Increasingly scarce metals are being recovered from mining waste by University of Queensland researchers, who are making the most of native plants' metal-absorbing nature.
Biotechnology
Jul 16, 2019
0
12
Coal ash solids found in sediments collected from Sutton Lake in 2015 and 2018 suggest the eastern North Carolina lake has been contaminated by multiple coal ash spills, most of them apparently unmonitored and unreported ...
Environment
Jun 03, 2019
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103
In a significant step toward large-scale hydrogen production, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a low-cost catalyst that can speed up the splitting of water to produce hydrogen gas.
Materials Science
May 09, 2019
0
17
There's a good chance the device on which you are reading this contains cobalt. It's an essential metal for batteries in phones and laptops. There's also a chance the cobalt was mined by slaves.
Social Sciences
May 02, 2019
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7
Do you feel the warmth coming off your computer or cell phone? That's wasted energy radiating from the device. With automobiles, it is estimated that 60% of fuel efficiency is lost due to waste heat. Is it possible to capture ...
General Physics
May 01, 2019
0
25
Electric vehicle revolution is well under way. Norway ambitiously heads toward having all new cars sold as zero-emission by 2025. China continues to be one of the major drivers of EV boom. The US market experiences strong ...
Energy & Green Tech
Mar 20, 2019
125
38
Additive manufacturing, also called 3-D printing, is commonly used to build complex three-dimensional objects, layer by layer. A*STAR researchers have shown that the process can also help to make a high-performance alloy ...
Engineering
Mar 18, 2019
0
7
Scientists at Aston University have discovered a technique similar to medieval stained glass-making that can completely eradicate the deadliest hospital infections within hours.
Materials Science
Mar 05, 2019
0
551
For many years, scientists have been looking for an effective and efficient way to turn water into energy-storing fuels using solar- and wind-powered electricity, likely by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. To do ...
Materials Science
Feb 08, 2019
0
36
Researchers at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST) have developed nano-catalysts that can reduce the overall cost of clean energy fuel cells, according to a study published in the journal of Applied ...
Materials Science
Jan 10, 2019
0
8
Cobalt ( /ˈkoʊbɒlt/ or /ˈkoʊbɔːlt/) is a chemical element with symbol Co and atomic number 27. It is found naturally only in chemically combined form. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal.
Cobalt-based blue pigments have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was later thought by alchemists to be due to the known metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue-pigment producing minerals; they were named because they were poor in known metals and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes upon smelting. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the kobold.
Nowadays, some cobalt is produced specifically from various metallic-lustered ores, for example cobaltite (CoAsS), but the main source of the element is as a by-product of copper and nickel mining. The copper belt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia yields most of the cobalt metal mined worldwide.
Cobalt is used in the preparation of magnetic, wear-resistant and high-strength alloys. Cobalt silicate and cobalt(II) aluminate (CoAl2O4, cobalt blue) give a distinctive deep blue color to glass, smalt, ceramics, inks, paints and varnishes. Cobalt occurs naturally as only one stable isotope, cobalt-59. Cobalt-60 is a commercially important radioisotope, used as a radioactive tracer and in the production of gamma rays.
Cobalt is the active center of coenzymes called cobalamin or vitamin B12, and is an essential trace element for all animals. Cobalt is also an active nutrient for bacteria, algae and fungi.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
