Scientists Create Magnetic Soap to Cope With Oil Spills

Posted on Jan 23, 2012

USFWS / Tom MacKenzie

Researchers have invented a kind of soap that can be magnetically corralled to help clean up toxic spills. The feat is accomplished by infusing more mundane suds with tiny iron particles that join together and react to magnets.

Magnetic soap isn’t ready for prime time, but its inventors are eager to get there. —PZS

BBC:

It is similar to ordinary soap, but the atoms of iron help form tiny particles that are easily removed magnetically.

“If you’d have said about 10 years ago to a chemist: ‘Let’s have some soap that responds to magnets’, they’d have looked at you with a very blank face,” said co-author Julian Eastoe of the University of Bristol.

He told BBC News: “We were interested to see, if you went back to the chemical drawing board with the tool-kit of modern synthetic chemistry, if you could…design one.”

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