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Posts Tagged ‘aqua regia’

…….. hopefully. I managed to learn something through about this. Last year when i started blogging, i moved from blogspot to blogsome, then to wordpress. I stopped by for about a year, then last month something wrong with my WP blog, and i swifted temporarily to my old-yet-exist blogspot. Later i registered a blog in WP (again), imported all my data from the old WP blog then started all over again.

Apparently the start is followed by an early good bye. A friend of mine, kindly offered this nice web and hosting. With a change of… something lah :p And now really i’d like to start from the very beginning. I was told to import all my thingie, but i just want a fresh one. 

Okay, here it goes, proudly present… Aqua Regia.

Why aqua regia? 

First let me explain what is it. Two paragraphs below is citated from wikipedia.

Aqua regia, or known wih its trivial name Royal Water, is a 1:3 mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid. The properties i like most about this mixture is that i dissolves noble metal  such as gold or platinum. Awesome, huh? Yeah, but some metals like iridium and tantalum don’t dissolve in aqua regia, though :D This compound was found by Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan, an Arabian alchemist.

Once upon a time, when Germany invadede Denmark in World War 2, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck into aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar – one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving – contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast and presented the medals to Laue and Franck.

Wow !!

You can’t get it in a form of medal, though, but at least it’s still pure gold after being precipitated :D

That’s a blast about my blog. Enjoy.