Kryptonite

It's been a few days since I've blogged and even longer since I wrote a science related post. Browsing through the news today I see that scientists from the Rio Tinto mining group have discovered Superman's Achilles heel in a mine in Serbia. Instead of being green and glowing the mineral, sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide, is actually white and boring. The discovered form, to be named Jadarite after the mine where it was found, exists as a hard solid composed of micrometre sized crystals. It's only saving grace is that it does fluoresce, a little bit, if you expose it to ultra violet light. The molecular composition was determined by analytical chemists at Canada's National Research Council, who branded the close similarity to kryptonite as "the coincidence of a lifetime."

Unfortunately IUPAC won't allow the mineral to be called kryptonite because it doesn't actually contain krypton. More details will be published in the European Journal of Mineralogy later this year.