Chemistry Goes Bad

By Mark Steer

At the Null we like words. They are rather important after all. We especially like ones which sound good, like rumbustious, haberdashery, eclectic and lunch. There are, however, words which make us giggle nervously and look over our shoulders to check that Old Mother Null hasn’t snuck up on us and is readying to clip us round the ear-hole.

And so it happened recently that a case of unfortunate chemical coincidence had us giggling and blushing like naughty nine-year-olds.

A team of Chinese chemists working on nanotubes (NTs) decided that carbon nanotubes (CNTs) weren’t to their liking. They needed nantoubes (NTs) that had something extra, something a bit more metally. Of all the elements that they could have chosen, the team plumped for the two finest in terms of unfortunate acronyms: Copper (Cu) and Bismuth (Bi).

Yes you guessed it, but no-one at the journal ChemComm - where the research was published - thought to point out our Chinese friends were using CuNTs and BiNTs. They even had diagrams.

Taken from the supplementary information here. If you're offended by this, for god's sake don't read any Henry Miller books.

The research appeared in the snappily named paper Electrochemical synthesis of metal and semimetal nanotube – nanowire heterojunctions and their electronic transport properties. You can find it here if you don’t believe us.

So I think we should all give a big hurrah to Dachi Yang, Guowen Meng, Shuyuan Zhang, Yufeng Hao, Xiaohong An, Qing Wei, Min Ye and Lide Zhang for brightening our week.

Thanks to the eagle-eyed Simon Allardice and Simon Leigh, who both brought this to our attention.

More filth from the Null:

- Crappy death - Ancient tribe's fatal faeces
- Mucky perfume - B offins bottle Eau d'Estuary
- Filthy beverages - Top ten nasty drinks
- Tough love - Transsexual bug's sick sex

Return to the top »

Share this

Email this article to a friend