Category Archives: Chem Resources

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

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Pity Larimer County in northern Colorado. We poor sods who live here find ourselves sandwiched between two unexploited deposits of natural mineral wealth. To the east of Fort Collins, near the hamlet of Nunn, is a fairly large uranium ore body. In the northwest, there may be an exploitable diamond deposit. Perhaps hundreds of Kimberlite pipes may be lying in the CO/WY region waiting to be exploited.

Diamonds have already been mined in northern Colorado, near the Wyoming border. The Kelsey Lake diamond mine closed in 2002 due to bankruptcy. The Kelsy Lake mine produced the 5th largest diamond ever found. The yield of the formation is reportedly 4 carats per 100 metric tons of ore.

Given that the Colorado Front Range has been substantially gentrified, the discovery of mineral wealth in the vicinity of hobby ranchers and McMansions will make for some interesting times for the county commissioners. Uranium and Diamonds. NIMBY.

Stealers Wheel Video 1972.

PGM Cu-Ni Strike Near Thunder Bay

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10 September, 2008. Anglo American has acquired a 12 % stake in the Australian mining firm Magma Metals Limited. Magma Metals had previously announced “spectacular” results August 11, 2008, in its exploratory drilling activities in the Current Lake intrusive complex north of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.

Magma reports a 2.5 kilometer long strike zone with mineralization varying from 5.6 g/ton to 26.5 g/ton of Pt + Pd from one drill hole. The drilling revealed concentrations as high as several percent of Cu and Ni as well. Magma Metals reports that it has been undergoing a 24,000 meter drilling program to map the Thunder Bay claims.

Archaic Chemical Terms

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There are interesting sites out there that list antiquated chemical terms. One apparently authoritative site lists 18th Century chemical terms (compiled by Jon Eklund of Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology). 

Some terms seem to remain quite useful, some are hopelessly irrelevant, and others are just odd.  Naturally, I am attracted to the odd words. Have a look for yourself. Here are a few good ones copied verbatum from early in the alphabet-

Cohobation –Repeated distillations, or any cyclic process in which a liquid is vaporized and condensed as, for example, in refluxing.
Cucurbit – The lower part of an alembic. Shorter, more squat and ovoid than a matrass.
Decrepitation – Rapid physical decomposition of some crystals when heated. Characterized by a crackling noise.
Dephlegmation – To remove water from a solution, usually one of an acid or alcohol. There is a sense of purifying about the term, as opposed to simple concentration.
Desquamation – The process of removing scaly crusts which form on a surface.
Dulcification – Any process in which a caustic substance is rendered less corrosive.
Empyreumatic – Tasting or smelling or burnt organic matter.
Exalt – To make more spiritous, volatile, or generally more active; activate.

I wonder if any of these would get through the peer review process if one were to try to use them in a procedure submitted for publication? Perhaps if Roald Hoffmann used them, I suppose.

Publishing in Open Access Journals

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In the course of searching chemical topics I keep running into the on-line publication Molecules, A Journal of Synthetic Organic Chemistry and Natural Product Chemistry.  This journal is part of MDPI, Molecular Diversity Preservation International, with an office in Basel, Switzerland.  MDPI is also dedicated to the “deposit and exchange of molecular and biomolecular samples”.

The idea behind this journal is to provide open access. The journal asserts that, with this approach, articles get substantially higher citation numbers. Open access is an alternative to paid subscriptions. In this model, the author pays the publication fee up front for peer reviewed editorial oversight and rapid publication.

This was covered by C&EN in the July 3 of 06 issue. It was stated in the article that Elsevier was planning to offer the same service for authors who wanted free access for a cool US$6,000 per article.  The Public Library of Science has a similar program, but with a more reasonable price structure.

What I find especially exciting about this publication mode is the MolBank service. Have you ever ended up with new compounds or data that was perhaps deserving of disclosure but not part of a body of work that would develop into paper?  Here is a blurb from the website-

Molbank (ISSN 1422-8599, CODEN: MOLBAI) publishes one-compound-per-paper short notes and communications on synthetic compounds and natural products. Solicited timely review articles will also be published. Molbank was published during 1997-2001 as MolBank section of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049, CODEN: MOLEFW). Since 2002 it is published as a separate and independent journal. Molbank is a free online Open Access Journal. To be added to the subscriber’s mailing list, write your e-mail address into the “Publication Alert” box on the right side, and press the “Subscribe” button. Molbank is indexed and abstracted very rapidly by Chemical Abstracts.

Interestingly, this could be a possible venue for defensive disclosures in intellectual property. Hmmm … 

The question is, will paying-to-publish be cheaper than paying-to-subscribe? And, how will library administration have to change to accommodate this? 

But perhaps the bigger issue may be related to a certain snobismus that exists in regard to publishing. At some point, the rock stars of research (Whitesides, Trost, etc.) need to wave their hands over this mode of publishing and utter something like “verily, it is good” so the rest of the herd will thunder in that direction.

The writer of this blog has vented on this issue several times.  Putting public financed research results into free public access is the fair thing to do and should contribute to innovation and get new technologies into use at lower cost.  Turning over copyright of research papers to private third party groups only adds to the expense and complication to the use of this national treasure.

No doubt this will be vigorously opposed by the publishing establishment. The US$6000 fee charged by Elsevier is absurd and in reality is the beginning of the end of their publically financed milking of the R&D cash cow.