Very Odd Lump | |||
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Very Odd Lump. This is a strange-looking lump of solid pure boron. It has several different kinds of surfaces, as you can see if you click on the picture to see the large version. I would love to know more about the means by which this lump was made. Reader Graham Cowan offers the following theory: From the bottom of p. 4 of this pdf file:Here is his interesting page about boron as a fuel."In 1985, Callery repurchased reserve pentaborane fuel from the military and reprocessed it into elemental boron. When this became unprofitable ..."Pentaborane, B5H9, is like all B-H compounds unstable with respect to dissociating into B and H2, so the only processing necessary would have been to heat it in the absence of air and water. (Probably in argon.) And as you can see below, this lump was considerably more cost effective than our first attempted sample. Source: David Franco Contributor: Ed Pegg Jr Acquired: 16 August, 2002 Text Updated: 11 August, 2007 Price: $12 Size: 0.5" Purity: 99.9% | |||
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