An experiment that, by design, was not supposed to turn up anything of note instead produced a "bewildering" surprise, according to the Stanford scientists who made the discovery: a new way of creating gold nanoparticles and nanowires using water droplets.
The technique, detailed April 19 in the journal Nature Communications, is the latest discovery in the new field of on-droplet chemistry and could lead to more environmentally friendly ways to produce nanoparticles of gold and other metals, said study leader Richard Zare, a chemist in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a co-founder of Stanford Bio-X.
"Being able to do reactions in water means you don't have to worry about contamination. It's green chemistry," said Zare, who is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science at Stanford.
[...] Around the mid-1980s, however, scientists discovered that gold's chemical aloofness only manifests at large, or macroscopic, scales. At the nanometer scale, gold particles are very chemically reactive and make excellent catalysts. Today, gold nanostructures have found a role in a wide variety of applications, including bio-imaging, drug delivery, toxic gas detection and biosensors.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 21 2018, @03:46PM
FTFY