YInMn Blue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YInMn_Blue

by zeristor • 7 years ago

212 97 7 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

Under this project, he was particularly interested in synthesizing multiferroics based on manganese oxides. He directed Andrew E. Smith (Subramanian's graduate student) to synthesize an oxide solid solution between YInO 3 (a ferroelectric material) and YMnO 3 (an antiferromagnetic material) at 1,093 °C (2,000 °F). The resulting compound was not an effective multiferroic; it was instead a vibrant blue material.

The quintessential chemistry story: someone sets out to make something and ends up creating something useful but completely different by accident.

CaliforniaKarl2• 7 years ago

See also, Polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene

vesche• 7 years ago

See also also, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_dieth...

dclowd99012• 7 years ago

Why does this happen so much? I mean, this is science: shouldn’t chemicals react as they do in theory? It doesn’t seem like it’d leave a lot to chance.

quanticle• 7 years ago

Computational chemistry involves solving multiple NP-hard problems. There is an increasing reliance on computational models and simulation, but chemists realize that the models are approximations (since it's computationally infeasible to have perfect fidelity simulations). The only surefire way to observe a compound's properties is to synthesize it and measure.

inflatableDodo3• 7 years ago

In the words of the Great Yogi (Berra);

'In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.'

OscarCunningham4• 7 years ago

It's often impossible to theoretically predict how two chemicals will react. The interaction of the molecules is governed by quantum mechanics, which can't be simulated quickly by classical computers.

nabla95• 7 years ago

Chemistry never had good theoretical classical theory like physics had. Theories have been just rules of thumb or heuristics based on experiments.

Theoretically all chemistry is quantum physics with nucleons, electrons and photons (quantum chemistry). You need to numerically simulate what happens in reactions and it's very expensive.

inflatableDodo3• 7 years ago

Given that the entire field of chemistry appeared in this fashion from alchemy, I suspect the tradition is very well ingrained by this point.

jboy55• 7 years ago

The discovery of artificial sweeteners is rife with this,

Saccharin: Chemist working on coal tar derivatives noticed a sweet taste on his hand from contamination.

Aspartame: Chemist working on anti-ulcer drugs discovers his finger's taste sweet when he licked them to turn a page.

Sucralose: Chemist working on novel uses of sucrose and synthetic derivatives asked a coworker to 'test' a compound. Coworker thought he said, 'Taste'.

zeristor9• 7 years ago

Is the mortality rate for Chemists higher than average?

Tasting unknown chemicals can't always end so well can it?

hammock• 7 years ago

I mean...there are SO many sweet-tasting chemicals. But most of them are toxic.

CaliforniaKarl2• 7 years ago

For a small set of other color-related videos, have a look at two from Tom Scott:

• "The Library of Rare Colors": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rApTzWboLrA

• "I Can't Show You How Pink This Pink Is": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NzVmtbPOrM

The latter video makes me wonder: Is there a good way of finding out if a monitor, or even an entire color space, can contain this color? This may be a pigment where you really can't tell exactly what it looks like on-screen, because either the screen cannot display the color or the color space being used can not encode the color (or because the camera sensor can't properly capture the color).

inflatableDodo3• 7 years ago

Is there a good way of finding out if a monitor, or even an entire color space, can contain this color?

You are describing the gamut. You can generally look up the gamut for any decent screen. Also, image editors have gamut warnings for going between colour-spaces.

sgustard• 7 years ago

A recent thread on that subject:

https://twitter.com/panic/status/1106633444157607936

Darkphibre• 7 years ago

I actually ordered some of this Pinker than Pink! As well as Black 2.0 and a few of his other pigments.

I believe what he's doing is mixing in a pigment that fluoresces from sunlight, at the same frequency as the primary visible-spectrum pigment. Thus, more of that frequency of light is coming off the page than the visible light landing on the page.

It's pretty crazy to look at in sunlight. Indoor, it's not quite as vibrant.

mturmon• 7 years ago

Like the optical brighteners that are used in detergents: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_brightener

Doxin• 7 years ago

Not quite as vibrant, but still startlingly pink.

wollstonecraft• 7 years ago

Why do people get to patent the products of federal grants?

