12-28 - The dawn of the age of critical materials: Alex King at TEDxDesMoines

"Do you ever lie awake at night and worry that we'll run out of all the stuff that we need to make things?"

Well, I didn't used to, Alex, but your video kind of freaked me out.

If we had a little more neodymium, we could get more wind turbines running and turning...but we can't find enough neodymium.

If we could find more rhenium, we could get jet engines manufactured more easily...but we can't find enough rhenium.

If we just managed a bit more terbium and europium, we'd have better, more efficient fluorescent lights (admittedly, a likely dated fact in today's LED-lit world)...but we can't find enough terbium or europium.

If we just had a little more of a whole lot of elements, we'd be better able to make more smart phones...but we can't get enough of all sorts elements.

I feel like we've been on the 'rare earth elements are rare' train before, but it looks like we're going going to be on the hunt for a fair while.

...and the final story about the change from the bronze age is chilling - though the ending is a painfully abrupt.

The Mystery Flaw of Solar Panels

I find myself digging the shift that has taken place on the Real Engineering channel.

Brian McManus - the host of Real Engineering - has been putting in a ton of work to step up the video's quality and the content's depth. I find myself learning a whole bunch of new stuff in every video that he's posting.

In this one, McManus details the reasons that the solar energy striking most photovoltaic solar cells is only turned into electricity at a lab-tested 20% efficiency - and even lower 18% real-world efficiency.

This is due to light being reflected, the threshold energy necessary for silicon to release electrons, heat build up, adding metal contacts which block light hitting the cell itself, oxygen defects in the silicon wafers itself.

...and there's some awesome explanation (along with animation) of how p-type and n-type semiconductors are used to produce voltages in solar cells.

The Real Engineering videos do tend toward higher level concepts nowadays, but they're brilliantly cited and clearly explained.

They're good stuff, man.

The Bizarre Market for Old Battleship Steel

Oddly, I had heard that old battleship steel - from before the development of atomic/nuclear weapons - was highly valuable for non-radioactive shielding material.

This video does a great job explaining how the Trinity explosion - and subsequent open-air, atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons - polluted any steel made after those tests via the Bessemer process for producing steel from pig iron and using atmospheric air.

I did not know, however, that the battleships scuttled at Scapa Flow had subsequently been salvaged and some of the steel used in this way. (As an aside, your friendly, neighborhood blogger has visited Scapa Flow. It's gorgeous.)

And I also didn't know that the demand for this low-background steel has mostly been superseded because of the switch from Bessemer to basic oxygen steel production.

Materials For The Future - The Plant Age | Oded Shoseyov | TEDxGateway

"The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones."

"The oil age will end long before we run out of oil."

Man, I hope that second statement is true.

In this TEDx talk, we hear about materials - collagen, humira (a drug), resilin (which I had to look up) - being produced in plant cells at scales large enough to be industrially practical.

The speaker discusses the final steps in harvesting the collagen to be 'like making pesto', but if I remember my pesto recipes from the past, the steps leading up to grinding the leaves didn't involve gene editing.

Though I could be wrong.

Aluminum =/= aluminium

When I was a college student at the University of Aberdeen (I spent my junior year from Wabash overseas in Scotland, doncha know) I was admonished by one of my professors for misspelling the element aluminum. 

See, he didn't know I was an American, and I didn't know - at the time - that the Brits spelled aluminum with an extra i - aluminium.

So, just why do we spell that element differently than they do?

For a few years now I've been telling a story of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) changing the name because it sounded better in their advertising back in the 1880's.

The story that Michael Quinion tells in his book Port Out, Starboard Home about the etymology of words and phrases in the English language is somewhat similar to that but isn't quite the same.

Check out the story in his book - or on Google Books here.

The surprising strengths of materials in the nanoworld | Julia Greer | TEDxCERN

And back to the TEDx talks...

I almost got distracted by the idea of vacuum balloons - filled with nothing instead of helium. That's a brilliant idea.

Then there's the Ashby chart for strength vs density which kind of looks like the Very Hungry Caterpillar. 

More importantly here is the chase for a material that is lightweight (low density) and strong, leaving the main area of the aforementioned Ashby chart.

I think I have most of the concepts down until - for about thirty seconds at 9:35 - the speaker talks about two-photon lithography and how the ceramic matrix is produced. There are words like boxel (a 3d pixel) and rastering lasers through space. I get the bit about depositing the material - whatever it is - onto the polymer matrix, but how the heck that polymer architecture is laid down is a total mystery to me.

