A few articles from last week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:
- Cover story: "Digitalization comes to the materials industry" (by Rick Mullin)
- Marc Reisch on cyanide in gold processing
- An interview with Ben Feringa by Alex Scott
- Phages and CRISPR - that's a bit different. (by Ryan Cross)
- "China increases the pressure on chemical producers" (by Jean-François Tremblay)
- Fascinating story about how Zika causes microcephaly by a single mutation (by Bethany Halford)
there is a competing gold extraction process that uses acidic solution of disulfide obtained by oxidation of thiourea, it has some advantage for heavily sulfidized ores but it is more expensive and the leaching solution is unstable, so it can be tricky to use on massive scale. And thiourea is hardly improvement, you have to use lots of it (up to 10% solution) and thiourea is a creepy cumulative thyroid toxin. With cyanide, the poisoning is much faster but the long-term exposure effects are less problematic. Also cyanide decomposes quite fast in the environment whereas thiourea lingers
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