A novel material with world record breaking surface area and water adsorption abilities has been synthesized by researchers from Uppsala University, Sweden. The results are published today in PLOS ONE. 
 
 The magnesium carbonate material that has been given the name Upsalite is foreseen to reduce the amount of energy needed to control environmental moisture in the electronics and drug formulation industry as well as in hockey rinks and ware houses. It can also be used for collection of toxic waste, chemicals or oil spill and in drug delivery systems, for odor control and sanitation after fire. 
 
 -In contrast to what has been claimed for more than 100 years in the scientific literature, we have found that amorphous magnesium carbonate can be made in a very simple, low-temperature process, says Johan Goméz de la Torre, researcher at the Nanotechnology and Functional Materials Division. 
 
 While ordered forms of magnesium carbonate, both with and without water in the structure, are abundant in nature, water-free disordered forms have been proven extremely difficult to make. In 1908, German researchers claimed that the material could indeed not be made in the same way as other disordered carbonates, by bubbling CO2 through an alcoholic suspension. Subsequent studies in 1926 and 1961 came to the same conclusion. 
 
 - A Thursday afternoon in 2011, we slightly changed the synthesis parameters of the earlier employed unsuccessful attempts, and by mistake left the material in the reaction chamber over the weekend. Back at work on Monday morning we discovered that a rigid gel had formed and after drying this gel we started to get excited, says Johan Goméz de la Torre. 
 
 A year of detailed materials analysis and fine tuning of the experiment followed. One of the researchers got to take advantage of his Russian skill since some of the chemistry details necessary for understanding the reaction mechanism was only available in an old Russian PhD thesis. 
 
 - After having gone through a number of state of the art materials characterization techniques it became clear that we had indeed synthesized the material that previously had been claimed impossible to make, says Maria Strømme, professor of nanotechnology and head of the nanotechnology and functional materials division. 
 
 The most striking discovery was, however, not that they had produced a new material but it was instead the striking properties they found that this novel material possessed. It turned out that Upsalite had the highest surface area measured for an alkali earth metal carbonate; 800 square meters per gram. 
 
 - This places the new material in the exclusive class of porous, high surface area materials including mesoporous silica, zeolites, metal organic frameworks, and carbon nanotubes, says Strømme. 
 
 In addition we found that the material was filled with empty pores all having a diameter smaller than 10 nano meters. This pore structure gives the material a totally unique way of interacting with the environment leading to a number of properties important for application of the material. Upsalite is for example found to absorb more water at low relative humidities than the best materials presently available; the hydroscopic zeolites, a property that can be regenerated with less energy consumption than is used in similar processes today. 
 
 - This, together with other unique properties of the discovered impossible material is expected to pave the way for new sustainable products in a number of industrial applications, says Maria Strømme. 
 
 The discovery will be commercialized though the University spin-out company Disruptive Materials (www.Disruptivematerials.com) that has been formed by the researchers together with the holding company of Uppsala University 
 
 The article describing the novel material is published in PLOS ONE can be read on the following link: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0068486 ||||| Now a century later, a team of Swedish scientists have done the impossible by producing the substance known as Upsalite by accident – after leaving their equipment running over the weekend. 
 
 The breakthrough has far-reaching commercial applications, as Upsalite (named after the University of Uppsala, where the scientists are based) is the world’s most efficient water absorber, with potential to be used for the removal of moisture in drug creation and high-tech electronics to cleaning up huge oil spills. 
 
 A single gram of this elusive white, dry, powdered form of magnesium carbonate (MgCO3) has an extraordinarily-large surface area of 800 square meters thanks to numerous minuscule pores, each one a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. 
 
 “Upsalite absorbs more water and low relative humidities than the best materials presently available and can be regenerated with less energy consumption than is used in similar processes today,” said Maria Stromme, professor of nanotechnology at Uppsala University. 
 
 “This, together with other unique properties of the discovered impossible material, is expected to pave the way for new sustainable products in a number of industrial applications,” she said. 
 
 Other uses include ice hockey rinks, warehouses, the collection of toxic waste or chemical spills and odour control. 
 
 MgCO3 is also about as dry as a material can get, a property which, combined with a huge relative surface area that is inundated with pocket pores, makes it the world’s best mop. The only problem is that, until now, this absorbent form of magnesium carbonate could only be produced by a process that is so expensive and involves so much heat that it wasn’t remotely feasible to use it. While other members of the so-called “disordered carbonates” family could be produced more cheaply and simply – by bubbling carbon dioxide through a mixture containing alcohol – a group of German researchers claimed in 1908 that this method couldn’t be used to make dry MgCO3. And so they dubbed it the “impossible material”. 
 
 The irony is that although the Uppsala team had been trying to create the impossible material, they had been going about it the wrong way. 
 
 “A Thursday afternoon in 2011, we slightly changed the synthesis parameters of the earlier employed unsuccessful attempts, and by mistake left the material in the reaction chamber over the weekend. Back at work on Monday morning we discovered that a rigid gel had formed and after drying this gel we started to get excited,” says Johan Gomez de la Torre. 
 
 The unwitting solution still involved bubbling the Co2 through the alcohol mixture, but at three times normal atmospheric pressure. A year of detailed analysis and experimental fine tuning followed, during which time it was discovered that when heated to 70C the resulting gel solidifies and collapses into a white and coarse powder. 
 
