Reike Cobalt

Co is apparently ferromagnetic. Who knew? Not me, until I talked to one of the students from the lab downstairs. Dunno why it was so surprising, on the surface I was thinking that iron was the only ferromagnetic material. I knew this wasn't true already though, because I've used gadolinium before and we also have a number of neodymium magnets in the lab. Silly silly silly.

This came about while trying to make finely divided cobalt powder in the same manner that Rieke Mg is synthesized. Whether this actually produced Reike Co or not is not certain, but it certainly didn't work for what I wanted it to. I did not spend a whole lot of time sorting out the rubble, but I did notice the Co particles lining up on the magnetic field lines of the stir bar. Weird.

rejection

Paper got rejected. Amusing since the reviewers gave it two thumbs up out of three. The third guy didn't leave his thumb in an up or down position at all, which means that whatever we wrote just happened to rub the editor the wrong way. To boot, the boat has kind of sailed on the relevance of the paper. It looks like my primary authorship is going to be shelved for now, and probably buried in some sort of collaboration as an afterthought. Maybe it won't even make it into the text, it will just be supplementary info. Goody goody.

The astute reader will notice that I have added a new label for this post, "research defeat". Hopefully this label won't get much use.

Research is stalled until the NMR facility gets their act together and drops a probe into a magnet that can look at something other than 13C and 1H. These are the times I regret not booking my Christmas flight way earlier.