The weekend

So, it turns out the weekend isn't so good for motivation when it comes to writing blog posts, who'd've thunk it?!

As it stands, the most likely research I'll be blogging about first is the separation of calcium from its alkaline earth family. It seems like there's some potential commercial application but, from what I've been told and read, calcium and strontium are really, really similar. In fact, almost identical, especially when it comes to wanting to stay in solution. Ho hum.

So, first off, where do you go? Well, if you've access to it, then Web of Knowledge is a good place to start. A quick search of terms and so on will usually get you a long list of articles that have some connections to what you want. However, calcium separation isn't one of those with a lot written on it. Bummer.

I did find one piece though with a lot of promise; wrote a paper in in which he described the kind of separation I plan on doing. w00t! Success!

However, it's crap.

I don't know whether the author was bound by some propriertory(?) confidentiality, or if the company he did the work for didn't let him give all the tricks away, or the author was just a very bad writer of scientific papers, but the outcome is that it's almost impossible to follow. So bad, that if it were a recipe to bake a cake it would go something like this:

Get flour, eggs and sugar.
Mix
Bake
Eat.

No measurement, no timings, nothing useful at all aside from a tantalising glimpse of a good analytical method. Oh, there's results showing you just how good it is, how it separates the Ca from the Sr just right... but it's going to take a lot more work to figure this one out.