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Scientists Create Compound With a Single Element
rocketman768 writes "An international team of researchers including scientists at the Carnegie Institution has discovered a new chemical compound that consists of a single element: boron. Chemical compounds are conventionally defined as substances consist of two or more elements, but the researchers found that at high pressure and temperature pure boron can assume two distinct forms that bond together to create a novel 'compound' called boron boride."
I think my head just exploded. Compound, of one element. What next transparent aluminum?
Boring.
No ascii art.
Why is this not an allotrope? I'm not a chemist so excuse me if the answer seems obvious to those with a better understanding.
It's a 2 for 1 special, all you need is high pressure and heat! I still don't quite understand how this works though.
Sorry, had to say it. :)
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
"Nobody does it like molten boron"
http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/7/78/Molten_Boron.jpg/200px-Molten_Boron.jpg
Where's my pizza pizza?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Call me when they make Hydrogen HexaHydride!
---- Now, where did I put that knife.....
Call me when they produce Helium Heliate
they're covalent, not ionic.
Whats the difference between that, and say, N2 or O2? Aren't those also compounds of a single element?
With oxygen and nitrogen the two atoms are identical for all intents and purposes. They share electrons evenly. In this case you have boron atoms that are giving up electrons and boron atoms that are accepting them to reach a stable state. So they're behaving differently, rather than the same.
Boron Boride, the nobleman? This discovery is an abomination, like the Boride of Frankenstein. And isn't Boron the cousin of the famous Ukranian trumpet player, Boris Boride? I know, my jokes are so bad you must think I'm a total stupid boron. What happens when you drill the surface of something? You boron it. What happens when the drill goes out of control and starts flopping all over the place and you're stuck on top? Boron bo-ride!
Ok I'll stop.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
this news bores me.
Frankly, the article is interesting enough without mangling it in the summary.
This is the first ionic crystal to consist of only one element. As a compound, by definition, contains two elements, it's not a compound. A boron ionic crystal is substantially different from, say, the multiple allotropes of carbon, though.
However, this is a solely theoretical crystal -- it hasn't been synthesized.
Finally out of Bad Karma hell, lets see how long THAT lasts.
You won't help the situation by joking around (no Karma for Funny), you need to bash Microsoft or something.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Because boron boride is actually the cure for cancer. You'll see.
You have to have electro negativity charge difference > 2 in order to be considered ionic.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Because boron boride is actually the cure for cancer. You'll see.
Yes, first you need to pressurize the patient to 100,000 atmospheres. Tada! You're no longer going to die of cancer.
Because every new vapor-ware discovery will cure cancer, make free power, and cause your re-productive organs to tingle.
Remember, when you gaze into the boron boride crystal, the boron boride crystal gazes back into you.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
is compounding your embarassment
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
as anyone knowledgeable of the star trek timeline is intimate with
put your forehead in your hand and stare at the table in shame in your best jean luc picard and hand in your star trek credentials at the door
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Did anyone else read that as "Single scientists join compound for singles...".
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Boron Boride: Buzz Killington's little brother...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
As I'm sure has been repeated, it appears that this is a compound of Boron where the Boron exists in two different covalently bonded structures, with different electronegativities. This results in the two structures forming ionic bonds.
SRSLY.
What about... two hydrogen atoms sharing one electron? Wouldn't one be an electron donor and the other a receptor? Or is that splitting hairs? (Honestly, I don't even know if that bond is possible.)
I'm pretty sure you can probably get those two to bind together with some work. What I'd like to know is if you could get two of them to stick to an oxygen atom and sort of share their electrons amongst them. Honestly - is that bond even possible? Well, I suppose by now someone has managed it.
We're intimate with dilithium crystals??
More like "Boron!"
No, wait... dammit
Not to say you are at all wrong, it is a good explanation, but the distinction between 'ionic' and 'covalent' bonds is really one of a matter of degree between 2 extremes.
At the one extreme we have single element compounds like H2 or O2 in which the electronegativity of the component atoms is (by definition) equal and thus have an even charge distribution and are entirely covalent. This is the simplest case.
At the other extreme we have substances like NaCl which are made up of atoms with extremely different electronegativities. However there is no such thing as a purely 'ionic' bond. Even in an extremely polar molecule like NaCl the charge distribution isn't ENTIRELY Na+1 and Cl-1. It very nearly is, but not quite.
MOST compounds are far less clear cut. Even H2O's bonds, which are fairly polar and is composed of 2 species with very different electronegativity the bond is generally characterized as having both an ionic and a covalent character.
So, our boron boride is also going to be a compound which is not going to be entirely clearly either ionic nor covalent.
