alloys used in dentistry. Good to see that detailed research work is still being done on the longest used dental restoration material; gold.You can find out a lot more on the use of gold in dentistry in the journal Gold Bulletin here.
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June 9th, 2010
Don’t break a leg….
Repetitive stress to bone tissue causes tiny cracks or scratches, known as microdamage, which increases the risk of fractures and can be a major concern for both the physically active and elderly. Yesterday, in discussion with Ryan Roeder at the University of Notre Dame, I became aware that scientists have demonstrated three-dimensional imaging of damaged bone tissue using functionalised gold nanoparticles. This work was published earlier this year. A really promising piece of research, let’s hope it is followed up with proof-of-concept and product development…. -
June 7th, 2010
Clear water
This technology has been featured on the blog on a number of times, but it is always good to profile it again…..
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June 3rd, 2010
The age old problem…..
Reducing the costs of platinum catalysts in fuel cells has been a goal of the US Dept of Energy’s research program for years. Its easy to be sceptical of so-called breakthroughs in this challenge, but this news reported on Nanowerk looks pretty promising, with a number of new catalyst formulations including the addition of gold to platinum.
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June 1st, 2010
A touch of gold
This story on Discovery News intrigued me. It is reporting that…. “cheap, flexible touch screens made with silver and gold nanowires could soon be rolling off the presses and into cell phones, computers and more. The same technology could even be used in solar panels. Writing in the journal ACS Nano, scientists from Stanford University say the new technology could be immediately used in consumer electronics.”The story continues “….most touch screens and solar panels are glass-based. The hard, insulating glass helps protect and support the thin coating of electrically conductive metals. But glass is also brittle and heavy. When an object strikes a solar panel, or a person drops a cell phone, the glass can shatter. Touch screens made from thin plastic coated with silver and gold would weigh less, take up less volume, be more flexible and could be produced much more quickly than glass plates.”
What the story doesn’t mention is that one of the major problems with current touch screen technology concerns the use of indium tin oxide (ITO) for the conductive transparent layer. At current levels of mine production and consumption, some analysts predict that there is only 15 years supply of indium left.
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May 28th, 2010
Targeting the flu virus
Yet another potential medial application for gold emerged this week when scientists at the University at Buffalo and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published work showing that future pandemics of seasonal flu, H1N1, and other drug resistant viruses could be thwarted by a potent, immune-boosting payload delivered to cells by gold nanorods. Read more here….
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May 26th, 2010
Less gas for NASCAR
A few weeks ago Trevor Keel highlighted the new commercial applications for gold catalysts in carbon monoxide oxidation, as being reported by Premier Chemicals. Well it seems their successes continue to accumulate. They have been working with NASCAR, the US-based racing industry, on driver safety improvement by using Gold based oxidation catalyst NanAuCat™ to improve air quality.Most people know carbon monoxide is a dangerous substance and in the NASCAR sport there is a build up of this material during races which in turn is taken into the car by the air conditioning system. The same air is then delivered to the drivers via there air fed system into the helmet. NASCAR recognised this issue a long time ago and advised the teams of the problem, the teams in turn went out and developed systems to limit the gas being delivered to the drivers.
Premier Chemicals Limited were contacted to look at this problem with their new gold based oxidation catalyst NanAuCat™ as an alternative to current systems, with a view to improving performance and reducing costs. NanAuCat™ is a gold based oxidation catalyst on titanium dioxide carrier deposited on an amorphous carbon support. It demonstrates extremely high activity in converting carbon monoxide to the less harmful carbon dioxide. The real advantage comes now as the teams can design much lighter and substantially more efficient catalyst filters using NanAuCat™ giving the drivers increased protection from the dangers of poisoning. In recent tests conducted in this application NanAuCat™ catalyst showed conversion efficiencies of more than 99% at high air flow rates. No current carbon monoxide removal catalysts employed in this application gets close to these efficiencies without using a significantly higher quantity of catalyst.
Richard Holliday
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