Four videos about one really bad event that could have been much worse

We'll start with the video debrief of the driver with the armored vehicle manufacturer after the fact so we're all aware that things worked out fine for the people you'll see in the next two videos which are the original footage - first one inside the vehicle, second one a dashcam pointed out of the video.

We've had impressive videos of bulletproof, composite glass before, but this is a really impressive application of that material in its designed use. And, of course, the host sits in the car at the very end while one of his coworkers fires another two shots at him. Nuts, man...

And the final video is from an American morning show providing some context on the interior video that was making its rounds on social media at the time.

Heck of a first day on the job for the guy in the passenger seat.

Making ULTRA-BRIGHT GLOWING GOO

Barnaby Dixon is an impressive puppeteer that I first heard about probably ten years ago. If you haven't checked out some of his work, do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes there first.

In this instructional video, Barnaby explains how he uses a thermoplastic polymer - a polymer that becomes flexible when it's heated above some temperature but is rigid below that same temperature. It's a great example of the polymer's glass transition phase change. Because polymers are mixtures, they don't necessarily have definite melting temperatures as pure substances like elements or compounds do. Instead they have ranges of temperatures during which they aren't quite solid or liquid but are flexible and moldable - think of hot glass being shapeable but not liquid.

I have some of this at school. It used to be available from Educational Innovations. That's where I bought it, but they sadly don't carry it anymore. Of course, just about anything is available at Amazon if you search for pcl moldeable plastic.

The Structure of Crystalline Solids

This video covers ground that is more attractively covered in this other unit cell video.

...but this video also goes through the specific math required to calculate the packing factor - the percent of occupied space - for each of the crystal structures.

Plus it has a Pokemon analogy - which the computer animation video doesn't have.

To paraphrase Corey Petersman, an AP chemistry and material science student during our first year of teaching matsci at Princeton, "vaporeon, witches!"

Exploring The Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA USA Walking Tour

I've never been to the Pacific Northwest - not further north than the Redwoods National and State Parks in Northern California, anyway.

Might have to get to the Tacoma/Seattle area to check out the Museum of Glass.

This video is an un-narrated walking tour of that museum with occasional annotations in the top corner of the video. Not a ton of information - certainly no science - just glances at pretty glass.

Making an atomic trampoline

I've said it before, but an atomic trampoline demonstration set-up would make for a spectacular gift for your favorite neighborhood blogger.

NileRed took a different route than I've taken - which is mostly just wishing that I would stumble across an atomic trampoline and not really doing anything at all to make that happen - and decided to make a disk of amorphous metal on his own.

Admittedly, one of our ASM Master Teachers has a lead on getting sets of amorphous metal disks for us to have in our classrooms. It involves the material scientists at Apple's headquarters in California and turned out to be much more complicated than expected because - as NileRed finds out - the adhesive used to affix the amorphous metal to the steel base is highly relevant in maintaining the ridiculously bouncy nature of amorphous metals in this application.

Here's to hoping that my strategy of doing nothing and just hoping things will work out will...um...work out.

I'll include the Grand Illusions videos that inspired Steve Mould's video that in turn inspired NileRed's above video...

Making concrete green with Dr. Pranshoo Solanki | Illinois Summer Research Academy

I love that this is a week-long research project/workshop for high school seniors. I know that we don't do anything nearly that intensive in our material science course at Princeton - partially because of time constraints and partially because we don't have anything that would test concrete's compression strength with any accuracy.

Does anybody know of similar experiences that near you that we could recommend for our high school students?

How One Company Secretly Poisoned the Planet

At some point in my material science and chemistry courses, I speak bluntly to my students that most research suggests that man-made polymers are bad for us.

Some are worse than others, but most research on the effects of polymers on humans seems to suggest that there are bad effects from most man-made polymers. Some are minorly bad, but others - like the family of PFAS - are more obviously and persistently bad.

The video above is short and has a direct message: DuPont is bad (or has acted badly).

The longer video below - from Veritasium - is far longer but is much, much more informative.

If this sounds familiar, you might've seen a semi-recent movie about this story, Dark Waters.