The real problem is that these terms only signify useful generalizations about how chemical species behave. While chemistry CAN be reduced to physics in a reasonably straightforward way in principle, the reality is that most of the terms and most of the ways chemists ordinarily think about chemistry is a set of 'rules of thumb' which are based as much on observation and valued as much for their general utility as they are based on precise formulations of fundamental laws and processes. Even the notion of 'compound' is really to a certain extent a convenience and necessarily gets a bit fuzzy at the 'edges'.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Boring...
*sings* No body does it like, molten boron!
Don't you think?
It's a shame I can't mod this post redundant. It would have been funny.
Common hydrogen gas, is 2 hydrogen atoms sharing TWO electrons. It is a reasonably stable and entirely covalent compound. That is you cannot say that one hydrogen has BOTH electrons and the other hydrogen has none. Each one has a 'share' of both electrons at once, and that share is exactly equal.
The difference with this boron boride is that some of the boron atoms have a bigger share of the electrons than others, which is at the very least pretty unusual for a compound with only one type of element in it.
By ordinary 'textbook' chemistry like you would learn in Chem 101 you would say 'impossible', but that's mostly because textbook chemistry is a bunch of generalizations that provide a 'good enough' answer MOST of the time for common cases.
Sort of like if you say 'my Farrari can beat any car on the road'. It may be true, but then there will come that day when you spin a main bearing and get dusted. All the chemists are agog! (and I worked in the obligatory car analogy, yippeee! ;)
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Which you've described reasonably well. 2 H's and an O will quite happily share electrons and come out of your tap too. That bond is not an 'even split' though, the oxygen holds tighter to the electrons and gets more than its 'fair share' of them.
Water is somewhat 'sticky' (viscous) because of this fact. The O part of it has a bit of a negative charge, and the H parts a bit of a positive charge, so it is a 'polar' molecule and the H side of one water sticks a bit to the O side of the next one. This gives water its very high boiling point and other interesting properties.
In terms of types of bonds it is a mixture, partly covalent, partly ionic.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
All bonds between different species are at least PARTLY 'ionic' in character. At least until now though NO bonds between like species have demonstrated ANY ionic character (at least that I know of). So it is interesting.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Who gives a flying F about this anyway - seriously how does this advance the human race?
Or repay deep-out-of-the-money home mortgages?
Boronic, isn't it ?
Your post, or the research?
if you are true star trek fan, yes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They already invented this, it's called arctic silver. Okay, maybe those are 3 different silver compounds but I could have sworn it was 3 different silver atoms like ions or something. Iunno. There's always hydrogen and deuterium and tritium. Those don't normally sort.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
In the mid-1990s I studied with the book Chemistry in Context by Hill and Holman. The companion book of experiments and real-world applications had a chapter on anions of alkali metals, and it included a picture of the crystalline self-compound Na-Na+.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
why is it important to high light the Carnegie institutet?
Where's the obligatory Australian connection?
Would be "Nobody doesn't like molten boron!"
Read Pynchon.
:-)
Reduced to physics? Reduced to physics!! Grr. If its being 'reduced' to physics, then is the rest of it unscientific alchemy?
Wikipedia has some further references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkalide
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I'm a machinest.
This part of TFA puzzled me. What he's describing is a genetic optimization algorithm, which has been known for decades. I looked up the full text of the Nature article, which doesn't claim novelty in its theoretical method, but does name the software used -- USPEX.
USPEX is a specific software package co-developed by Dr. Oganov, the lead author of the paper. I think his comments on how it works -- which are generic and quite correct -- were misinterpreted by the ScienceDaily reporter, who has done Dr. Oganov a disservice. USPEX was new in 2004; the concept of genetic optimization was not.
Yes, first you need to pressurize the patient to 100,000 atmospheres. Tada! You're no longer going to die of cancer.
And they'll be able to neatly bury you in an Altoids tin
What will the Boron lady think of this new development: http://www.periodicvideos.com/videos/005.htm
Because boron boride is actually the cure for cancer. You'll see.
It is the fifth element, you know.
Reduced to physics? Reduced to physics!! Grr.
If its being 'reduced' to physics, then is the rest of it unscientific alchemy?
Mathematics.
that Boron is a contraction of Boring Moron, which is coincidentally what the writer of the original article is.
did I do that right?
Extremely polar molecules like NaCl, salts, are so polar that they hardly share electrons at all. Thus the vast majority of the forces that hold them together are purely electrical charge, as opposed to the case of covalance where the bond is stabilized due to the formation of an energy level which favors stability.
In these types of compounds there ARE no molecules per-se. There is no one Na+ that is associated with a specific Cl-.
Still, the original point was that chemical bonds are understood to have both ionic and covalent components, and most bonds are not clearly at one extreme or the other.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
In a crystal of table salt there are no molecules. No one Na+ is associated with any one given Cl-. The crystal is made up of alternating Na and Cl atoms, sort of like a checkerboard.
Highly ionic crystalline solids are compounds, but not composed of molecules, and in fact NaCl is NEVER a molecule. In aqueous solution it dissociates entirely. If you melt it you still have a situation where the various atoms move freely in the now liquid substance.
