X-Nico

2 unusual facts about gallium


Ribonucleotide reductase

Gallium inhibits RNR2 by substituting for Fe3+ in the active site.

Volcanogenic massive sulfide ore deposit

As a class, they represent a significant source of the world's Cu, Zn, Pb, Au, and Ag ores, with Co, Sn, Ba, S, Se, Mn, Cd, In, Bi, Te, Ga and Ge as co- or by-products.


Blue laser

In the early 1990s the Institute of High Pressure Physics at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (Poland), under the leadership of Dr. Sylwester Porowski developed technology to create gallium nitride crystals with high structural quality and fewer than 100 defects per square centimeter — at least 10,000 times better than the best sapphire-supported crystal.

Cray MTA-2

The MTA-2 was an attempt to correct these problems while maintaining essentially the same processor architecture respun in one silicon ASIC, down from some 26 gallium arsenide ASICs in the original MTA; and while advancing the network design from a 4-D torus topology to a more scalable Cayley graph topology.

Gallium chloride

Gallium trichloride (gallium(III) chloride/digallium hexachloride), GaCl3

Gallium maltolate

Christopher Chitambar and his associates at the Medical College of Wisconsin have found that gallium maltolate is active against several lymphoma cell lines, including those resistant to gallium nitrate.

Oral gallium maltolate is also being investigated as a treatment for Rhodococcus equi foal pneumonia, a common and often fatal disease of newborn horses.

Mbozi meteorite

The Germanium-Gallium ratio is larger than 10, which can also be seen in meteorites of the IIF iron meteorite group and the Eagle station pallasites.

Molecular beam epitaxy

In solid-source MBE, elements such as gallium and arsenic, in ultra-pure form, are heated in separate quasi-Knudsen effusion cells until they begin to slowly sublime.


see also