boron tagged posts

A selfie of the NASA Curiosity rover at the Murray Buttes in Gale Crater, Mars, a location where boron was found in light-toned calcium sulfate veins. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Boron compounds play role in stabilizing sugars needed to make RNA, a key to life. The discovery of boron on Mars gives scientists more clues about whether life could have ever existed on the planet, according to a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “Because borates may play an important role in making RNA – one of the building blocks of life – finding boron on Mars further opens the possibility that life could have once arisen on the planet,” said Patrick Gasda, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory...

Images: This pair of drawings depicts the same location on Mars at two points in time: now and billions of years ago. The location is in Gale Crater, near the Red Planet’s equator. 1 shows a present-day snapshot of the northern half of Gale Crater. North is to the left. The underlying basement is the crust of Mars that forms the crater’s rim (left) and central peak (right). About 3.5 billion years ago, rivers brought sediment into the crater, depositing pebbles where the river was flowing more quickly, sand where the river entered a standing body of water in the center of the basin, and silt within this lake. Lake level rose over time as the sediments built up. Eventually they were buried by dry dust...

Chunks of this sodium-based compound (Na2B12H12) (left) would function well in a battery only at elevated temperatures, but when they are milled into far smaller pieces (right), they can potentially perform even in extreme cold, making them even more promising as the basis for safer, cheaper rechargeables. Credit: Tohoku University, Japan

By chemically modifying and pulverizing a promising group of compounds, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have potentially brought safer, solid-state rechargeable batteries 2 steps closer to reality. These compounds are stable solid materials that would not pose the risks of leaking or catching fire typical of traditional liquid battery ingredients and are made from commonly available substances.

The first advance cam...