Very few highly ionic substances, salts, even CAN be vaporized. They are so polar that at the extreme temperatures required you basically just tear atoms off the stuff and end up with a big cloud of ions.
In a sense you could think of a crystal of salt as a single large macromolecule. Diamond would be an example of a somewhat similar covalently bonded structure.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The higher the pressure, the closer Boron is to being metal-like. Then it should be no wonder that charge is distributed unevenly.
Nobody doesn't like high pressure boron boride!
without sarcasm? ;)
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
What about... two hydrogen atoms sharing one electron? Wouldn't one be an electron donor and the other a receptor? Or is that splitting hairs? (Honestly, I don't even know if that bond is possible.)
H2+ does exist, and is useful in studying molecular orbital theory. In fact, it shows how traditional Lewis theory breaks down: the bond consists of but a single electron.
Also useful in this realm is H3+, which has two electrons holding together three protons.
The electron is shared among all three rather equally, I think, so it wouldn't be a very ionic bond.
Reduced to physics? Reduced to physics!! Grr.
If its being 'reduced' to physics, then is the rest of it unscientific alchemy?
Well, actually you are correct. Much of chemistry simply works because... well because we can see it work that way.
With Physics, we can observe phenomena & model it using Math. We can then extrapolate our math and come up with a new model, and if we were correct with all our steps we can (eventually) find other phenomena that match this model.
With Chemistry, we derive a model based on observation, do the math, get a new model, and find that the new model is completely invalid... even though the math seems right.
So to sum it up, the models we use in Chemistry are largely incorrect- we have a lot of very limited cases that allow us to do Chemistry, but nobody has ever been able to come up with anything that even approaches a unified theory. At least in Physics we have e=mc^2.
I bet California has already declared it to be cancer-causing..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
We still have people in the office debating this.
I, along with a few others at my office, contend that physics is the base, not math.
What makes math wrong? Why isn't 1+1=3? 'Cause when you take 1 apple and set it beside another apple, you get 2 apples, not 3.
Physics is the base. You could invent any math you want, but the only math that really is thought of as correct is the one that adheres to the physics.
You should have said something. I've got mod points right now and you could have borrowed one. :-)
Seriously, though, just 'cause there's no "-1, horribly bad pun" mod isn't an excuse to mod without knowing the meanings of the different available ones. They could have modded me "overrated" and I'd have had nothing about which to complain . I might not have agreed, but could have accepted it as an honest difference of opinion.
This post could be quite legitimately modded down as "offtopic", but, since it isn't restating the content of someone else's earlier post to this story, it isn't redundant.
Now if there were some way that this post could be modded "-1, redundant, :-)", that would be funny.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Reduced to physics? Reduced to physics!! Grr.
If its being 'reduced' to physics, then is the rest of it unscientific alchemy?
Yes.
That is the very thing that separates math from physics. We can declare that 1 + 1 = 3 is an axiom and then derive a whole bunch of things from this within what GÃdel's Incompleteness Theorems show to be necessary.
Mathematics exists in a realm completely separated from anything else, and it is very much like programming except for that programming is by necessity discrete and math allows you to deal with continuous things such as geometry. You could program a physics engine with completely different laws of physics than those in 'the real world'* and it could make for a very interesting computer game, but from the perspective of a mathematician physics is just a grand project to come up with an engine that gives the same result as those found in actual live experiments.
Theoretical physics exists in a quagmire between math and physics, and for some reason the guesses that theoretical physicists make often turn out to be dead-on. Quantum Electrodynamics stands out as a most prominent and realistic guess, but it is important to note that in spite of 50 years of confirmation QED is COMPLETELY SEPARATED** from 'the real world'.
*Poorly defined concept, subject of politics
**QED was composed within the system it tries to model, and from Conway's Law we can derive that it can approach but never actually reach the complexity of 'the real world'.
All rites reversed 2010
In this context, the word "reduced" means something along the lines of "explained in detail". Mathematicians use the word this way with fair regularity; not sure about physicists.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> We can declare that 1 + 1 = 3 is an axiom and then derive a whole bunch of things from this
Technically, yeah, you can, but you have to *remove* from your system any axioms that would lead to contradictions when you start deriving theorems. (Unless what you're trying to do is prove by mathematical induction that 1 + 1 = 3 is false, in which case finding a contradiction is the _goal_.) In the case of 1 + 1 = 3 you end up getting rid of all references to 2, at which point 3 merely becomes the symbol for two, which isn't very useful.
Much more interesting is what happens when you declare that the sum of the angles of a triangle is greater than 180 degrees.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Two hydrogen atoms sharing one electron would just have a single orbital, which is equally shared. However, that orbital is repelling, the energy state of a free unbound hydrogen atom and one proton would be more favorable.