WrtCdEvrydy• 7 years ago

Because federal grants don't require exclusivity.

jcranmer• 7 years ago

Why should you deprive an inventor of the rights to his invention merely because he's funded by the government? Do note that, in these situations, you have to notify the government of your intent to file a patent (and you lose the patent if you fail to do so!), and the government gets an automatic license to the patent.

dclowd99012• 7 years ago

Because it was in the public’s interest to fund them and the public should reap the benefits. It should be “open”. I know this is largely a philosophical difference of view, but let me ask you: why should the public fund anything if it doesn’t do anything to benefit the public?

pastor_elm• 7 years ago

Why should you deprive an inventor of the rights to his invention merely because he's funded by the government?

Same reason the company i work for owns any code I write while I'm on the clock.

JoshTriplett2• 7 years ago

Why should you deprive an inventor of the rights to his invention

"Rights" to inventions aren't innate, they're explicitly granted. Why should we grant an exclusive monopoly on publicly funded research?

pjc50• 7 years ago

Everywhere I've ever worked claimed patent rights over anything I invented.

TallGuyShort3• 7 years ago

Tax money doesn't come from the government, any more than a politicians power comes from the government. It comes from the people. It ought to serve the people, not the recipients.

anbop• 7 years ago

I’m funded by my employer and my parents are assigned to and owned by them. Why isn’t this analogous?

mbreese4• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

This is the act that makes this all possible and actually encourages this practice.

peteretep• 7 years ago

Presumably because it keeps the profits in the country that funded it?

TallGuyShort3• 7 years ago

No it doesn't - the patent can be read by anyone, and if someone in China wants to duplicate your invention they can. This just stops other people who paid the taxes that funded the work from getting it without paying more for a long time.

Majromax• 7 years ago

Why do people get to patent the products of federal grants?

A few reasons:

* The core hypothesis behind publicly-funded research is that simply advancing knowledge is a good thing. Patents (versus public domain, versus assigning a patent to the government) can change who benefits to what degree, but the raw public good is still there.

* Government grants often don't fully fund a research project, or interesting research happens as a byproduct of another 'core' project. That happened here -- undoubtedly the original grant said nothing about finding new dyes.

* Research grants don't fund all the steps to commercialization, they just fund "basic" research. Paradoxically, denying IP rights to funded research might stifle commercialization by making it not worth the effort to turn a lab development into a commercially-viable product. This is similar to the idea that old drugs and traditional remedies are under-studied in part because pharmaceutical companies cannot patent (and thus profit from) associated discoveries.

kazinator• 7 years ago

Also:

* Patents expire, eventually, in a more reasonable timeframe than, say, copyrights.

njharman• 7 years ago

Patents themselves are federal grants. They are the government giving you a monopoly and enforcing it.

If you don't think people should profit from the governments efforts to promote science, cats already out the bag and run round corner down the alley.

myself2482• 7 years ago

YInMn Blue is chemically stable, does not fade, and is non-toxic.

I'm calling a big old [citation needed] on a compound that's only existed for a decade. It might not be acutely toxic, but recently we seem to be finding all sorts of subtle effects from compounds that've been in common use for decades.

How does one establish non-toxicity?

nabla95• 7 years ago

You test it with animals.

It's inorganic, has simple structure and contains only non-toxic compounds, so there is no reason to be worried.

If you want to worry, direct your attention towards Vantablack and other carbon nanotubes. It has specific target organ toxicity from single exposure and while it does not appear to be carcinogenic it needs more testing.

fmblwntr• 7 years ago

yttrium and indium are both suspected to be toxic, manganese can certainly be toxic. no idea about the relative doses, I suspect that the chemists certainly thought about this etc, so I'm not trying to say YInMn is toxic, but "inorganic, has simple structure" doesn't mean anything, as it also describes Cobalt Blue, which is definitely toxic.

weinzierl• 7 years ago

It's inorganic, has simple structure and contains only non-toxic compounds, so there is no reason to be worried.

