A few of the articles from this week's issue of C&EN:
- Cover story: "The rise of organic LEDs" by Jean-François Tremblay
- Did not know iridium was $19/gram - yikes!
- I really enjoyed this profile of the DEA efforts to track "designer drugs" by Erika Gebel Berg.
- If you want to read different parts of the refrigerants industry dog one another (which is fun!), this Marc Reisch piece on ammonia refrigeration is a great start.
- (Anyone ever notice how "chemical incident at grocery store" is always about ammonia leaking from the coolers?)
- Jeff Johnson covers a tempest over a PNAS paper about methane leaks around natural gas extraction sites.
- ACS director-at-large Ingrid Montes, on gender disparities in STEM worldwide.
Ir and Rh are always very expensive, historically even more than Pt and Au (although now it is less). Pd and Os are slightly less expensive, and Ru and Ag are pretty cheap. The difficulty is very limited supply and lots of speculation, so any time there is a rumor of a major new application (like superalloy containing few % of platinum group metal to be used in fighter jet engines) the price quickly grows to insane levels
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the cost of the ligands and overall cost of the metal-ligand complexes of these things. Those can dwarf the cost of the metal. Grubbs' catalysts, I understand, are in the neighborhood of $30-35K/kg. Last time I looked (about 2 yr ago) the ruthenium accounted for only ca. 5% of the total cost.
ReplyDelete"women outnumber men (53%) at the bachelor’s degree level worldwide. Female university students dominate in North America (57%), in Central and South America (49–67%), and even more so in the Caribbean (57–85%).....this percentage drops at the Ph.D. level, where male graduates (57%) outnumber female graduates."
ReplyDeleteWomen are up to 85% of the student body? Girl power!
Men are 57% of the student body? Problem! Patriarchy!