So this is just one of those things that's ... well, you know, cool: Blue is sometimes not an easy color to make. Blue pigments of the past have often been expensive (ultramarine blue was made from the gemstone lapis lazuli, ground up), poisonous (cobalt blue is a possible carcinogen and Prussian blue, another well-known pigment, can leach cyanide) or apt to fade (many of the organic ones fall apart when exposed to acid or heat). So it was a pleasant surprise to chemists at Oregon State University when they created a new, durable and brilliantly blue pigment by accident. (Chang) So apparently researchers were working with manganese oxide, mixing it with other chemicals with an eye toward "novel electronic properties", and one of the samples came up blue. This was apparently something of a surprise. "I was shocked, actually," said one Dr. Mas Subramanian. The short explanation for what happened: In the intense heat, almost 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the ingredients formed a crystal structure in which the manganese ions absorbed red and green wavelengths of light and reflected only blue. When cooled, the manganese-containing oxide remained in this alternate structure. The other ingredients ā white yttrium oxide and pale yellow indium oxide ā are also required to stabilize the blue crystal. When one was left out, no blue color appeared. The outcome is fascinating enough to be published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Brand New Blue: Photo by Mas Subramanian.____________________ Notes: Chang, Kenneth. "By Happy Accident, Chemists Produce a New Blue". The New York Times. November 24, 2009; page D3. NYTimes.com. November 26, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/science/24obpigment.html See Also: Smith, Andrew E. et al. "Mn[sup]3+[/sup] in Trigonal Bipyramidal Coordination: A New Blue Chromophore". Journal of the American Chemical Society. November 9, 2009. Pubs.ACS.org. November 26, 2009. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja9080666 Note: Abstract only; membership or fee required for full text.
It's supposedly durable Well, the NYT article calls it durable, in seeming direct counterpoint to the proposition that blue pigments tend to fade quickly: Blue pigments of the past have often been expensive (ultramarine blue was made from the gemstone lapis lazuli, ground up), poisonous (cobalt blue is a possible carcinogen and Prussian blue, another well-known pigment, can leach cyanide) or apt to fade (many of the organic ones fall apart when exposed to acid or heat). So it was a pleasant surprise to chemists at Oregon State University when they created a new, durable and brilliantly blue pigment by accident. (Chang) So for the time being, I am operating under the impression that this particular blue does not fade as quickly as other, similar pigments. _____________________ Notes: Chang, Kenneth. "By Happy Accident, Chemists Produce a New Blue". The New York Times. November 24, 2009; page D3. NYTimes.com. November 28, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/science/24obpigment.html
Wow thats a gorgeous blue colour. A bit OT but I picked up this bit of rock in a local museum, its apparently a brittle blue crystal only found hereabouts called cavansite Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Its not a very good specimen since I understand from other sources that a richer colour is possible Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
who's hair is that in first picture? and the second picture has a shape of small bird with blue eyes on the right.
Mine of course, I was bent over it taking the picture, excusez moi Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
why waste food, I am just going to eat them. After that my lips and tongues stay blue all day long. It looks like I'm an emo.
Oooooookay. In the interest of full disclosure, I make Prussian blue at work. This is very cool stuff. But I have to object to the implication in the NY Times article that Prussian blue is dangerous due to leaching cyanide. Yeah, they didn't explicitly say that it's dangerous, but they said "it can leach cyanide" in a list of problems with blue pigments, so the implication was pretty clear. It's true that there's some cyanide in Prussian blue, but Prussian blue is a very safe material. In fact, unlike most other clothing dyes, you can safely eat pretty large amounts of Prussian blue; capsules of Prussian blue are a common antidote for certain kinds of metal poising. And there's a lot more Prussian blue in a 1-gram capsule than is present in your dyed bluejeans, which you presumably aren't planning to eat. So, yeah...don't worry about the Prussian blue. Also, this new blue material contains Indium(III), which is both very expensive and toxic. And it's complicated (and therefor expensive) to make, unlike Prussian blue, which can be made easily and cheaply by simply mixing two aqueous solutions together. So it seems very unlikely that this will see any use as a dye for both economic and health reasons. Although the article claimed that the pigment was safe, I didn't see anything at all about safety in the linked JACS article, so I'm not entirely sure what's backing that claim. It seems to me that in their desire to make this discovery "exciting" for their article, the NY Times went out of its way to bash all the existing blue pigments while overlooking some fairly obvious problems with this new one.