 “It became clear that we had indeed synthesised the material that previously had been claimed impossible to make. This places it in the exclusive class of porous, high surface area materials,” said Ms Stromme. 
 
 The findings have been published in the journal PLOS ONE. ||||| Credit: Simon Ydhag, Uppsala University Researchers in Uppsala, Sweden accidentally left a reaction running over the weekend and ended up resolving a century-old chemistry problem. Their work has led to the development of a new material, dubbed Upsalite, with remarkable water-binding properties. Upsalite promises to find applications in everything from humidity control at home to chemical manufacturing in industry. 
 
 Maria Strømme and colleagues at Uppsala University, whose work appears in the journal PLOS ONE, have modified a procedure dating back to 1908 to make a powdered and dry form of magnesium carbonate (MgCO 3 ). The reaction ingredients are all cheaply available: magnesium oxide (MgO) and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), dissolved in methanol, a common industrial solvent. The result is pure, dry MgCO 3 . 
 
 Dry in this case means very dry. In the chemical sense, it means void of almost any water molecules at all. 
 
 Crystalline forms of dry MgCO 3 , which lack the structure needed to absorb water, are readily synthesised at high temperatures (over 100 °C). As early as 1820, people started to search for lower-temperature routes to make dry MgCO 3 , but none have successfully yielded pure product until now. This is why Upsalite has been described as an "impossible material". 
 
 The key modification was to increase the pressure of CO 2 to three times that of normal atmospheric pressure, rather than simply bubbling the gas through a mixture of MgO in methanol. When one mixture was accidentally allowed to react over a long weekend, researchers came back to find a gel. It turns out the gel was formed because methanol molecules had been trapped within the material. When heated to 70 °C, which is above the boiling point of methanol, the gel "solidifies and collapses into a white and coarse powder". Analysis confirmed that the product was just what chemists had been trying to make for more than 100 years – a dry, powdered form of MgCO 3 . 
 
 Upsalite has impressive properties as a desiccant, absorbing water better than the much more expensive materials that are currently used (called zeolites). Most of the absorbed water is retained when Upsalite is transferred from a humid to a very dry environment. The dry form can be regenerated by heating to 95 °C. By contrast, most zeolites need to be heated to over 150 °C in order to dry them. Not only is Upsalite easy to make and reuse, but it is also not toxic to humans, which makes it suitable for humidity control indoors. 
 
 The impressive drying property stems from the very large internal surface area of Upsalite. MgCO 3 is a common mineral that occurs in a variety of forms, most of which have water bound to their surface and are crystalline. By contrast, Upsalite has no water integrated into its structure and is not crystalline. Instead, it is mesoporous – a structure with pores that are a million times smaller than the width of a human hair – which provide it with a much greater surface area. 
 
 The past 20 years have seen a surge of interest in mesoporous materials such as zeolites and carbon nanotubes due to their ability to selectively absorb small molecules, which may enable applications in drug delivery, pollution removal, and the development of new catalysts for chemical reactions. Recognizing these prospects, the researchers have founded a spin-out company called Disruptive Materials to commercialise and apply Upsalite. 
 
 Explore further: Impossible material with world record breaking surface area made by swedish researchers 
 
 More information: Forsgren J, Frykstrand S, Grandfield K, Mihranyan A, Strømme M (2013) A Template-Free, Ultra-Adsorbing, High Surface Area Carbonate Nanostructure. PLoS ONE 8(7): e68486. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0068486 
 
 Abstract 
 
 We report the template-free, low-temperature synthesis of a stable, amorphous, and anhydrous magnesium carbonate nanostructure with pore sizes below 6 nm and a specific surface area of ~ 800 m2 g?1, substantially surpassing the surface area of all previously described alkali earth metal carbonates. The moisture sorption of the novel nanostructure is featured by a unique set of properties including an adsorption capacity ~50% larger than that of the hygroscopic zeolite-Y at low relative humidities and with the ability to retain more than 75% of the adsorbed water when the humidity is decreased from 95% to 5% at room temperature. These properties can be regenerated by heat treatment at temperatures below 100°C.The structure is foreseen to become useful in applications such as humidity control, as industrial adsorbents and filters, in drug delivery and catalysis. 
 

– Sometimes screwing up a science experiment isn't such a bad thing. Case in point: Researchers in Sweden accidentally left their equipment running on an experiment over a weekend, and ended up creating something awesome—Upsalite, the world’s most efficient water absorber, reports the Independent. This substance, prohibitively expensive and difficult to produce until now, can potentially do everything from controlling moisture on a hockey rink to cleaning up toxic waste and oil spills, reports Science Blog. This "is expected to pave the way for new sustainable products in a number of industrial applications," says nanotechnology professor Maria Stromme. Scientists have been trying—and failing—to cheaply create a dry, powdered form of magnesium carbonate since the early 1900s, earning it the nickname the "impossible material." Turns out, all they needed to do was use the same process they've been attempting for more than 100 years, but at three times the atmospheric pressure. When the scientists at the University of Uppsala inadvertently did this, they returned to the lab Monday morning to find a gel had formed. When heated to more than 158 degrees, that gel "solidifies and collapses into a white and coarse powder," they report, per Phys.org. "It became clear that we had indeed synthesized the material that previously had been claimed impossible to make," says Stromme. (It's not the only amazing discovery reported this week. See the best of those here.)