A paper in collaboration with  Khalil Hanna (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Rennes) and Eugene Ilton (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)!

Cheng W, Lindholm J, Holmboe M., Luong NT, Shchukarev A, Ilton ES, Hanna K., Boily J.-F. ‡ 2021. Nanoscale hydration in layered manganese oxides. Langmuir. (in press) 

The Swedish Research Council funds  JF Boily with 3.9 Mkr for a new 4-year project on the geochemistry of rust in cold environments!

“Effects of organic matter–goethite interactions on reactive transport of nalidixic acid: Column study and modeling” by the research group of JF Boily and Khalil Hanna (Rennes Institute of Chemical Sciences) is now published in Environmental Research

Using an AFM tip sensitive to water, we tracked the spatial distributions of water films on minerals. We thank the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for access to its facilities through a User grant.

You can find our paper here:
Yalcin SE, Legg BA, Yeşilbaş M, Malvankar NS, Boily JF. 2020. Direct observation of anisotropic growth of water films on minerals driven by defects and surface tension. Sci. Adv. 6, eaaz9708

In the news: Smart Water Magazine, Phys.org, Yale U., UmU, News Beezer, aitnews, Today Headline, Forskning.se, My News Desk

Using vibrational spectroscopy and simulations we resolved the enigmatic surface chemistry of ferrihydrite. Three ways to learn more about our work:

1. The paper: Boily JF & Song X. 2020 Direct identification of reaction sites on ferrihydrite. Nat. Comm. Chem. DOI 10.1038/s42004-020-0325-y​.
2. Nature’s blog site, with the story behind this paper.
3. Goldschmidt conference: PDF of virtual presentation. Also a Q&A session on June 23rd.

In a collaboration between the JF Boily group and the Allan Bertram group of UBC, we show that K+ is the key ion driving ice nucleation on K-feldspar, an important part of atmospheric mineral dust. Read the paper here:

Merve (Ph.D. 2018, Umeå U.), a VR- and NASA-supported postdoc at SETI, won this
award for her designing a project to explore frozen environments on Mars:

Two new papers in collaboration with Stina Jansson  and J-F Boily of UmU now out in Environmental Science and Pollution Research:

Niinipuu M, Latham KG, Boily J-F, Bergknut M, Jansson S. 2020 The impact of hydrothermal carbonization on the surface functionalities of wet waste materials for water treatment applications. Env. Sci. Poll. Res. doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-08591-w

Niinipuu M, Bergknut M, Boily J-F, Rosenbaum E, Jansson S. 2020 Influence of water matrix and hydrochar properties on removal of organic and inorganic contaminants. Env. Sci. Poll. Res.  doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-09164-7

“Carbon Dioxide Binding in Supercooled Water Nanofilms on Nanominerals”

by Merve Yeşilbaş (now at SETI), Xiaowei Song (now at IKEA), and Jean-François Boily

You can find the article here

Emma Westling, Lisa Bryggman and Niklas Viklund from Nolaskolan in Örnsköldsvik brought in soil samples for Cesium-137 analysis. Many thanks to Peder Arvidsson from the University Hospital of Umeå  (Center for medical technique and radiation physics) for providing access to his laboratory and hosting the students.