A next-generation material first earmarked for use in electronics has proven itself a capable clean-up agent for polluted waters.
Boron nitride, or "white graphene", is similar to its namesake: sheets of atoms laid out like a chain-link fence.
A report in Nature Communications shows the material can preferentially soak up organic pollutants such as industrial chemicals or engine oil.
However, it is easier to clean and re-use than other such "nanomaterials".
The family of these materials includes much-touted, carbon-based members such as graphene and nanotubes, and are notable in part for their surface area-to-weight ratio.
That allows them to take up an incredible amount for their size, making them attractive for the clean-up of pollutants.
The new work suggests that a preparation of boron nitride could outperform many nanomaterials and more traditional approaches.
A team from the Institute for Frontier Materials at Deakin University in Australia and the Pierre and Marie Curie University in France started by making porous boron nitride "nanosheets" - wavy, single-atom layers of the material with holes in them.
These porous sheets, which together form a coarse white powder, vastly outperformed sheets that did not have the pores, and commercially available chunks of boron nitride that is not made up of the tiny sheets.
The porous version exhibited high "selective absorption and adsorption" - preferentially picking up organic pollutants and dyes out of water.
The powder soaked up as much as 33 times its own weight in the chemical ethylene glycol and 29 times its own weight of engine oil. Even still, the saturated powder floats on water.
The pollutants could then be driven out of the nooks and crannies of the material by heating it in a commercial furnace, or by simply igniting it - a trick that other, more established materials could only survive a few times before becoming completely clogged up.
"All these features make these porous nanosheets suitable for a wide range of applications in water purification and treatment," the authors wrote.
Francesco Stellacci of EPFL in Switzerland called the work "an excellent paper in a booming field".
"The data reported are indeed excellent and impressive," he told BBC News. "The key question is if this is the material that at the end will be used for remediation."
Prof Stellacci said that a market for such materials does not yet exist, and boron nitride's striking clean-up powers may or may not be enough to establish it as a leading contender, even among nanomaterials.
"I think that at the end it will not be performance that will determine the final material used, but more costs and scalability. I really hope that one of these materials, and maybe this one, will make it," he said.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22351056#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Public release date: 1-May-2013
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Braintree, the Chicago-based payments gateway that’s processing about $2 billion in mobile transactions per year, just poached one of Google Wallet’s creators Rob von Behren from Square. Von Behren was one of the co-founders of Google Wallet, the NFC-centric mobile payment system that was designed to let consumers pay directly for goods and services with their smartphones. Wallet hasn’t seen widespread traction thanks to the often conflicting motivations of carriers, banks, credit card companies and Google. But there were also internal politics too, which led to a diaspora of Google Wallet team members out into startups and growth-stage companies like Square and Braintree. At Braintree, von Behren says he’ll be working on their mobile e-commerce platform. “Smartphones are pervasive in developed economies, and people use them all the time while making purchasing decisions — but actually buying things with your phone is still really painful in most situations,” he said. Braintree has focused on building out a direct-to-consumer presence with the acquisition of New York startup Venmo over the last year. Before, Braintree had mostly been handling B2B relationships and powering payments for companies like Airbnb and Uber. Venmo gave them a consumer brand, which they then used to launch services like Venmo Touch, which let consumers sign up to pay for services in the Braintree network with one-click. Von Behren didn’t really comment on why he left Square after spending a year there. Square has seen a string of departures into the venture world with its head of growth Jared Fliesler moving to Matrix Partners, its director of product Megan Quinn moving to Kleiner Perkins and its COO Keith Rabois joining Khosla Ventures after allegations of sexual harassment. “For somebody as well-known and respected as Rob, getting that kind of hire was going to be fierce competition,” said Braintree CEO Bill Ready. “We’re thrilled to have him on the team.” He added that Braintree is definitely not doing NFC. “Rob’s passion was never NFC,” Ready said. Von Behren said he was mostly attracted to the problem of making payments easy and frictionless on mobile devices. Braintree has a critical mass around this area with 40 million customers and $8 billion in transaction volume a year. He added that the Google Wallet experience taught him about how difficult it can be to work with large retailers. ?One of the most challenging aspects of Google Wallet was working with the long