dan nocera, chemist and enterprising businessperson

I've made several posts in the past about MIT's Dan Nocera,(here, here, here and here) who has generated quite a bit of buzz with his cobalt phosphate water-splitting catalyst recently published in Science.

He's taken the next step, and launched a company around the catalyst called, wait for it... Sun Catalytix. Bleh, while I hope Nocera can help us figure out our huge energy problems, that company name needs to die an ungraceful death, stat.[1] Scientists are always crappy at naming things (present company excluded).

He's gotten $4 million from a new US agency also with a shitty name, ARPA-A. Whooopeee, let's hope he can put it to good use.

Also, appropos of nothing, this is me in LOLcat form:


[1] I graciously offer the name of Infiniflux to Nocera's company, and any nano/energy startup that is willing to pay me in stock options and a lifetime supply of RedBull. Actually, I'd be willing to settle for just the energy drinks. I am not ashamed to admit.

infiniflux: where blogging about dan nocera happens

Looks like Daniel Nocera has been doing some more work on (and some more promotion of) his much-publicized catalyst for water-splitting. He's just presented at the ACS meeting in Philadelphia, and has Katherine Sanderson of Nature taking note:

In today's talk he confirmed what he had thought then - that the cobalt gets oxidised all the way to its +4 oxidation state... "I guarantee in under five years you'll see this," he said.


...Other big claims he made were that in a system based on his catalyst cuold produce enoguh fuel to run a typical house for a day in just two and a half hours.

(via The Sceptical Chymist)

Daniel Nocera's big secret paper

That mystery paper that Daniel Nocera presented on at the CSC? It finally came out in Science today (doi: 10.1126/science.1162018) as a ScienceXpress [1].

It's all electrochemistry mumbo-jumbo, which uses some sort of implied Co2+ catalyst to split water. I can neither claim to understand or describe it, so here's an idea: the first person to respond in the comments with a plain English explanation of the concepts gets a prize. A prize of solid gold![2]

(Via Digg, if you can believe it or not. Science news travels quickly!)

1. Lamest name ever, seriously. The AAAS should rename it ScienceXXpress (science-double-x-press)!

2. Okay, maybe just gold nanoparticles. Okay, maybe just a mixtape and a piece of science memorabilia. Of solid gold! Actually, you can negotiate the prize after you explain the science. Prize money tops $25.