Nanoparticles Change Crystal Structure When Wet

Roland Piquepaille writes "This news release from the University of California at Berkeley is quite astonishing. 'A UC Berkeley team comprised of physicists, chemists and mineralogists reports on the unusual behavior of a semiconducting material, zinc sulphide (ZnS), when reduced to pieces only 3 nanometers across. They found that when the surface of a ZnS nanoparticle gets wet, its entire crystal structure rearranges to become more ordered, closer to the structure of a bulk piece of solid ZnS.' My summary includes two images of a 3 nanometer zinc sulphide (ZnS) nanoparticle with or without surface-bound water. How can this be used for? Surprisingly, they think that it 'could provide a way to tell whether pieces of rock from outer space came from planets with water.'"

Comments

protein folding

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like it could be the same kind of process that triggers folding in organic chains in the presence of water ? After all, the water matrix does exert certain forces on particles that are at the same scale, it probably triggers an avalanche effect on the ZnS crystal starting at the surface of the material.

Why *only* water?

[DrSkwid]

Surely with the multitude of molecules there would be some other that would cause such a re-arrangement.

To conclude that a space rock was formed in the presence of water could be an expensive mis-interpretation, such as if a space exploration program was based on that assumption.

I'm not trying to debunk their research but without experimenting with a wide variety molecules in different pressures and temperatures all that can be concluded is that "these crystals order themselves in water" not "any ordered crystal formed in water".

I look forward to finding out why I am wrong.