HIDING IN THE BACKGROUND

Abstract

IMAGINE HOW DISAPPOINTING IT would be to learn that you've unintentionally been throwing away something valuable because it was tucked inside something else and you didn't know it was there—like free movie tickets hiding in a newspaper section that you never read. How much worse would it be to discover that something you've been discarding for years—deliberately—is valuable? That's exactly what's been happening in X-ray absorption studies for quite some time, according to Diederik C. (Diek) Koningsberger. For 25 years I've been throwing away useful data, he says. We've all been doing it. Fortunately, unlike the theater tickets, the lost data can be retrieved. Recently, scientists have begun extracting chemically significant information from data that's ordinarily overlooked and using it to understand the effect of materials used to support precious-metal catalysts. A longtime user of X-ray absorption methods to study catalytic materials, Koningsberger, a professor of inorganic chemistry and catalysis ...