Inorganic chemistry

Inorganic chemistry is the branch of chemistry concerned with the study of
materials that contain any combination of chemical elements except for
organic compounds. Major branches include:

   * Minerals, like salt, asbestos,silicates, , ...
   * Metals and their alloys, like iron, copper, aluminum, brass, bronze,
     ...
   * Compounds involving non-metallic elements, like silicon, phosphorus,
     ,chlorine, oxygen, for example water
   * Metal complexes

Some important inorganic products are silicon chips, transistors, LCD
screens, and fiber optics.

Inorganic chemistry often overlaps with mineralogy, geochemistry,analytical
chemistry, environmental chemistry, physical chemistry, and Organometallic
chemistry. Organometallic chemistry combines aspects of organic chemistry
with inorganic chemistry, and is partially characterized by the study of
metal-carbon bonds, in which the carbon, apart from the metal-carbon bond,
would otherwise be considered a part of an organic compound. Vitamin B12,
whose active site is similar to that of hemoglobin, is a
naturally-occurring, metabolically-important organometallic compound
containing a large organic components (corrin and protein), a metal
(cobalt), a bond between the metal and the carbon of a methyl group. Despite
the presence of metal ions or metal-carbon bonds, gold cyanide, calcium
carbonate, and nickel tetracarbonyl (to name just a few such) are inorganic,
rather than organometallic, compounds, although some chemists consider metal
carbonyls to be organometallic.

Adding to the confusion, the oxides of carbon, carbonate salts, and
materials containing carbon like steel and diamond are usually considered
inorganic, while the inorganic molecule nitric oxide is often studied for
biochemical effects.

Much of inorganic chemistry deals with molecular compounds. i.e many
inorganic materials have a structure that can be described in terms of
molecules but many others do not. The study of such solids is called Solid
State Chemistry. It is a branch of materials science.