10/18/2007

change of plans? (no-content post)

I was planning to post some beautiful red crystals that finished growing after two weeks of resisting the temptation to look at them every five minutes. You would have liked them--they were fibrous and tangled and somewhat reminiscent of hair. Some are shorter and more blocky, and look like they will diffract very well. Unfortunately, I don't have them anymore, and unless some nice people at NIST want to take a shot of them once they arrive, you'll never see them. Sorry!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

speaking of crystals, OMFG this paper is awsome:

Structure of a Thiol Monolayer-Protected Gold Nanoparticle at 1.1 Å Resolution
Pablo D. Jadzinsky, Guillermo Calero, Christopher J. Ackerson, David A. Bushnell, and Roger D. Kornberg Science 19 October 2007: 430-433.

The dude deserved the Nobel.

Excimer said...

wow, impressive. I wonder why noone else thought about doing this- growing sufficiently monodisperse gold nanoparticles is very tricky but not impossible. Good stuff.

Anonymous said...

Homeland Severity monitors crystal color. Red crystals within a Hitlery Ramrod Clinton landslide are a ticket to your being sedated in diapers on a plane approaching Eastern Europe.

Every product will be brown, amorphous, and CO2-absorbing. Proton discrimination by NMRs will be ended: deuterium deserves diversity incorporation for being a minority isotope. Deuterated solvents are token isotopism!

Anonymous said...

I may be wrong, but I think that large nanoparticle crystals are relatively new, circa ~2004. Monodispersity is crucial, and people associated with CB Murray's lab (formerly at IBM) showed that large superlattices were possible if you keep the size distribution very small.

The gold 'nanoparticles' in this paper are actually gold clusters. These tyically correspond to numbers of atoms needed to make a platonic solid, i think.

This paper is great. I'd like to think that Kornberg will work on more traditional chemical systems because of his Nobel. He owes us, no?