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December 31, 2009
Superatoms: Not quite alchemy, but something pretty close
There is nothing new under the sun. Just huge pile of old shit we haven't discovered yet.
...Three Penn State researchers have shown that certain combinations of elemental atoms have electronic signatures that mimic the electronic signatures of other elements...
...Superatoms are clusters of atoms that exhibit some property of elemental atoms. Former work in Castleman's lab has involved investigating the notion of superatoms. One of his previous experiments showed that a cluster of 13 aluminum atoms behaves like a single iodine atom. Adding a single electron to this aluminum-atom system results in the cluster behaving like a rare-gas atom...
They go on to say that it might be able to replace Platinum with much cheaper Tungsten Carbide as a catalyst. This is pretty interesting. I'm virtually certain now that I've made these things in the lab and never realized it. It would explain a lot of unexpected results we've gotten.