Amalgam (chemistry) The aluminium is the ultimate electron donor, and the mercury serves to mediate the electron transfer. The reaction itself and the waste from it contain mercury, so special safety precautions and disposal methods are needed. As an environmentally friendlier alternative, hydrides or other reducing agents can often be used to accomplish the same synthetic result. Another environmentally friendly alternative is an alloy of aluminium and gallium which similarly renders the aluminium more reactive by preventing it from forming an oxide layer. Tin amalgam was used in the middle of the 19th century as a reflective mirror coating. A variety of
Women in chemistry the only woman to be award two Nobel prizes). Her prize in chemistry was for her "discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element." Irene Joliot-Curie, Marie's daughter, became the second woman to be awarded this prize in 1935 for her discovery of artificial radioactivity. Dorothy Hodgkin won the prize in 1964 for the development of protein crystallography. Among her significant discoveries are the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12. Forty five years later, Ada Yonath shared the prize with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas