Gold and Mercury

A cool article on the C&E news website. Gold nanoparticles cleaning mercury.  I worked a lot trying to clean water in graduate school.   Also did a lot of ICP for metals.   One problem that I frequently came up against was vaporization, and contamination of the instrument.   Interestingly, adding gold helps this problem.   A simple google search will yield lots of papers about this effect.  Amalgams with mercury are popular for mining, dental fillings
Some mining examples mining questions and more mining
Dental amalgams are falling out of favor though it's hard to prove any link to specific health problems epa website on dental amalgams
So it makes sense that gold can be used to clean mercury.    However, I enjoy reading about it and hope you do too.

Yet again it's been a long time

You can tell when I have a 40/hr a week job, can't you?   I need to work on that.   Well, here I am.  blogging.   I do still have a job, so I guess that's something-both a blog and a job.  And a super spiffy apartment.  Well, I think so.  
I have a post in mind that I deeply want to get into-regulatory chemistry and defensible data.   Both from the sense that sometimes the regulations are really really important-sign your chain of custody if you're doing anything legal, people.  And sometimes the regulations do have to be followed because that's what you do to be consistent, even if no, that compound might not break down much in three days.
It's what I've been doing, and it is something that I am actually loving. But it's something that makes me get up in the morning, and so I don't really have time to draw out my thoughts tonight.
Also, I missed the local section here ACS meeting last week.   I'm unhappy.