Could it be used for coins? And would that be 'cleaning' or 'conservation'? "Where there's silver, there's tarnish. While getting the tarnish off your flatware might be an occasional inconvenience, to museum curators and conservators, it's a threat to irreplaceable works of art. To protect these objects for generations to come, scientists from the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, have teamed up with conservators from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Md., to develop and test a new, high-tech way to protect silver art objects and artifacts, using coatings that are mere nanometers thick." Full story here.
Keep us informed on any follow up stories on this. I don't know how well this would go over in the numismatic world, people (including myself) are pretty darn skeptical when it comes to anything coming in contact with their prized key-dated coins.
Call me in 30 years and let me know how that's working out. They used to use lacquer on copper long ago (and apparently silver even today, according to the article). It worked for a while, then the coin's surfaces start to deteriorate. On a more serious note, I do hope that something like this works. That would be really cool.
Doesn't really sound like anything new to me, numismatist have known for decades that toning on a coin protects that coin from from different or additional toning as long as the coin is stored correctly. At the very least it delays additional or different toning for a very long time. It also sounds like they are taking a page direct from the "coin docotor's manual".
