A robust and parsimonious model for caesium sorption on clay minerals and natural clay materials

Clay Minerals as Natural Nanosheets

Particles with nanometer dimensions (nanoparticles) are all around us. The finest particles of sand are blown by the wind over thousands of kilometers. The finest particles of soils are either eroded by the wind in extremely dry conditions or by water under wet conditions and deposited hundreds of kilometers or more from the origin. The air contains nanoparticles of carbon, ice, and oxides and ...

Sorption and Desorption of Pesticides by Clay Minerals and Humic Acid-Clay Complexes

small amounts of water to soil reduced the sorption of organic compounds relative to the sorption by the In soils, organic matter and minerals are often associated such that dehydrated soil in hexane, and that organic vapor adit is unclear how the presence of the former component influences sorption by soil was significantly depressed by increasing the sorptive properties of the latter one. In ...

Clay Minerals and Catalysis

More than half a century ago, Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal and Swiss geochemist Victor M. Goldschmidt independently proposed that clay minerals may have played an important role in prebiotic synthesis (Bernal 1949; Goldschmidt 1952). I concur that mineral catalysis must have had a central role in prebiotic synthesis because most uncatalyzed reactions start from simple precursors like hyd...

Killer Clays! Natural antibacterial clay minerals

Clay minerals have been used in medicinal applications since Aboriginal times (Carretaro, 2002; Wilson, 2003). Clay poultices are used to heal wounds; people eat clays to coat stomach linings and soothe indigestion; animals eat clay containing trace elements (e.g., As) that can kill worms. The reasons that various clay minerals are effective as medicines may be as variable as the ailment, but b...

Clay and non-clay minerals in the pharmaceutical industry