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from the good-thing-it's-all-around-us dept.
A nifty move with nitrogen has brought the world one step closer to creating a range of useful products—from dyes to pharmaceuticals—out of thin air.
The discovery comes from a team of Yale chemists who found a way to combine atmospheric nitrogen with benzene to make a chemical compound called aniline, which is a precursor to materials used to make an assortment of synthetic products.
[...] Holland said previous attempts by other researchers to combine atmospheric nitrogen and benzene failed. Those attempts used highly reactive derivatives of benzene that would degrade before they could produce a chemical reaction with nitrogen.
Holland and his colleagues used an iron compound to break down one of the chemical bonds in benzene. They also treated the nitrogen with a silicon compound that allowed the nitrogen to combine with benzene.
Journal Reference:
Sean F. McWilliams et al. Coupling dinitrogen and hydrocarbons through aryl migration, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2565-5
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:10PM (1 child)
Yay ! Now we have a way to create out of thin air truckloads of highly unstable nitrogen-based products and stockpile hundreds of thousands of tons of them in giant warehouses for years and years !
What could possibly go wrong ?
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:52PM
The year 1909 called and wanted to remind you about the Haber Bosch process.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:54PM (2 children)
That's not my field, but the abstract didn't leave me convinced that they were processing atmosphere rather than Nitrogen gas.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:51PM (1 child)
It's not hard to separate Nitrogen from atmosphere.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 14 2020, @03:55AM
Understood. It doesn't add hugely to the cost. But it does add. And, of course, how much it adds depends on the required purity. Medical oxygen machines run on household current, so it can't be very expensive. I'm assuming that it generates the oxygen via fractionating. OTOH, you neither usually need or want pure oxygen in medical uses. But presumably those machines separate oxygen from nitrogen to a fair degree of purity. That they're designed to recover the oxygen rather than the nitrogen should be a trivial design difference.
But if you need to add that extra step, then it's less useful. And if it needs to be highly purified, then the costs are higher.
But my main complaint was WRT the presentation. The summary made it sound as if you could just pipe in air.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday August 13 2020, @02:35PM (2 children)
It's a liquid composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of other gases. Best thing you never saw!
(Score: 3, Touché) by richtopia on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:06PM (1 child)
I think thin air is mostly CO2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars [wikipedia.org]
At least that is what I think of when I hear "Thin Air".
For further reference on the Richard scale of air:
Thick Air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars [wikipedia.org]
Air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth [wikipedia.org]
Thin Air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars [wikipedia.org]
Funny Air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:35PM
Thick Air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:26PM
"Thin air." Why is it always "thin air"? Never fat air, chubby air, mostly-fit-could-stand-to-lose-a-few-pounds air."
--Michael Garibaldi
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:34PM (2 children)
So they are also getting the benzene from the air? Because if not, then I don't see how this is making stuff out of thin air any more than fire produces ash out of thin air.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @06:49PM
They are producing a bunch of hot air.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:14PM
I don't see how this is making stuff out of thin air
They are making money out of thin air. Yoooo toooo can become a millionaire!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:24PM (1 child)
The immediate use I can think of for this is nitrogen-containing fertilizers, and we are in serious need of these as the soils deplete. There are nitrogen-fixing plants (in symbiosis with bacteria) that do this, but I never expected to see a non-biological process; the problem is that nitrogen molecules, N2, are triple-bonded and therefore *extremely* stable, so breaking that bond to produce nitrates and such requires a lot of energy.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @02:21AM
A large chunk of Nitrogen fertilizer is Ammonium Nitrate and Urea. Urea is harvested from many places. However, most of the Ammonium Nitrate is artificially generated, thanks to Haber and another process that slips my memory. If possible, you order it as straight product (CAN) because that includes the lime for your fields too and is much cheaper than the purified stuff separately.