industryterm:chemical reactions

Once Upon a Gemstone - Issue 10 : Mergers & Acquisitions
▻http://nautil.us/issue/10/mergers--acquisitions/once-upon-a-gemstone

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For longer than recorded history, gemstones have been used to tell stories. Passed down through generations, they carry the legends of our ancestral past. They also carry with them a much, much older history: the geological echoes of our planet’s very formation. As shifts deep within the Earth’s core drove its tectonic plates, compression, heat, and chemical reactions created a new set of minerals, beautiful to the human eye. Understanding that these were objects of record, of permanence, humans wove their own, new stories around them, making meaning from mystery. Peridot of the splitting sea The island of Zabargad in the Red Sea has been home to the world’s finest specimens of peridot for as long as 3,500 years, since its mines were first worked for Egyptian Pharaohs. The island was (...)

New low-temperature chemical reaction explained
▻http://phys.org/news/2013-09-low-temperature-chemical-reaction.html

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In all the centuries that humans have studied chemical reactions, just 36 basic types of reactions have been found. Now, thanks to the work of researchers at MIT and the University of Minnesota, a 37th type of reaction can be added to the list.
The newly explained reaction—whose basic outlines had been known for three decades, but whose workings had never been understood in detail—is an important part of atmospheric reactions that lead to the formation of climate-affecting aerosols; biochemical reactions that may be important for human physiology; and combustion reactions in engines.
The new analysis is explained in a paper by MIT graduate student Amrit Jalan, chemical engineering professor William Green, and six other researchers, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The reaction’s details sound esoteric: a low-temperature oxidation that results in the decomposition of complex organic molecules known as gamma-ketohydroperoxides. When he first described the reaction in the scientific literature 30 years ago, Stefan Korcek of the Ford Motor Company proposed a hypothesis for how the reaction might take place. The new work shows that Korcek had the right concept, although some details differ from his predictions.