So is asbestos...

zeristor9• 7 years ago

The article makes no mention of how the pigment makes the blue colour.

s0rce2• 7 years ago

It reflects only blue photons

beautifulfreak• 7 years ago

It's due to the "trigonal bipyramidal" lattice structure. By changing atoms in the structure, they've created pigments with a range of colors. https://ws680.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=921441

zeristor9• 7 years ago

Excellent find!

This article also talks of the three other variants for different colours

creeble3• 7 years ago

Ooh yeah, that's very interesting. Thanks!

zeristor9• 7 years ago

Yttrium and Indium are two rare earths, Indium especially, used in displays. Mention has been made that the Indium required makes this pigment expensive.

zeristor9• 7 years ago

As mentioned in this YouTube video by Seeker, albeit in passing, but credit where it’s due:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lolgjjr8QIU

creeble3• 7 years ago

Is it still true that there are no real inorganic red dyes? Or is that ancient history?

s0rce2• 7 years ago

Cinnabar is red...

gimmeThaBeet• 7 years ago

It may depend on the definition of red, but that doesn't sound true at all. Cadmium red, lead tetroxide, cinnabar, all in use for a hundred+ to even thousands of years.

I think where that comes from is that there isn't really an inorganic red that is all of stable, durable, non-toxic, and only then even then good looking.

If I remember correctly, once Mas Subramanian sort of stumbled into "I guess I can try to make pigments with these compounds" he's tried making other colors, but sort of the big prize is in finding a good red with properties similar to YInMn.

creeble3• 7 years ago

>stable, durable, non-toxic, and only then even then good looking.

Yes, I think that was the combination.

I was thinking in particular red car paint -- it was only organic compounds through the early 2000's, and therefore all of it fades.

a1369209993• 7 years ago

It may depend on the definition of red, [...] Cadmium red, lead tetroxide, cinnabar

For that matter, iron oxide (rust) technically qualifies.

neonate• 7 years ago

Here's a nice interview with the discoverer: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/chemist-mas-subramanian-on...

zeristor9• 7 years ago

YInMn is supposed to have high NIR reflectivity useful on a sunny roof. The Apollo 11 Lunar Module used gold foil to reflect heat, I suppose future vehicles could have a brilliant blue foil, apt for Blur Origin.

I liked how the lunar module used gold foil, and Apollo the Greek god was the Sun deity; gold often used to represent the Sun.

the84722• 7 years ago

If all you need is IR reflection for a building then TiO2 based paint will do the job and is much cheaper. The advantage of YInMn is that it also provides color.

zeristor9• 7 years ago

Under properties one an see the reflectivity and whilst far better than Cobalt blue, its a long way from Gold and silver:

https://colourlex.com/project/yinmn-blue/

jamhan• 7 years ago

It wasn't gold foil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapton

pacificmint• 7 years ago

NPR had a good article about the discovery: "A Chemist Accidentally Creates A New Blue. Then What?" [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/07/16/485696248/a-chemist-accidenta...

viewtransform• 7 years ago

This blue pigment is used on the shrouds of AMD Radeon Pro graphics cards. https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/workstations

broahmed• 7 years ago

Here's a great article about the discovery of this color, and the pigment industry in general, which hit the front page of HN a year ago:

The Quest for the Next Billion-Dollar Color

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-quest-for-billion-do...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870440

joshu• 7 years ago

Apparently it costs $1k/kg right now, if it were even available.

bpicolo• 7 years ago

https://www.shepherdcolor.com/products/yinmn/

Looks like it hasn't received approval for commercial sale yet. Presumably some health / safety entity?

zeristor9• 7 years ago

Indium looks to cost $5 a gram, twice the price of silver, although it’s supposed to be as ubundant

kortex• 7 years ago

That's cheap by pharmaceutical standards and expensive by pigment standards.

About right for exotic engineering applications though.

del_operator• 7 years ago

Reminds me of the story of how Lithium was initially thought help “brain gout” by dissolving uric crystals, but it still ended up working.

Read an interesting story of a physicist that got curious about it. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-bra...

YInMn Blue

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