alt Hacker NewsBoron always seemed like an under-studied element to me. Starting from the bottom, hydrogen of course is very well understood, helium not useful for much, lithium used for many things, and beryllium interesting but unfortunately toxic. Next is boron. Low toxicity, light weight, interesting electron configuration. Compounds like boron nitride and boron carbide have remarkable properties, but seem to get less attention than carbon. Not sure why.
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Some have noticed. My top example. "solidstate protein synthesis". Interest should asymptotically approach that in orgo since boron makes any cooking more fun,just like butter (garam bleng for the vegans, sorry)
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/SG/en/technical-documents/techn...
Remarkably pleasant to work with, unlike the class of compounds which include
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_fuel
And
Merlin's TEA-TEB
Easter egg:
At least one town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron,_California
(Carbon has too many)
> helium not useful for much
Maybe not for a chemist, but as a physicist it’s certainly useful. Liquid He cooling, Bose-Einstein condensation, superfluidity, p-wave triplet pairing in He-3, etc. while being basically chemically inert!
For many properties, boron has an intermediate behavior between carbon and silicon. For a few properties, boron resembles more phosphorus than silicon or carbon (mainly because of a closer ionic size, which makes borates somewhat intermediate between phosphates and silicates).
But both carbon and silicon are extremely cheap and abundant, many orders of magnitude more abundant than boron. Even phosphorus is several orders of magnitude more abundant than boron.
So in many cases there are carbon and/or silicon compounds (or sometimes phosphorus compounds) with properties not very different from some boron compounds. For instance in some applications where boron nitride or boron carbide would be desirable one of diamond, graphite, silicon nitride or silicon carbide may also be acceptable.
Therefore the boron compounds are typically used only when their specific benefits are so great that they overcome any cost difference over possible carbon-based or silicon-based or phosphorus-based substitutes.
In living beings (e.g. in plants), the role of boron is similar to that of phosphorus, both are used in their oxidized form, i.e. as phosphates or borates, which both have an affinity for binding to carbohydrates (like phosphate in nucleic acids) or sometimes to other alcohols (like in cellular membranes).