New form of Boron and Conan O'Brien

It's not that Boron has only four true crystal structures that makes it interesting, the real deal is at the fact that Boron is very hard to predict. It disobeys all the rules of periodic table. Artem Oganov from State University of New York at Stony Brook discovered a never observed allotrope of boron just recently and this may not be the last one.

Ken Chang wrote about this and mistakenly mentioned three forms not including the study he was writing about. He corrected it soon after but it was long enough to get caught by Conan O'Brien.

Check out the video on Conan's take on the matter.

Magnetic Boron Nitride and CrO2 Nanorod Devices

This past week wasn't free enough for me to read around to find out what cool things were out but I realize now that there wasn't much exciting stuff either. Except these:

• Magnetic Boron Nitride! Barone et al. (Peralta group at Central Michigan) did a theoretical study and suggesting that BN must have tunable electronic properties.
• CrO2 nanorod devices: Song et al. (Jin group at U Wisconsin Madison) synthesized this awkward but known metal oxide in single crystal nanorods and then used it in devices. Evidently CrO2 is ferromagnetic, has a (relatively) high curie temperature of 395 K and predicted to be half-metallic. Good data but not so interesting to read if you're not into this stuff.