Plant-controlled supratidal anhydrite from Al-Khiran, Kuwait
We report here that in the supratidal zone of the Al-Khiran sabkha, diagenetic anhydrite occurs exclusively in association with the living halophyte Halocnemum strobilaceum (Pallas) M .B. This anhydrite has a hair cream-like consistency and the bulk of it has formed as pseudomorphs after gypsum crystals. On the death of the plant at the end of its life cycle, the anhydrite is hydrated back to gypsum. This two-way transformation results in a series of characteristic textures, whose preservation could be due to the comparative ‘youth’ of the sabkha, which is in the very earliest stages of evaporite diagenesis.
Electronically modified single wall carbon nanohorns with iodine adsorption
Abstract Tailoring electronic properties of single wall carbon nanohorn (SWCNH) is expected to develop the application potential in various fields. SWCNH is efficiently modified with iodine molecules by liquid phase adsorption. The adsorption isotherm of iodine on SWCNH was Langmuirian with the saturated adsorption amount of 185 ± 10 mg g−1 (coverage 0.18), indicating a specific interaction between SWCNH and iodine. The DC electrical conductivity of SWCNH film prepared by dip-coating method increased with the iodine adsorption amount almost by a factor 10.
Time and Heritage
As a historian studying what can be considered a form of intellectual history, I have slowly come to adopt Michel de Certeau’s observation made at the end of the 1980s that ‘objectifying the past, for the last three centuries, has undoubtedly left unconsidered time within a discipline that has continued to use it as a taxonomic instrument’. To a certain degree, time has become commonplace for the historian who has preserved or instrumentalized it. It is not considered because it is inconceivable, but because we do not think of it or, more simply, we do not think about it. As a historian attempting to pay attention to the time I’m living in, I have thus, like many others, noticed the swift development of the category of the present until it has become obvious that the present is omnipresent. This is what I refer to here as ‘presentism’.