[NewCandle] Invasion of the Nanosquiddies

[Nick Reiter]

Gather around the quantum campfire, kids, this is a
strange tale.  As always, I look to the august minds
out there to tell me that "whew -yeah, Hans Blinx
discovered that in 1923"  Or not.

Keith, I just sent a file of photos to you via my home
e-mail, to back up this story.  Let me know if they
did not come through.

Alright, for those vaguely following my on-going
aluminum hydrolysis experiments, this latest weird was
an outcome of the most recent recipe for salt water
hydrolysis.  Pixie 10 is the bucket designation. 
Standard commercial tight wound Al foil roll sections,
600squ.ft. total, in polypropylene buckets, with four
liters of distilled water, and 4 tablespoons of a
halide salt.  

This most recent Pixie was fueled with potassium
iodide, KI; ACS grade, about 100 grams by weight.

Within about 6 hours of starting the bucket this last
Friday night, I noticed two things happening of
interest, one of which is pretty typical - the "oily"
phase.  This is an effect I have seen with pretty much
all of the hydrolyis experiments, where a thin but
discernible "slick" of an oily nature appears on the
water surface.  I have attributed this in the past to
a thin food grade oil residue on the foil surface that
leaches out.  It soon disappears as the bubbling of
hydrolysis typically starts.  However, in the case of
this latest, the slight oily slick was also
accompanied by the appearance of an objective greenish
hue to the solution.  This is not usual - with none of
the other salt variants, NaCl, LiCl, KCl, KBr, MgSO4
did a color change of an obvious sort appear in the
solution before or during the hydrolysis.  By about
T+24 hours, steady fine streams of H2 bubbles were
forming, and I saw the pea green hue of the solution
began to diminish.  I thought it might be valuable to
sample a piece of the outer turn of one of the foil
rolls before the green phase went away entirely.  The
foil rolls were beginning to take on a slight smoky
colored burnish also.

So I snipped a piece of foil, and kept it in a baggie
until yesterday, when I was back to the lab.  In the
meantime, the hydrolysis rate of the bucket has really
taken off - more aggressive than KCl or KBr, right up
with NaCl.

The surprise came then when I put a snip of the "green
phase" foil in the SEM.

At low mag, I could see what looked like flecks or
islands of oxide on the surface.  No big deal. 
However at about 200x... well, I had squid.

The surface of the foil appears to be strewn with
dendritic forms that look like beer soaked daddy
longlegs, or, well, really sick squid.  They are not
the crisp fractal dendritic beauty of silver-life...
these are rather nauseating in form, honestly.  The
largest of these squid forms seems to be about 200
microns long.  They are mostly leg, little body.  See
the pics, when Keith can get em posted.

Now the mystery deepens then when I began to look at
these with EDS.  I suspected they would be a truly
weird form of Al2O3.  Wrongo.  They seem to be made of
aluminum, carbon, oxygen, potassium, and iodine.  The
carbon is the wild card.  I could only think of three
sources for carbon... the plastic of the bucket, the
possible slight machine oil residue on the foil, or
"exotic other".  The composition of squiddies is
surprisingly homogeneous, though the legs seem to be a
bit more Al rich.  BTW, a shot of the background foil
shows Al of an almost pristine sort.  Very little
else.  Not even oxidized to a noticeable degree.

I really don't know what the hell these are.  I don't
know as they have any use.  But dang, I gotta try to
grow some more of these, even as disgusting as they
are in appearance.  I had more than a couple of Matrix
milliseconds there.  Organo-aluminum iodine eating
potassium metabolized layabout nano-life?  Somebody
lose track of their utility fog?

Ideas?  Comments?

Later, squiddies.

n



The Holy Grail 'neath ancient Roslin waits.
The blade and chalice guarding o'er Her gates. 
Adorned in the masters' loving art, She lies;
She rests at last beneath the starry skies.