All in all this looks like fascinating steps forward toward...something...in the future.

Waste Land - NPR article

Source - https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

I will admit that I am 100% confused by recycling at this point.

I think I can recycle paper, cardboard, glass, and aluminum pretty well. 

I take my aluminum cans to the local animal shelter where they supposedly make some cash from them.

I put my glass, paper, and cardboard (after tearing out the plastic windows in envelopes and tearing off as much sticker waste from the cardboard as I can) into my curbside bin.

But the plastics mystify me.

My local waste collector - Rumpke - says they can take, "Plastic Bottles (empty, crush, reattach lid): Bottles and jugs that have a small mouth and wider base, such as milk jugs, soda bottles, laundry detergent bottles, water bottles, shampoo bottles and contact solution bottles".

When I called them a couple of years ago and asked what they could take, the customer service person - clearly reading from a manual because she couldn't answer follow-up questions - told me they could take "#1-7 except butter tubs." 

#1-7 is pretty much everything, and I know flatly that they can't take styrofoam (foamed polystyrene - #6).

And now I see that Planet Money has posted a twenty-four minute story (audio and transcript - there's also a 4-minute summary from NPR) relating the history of the Resin Identification Codes (RICs) and the plastics industry's efforts in the 1970's to advertise their way out of plastic's imaging problem. Instead of finding ways to recycle plastics, they convinced us to feel better about plastics by letting us think they were making recyclable products.

Which was apparently crap.

But now they've promised that they're really going to recycle plastics going forward.

SULLIVAN: These days, Larry [Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry] spends a lot of time biking past the ocean. He's become deeply worried about its future, what it will look like in another 20 or 50 years, long after he's gone. And he thinks back to those years he spent at fancy hotels and conference rooms with oil and plastic executives. And he says what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should've been obvious all along. He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, as much virgin oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition. 

THOMAS: They were not interested and still aren't interested, as far as I'm concerned, in putting any real money or effort in the recycling because they want to sell virgin material. Nobody is producing a virgin product and wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material - that's their business. Every year, they want to say they produced X number of million more pounds because that meant their business was growing. 

SULLIVAN: And it is growing. We're making more plastic, buying more plastic, using more plastic. That's not going to go away anytime soon. But as the industry dusts off their new ads and makes their new promises, there is one difference. The difference this time is whether or not the public will still believe them.

Many Moving Magnets Melting Metal

Ooh, alliteration! I do love some alliteration.

I also love seeing a low tech version of high tech things - like in this case a bunch of magnets stuck to a moving flywheel being used to melt metal similarly to how an induction coil can melt metal - even metal that doesn't normally respond to magnet.

Shape-Morphing Smart Materials; The Future of Assistive Technology | Mark C Ransley | TEDxUCL

That's a fascinating idea - wearing a suit of materials that could stiffen, expand, and contract with the application of electricity. Memory metal does seems fairly well a natural for that. Interestingly, the talk never mentions them.

I appreciate the speaker's sense of humor as he goes through each of the other options

• dielectric polymers - perfect except for needing "tens of thousands of volts to operate...enough to give you a pretty nasty electric shock" (4:46)
• carbon nanotube aerogel - perfect except for also needing tens of thousands of volts to operate
• nylon fishing line muscles - relies on heat, much faster to heat up (and contract) than to cool down (and release)
• solid state actuators - either fast or strong but not currently both
• architectured materials - the current choice of the speaker's research group

The use of computer simulations to design materials - 3d printable structures - to predict the flexibility and changing shape of the material is really interesting.

And I'm amazed that the research group is looking at 3d printed materials - assumedly polymer materials - was the outcome. 

I'd very much like to see larger version of the materials that the speaker demonstrates (much too far from the camera) at 11:45. It's made from laser sintered nylon. 

Cubic Unit Cells

I'll admit that I posted this video. If you check, it's on the Lonnie Dusch (the actual name of your friendly neighborhood blogger) account.

I didn't make the video. I didn't clip it from whatever its original source it. But I needed it, and I had a downloaded copy that I got somewhere along the way of teaching the material science summer camps.

So I posted it on YouTube so I could stream it from anywhere.

If that's the event that pushes me over the edge into eternal damnation, I really wish I would've known.

But you might as well benefit from me risking my eternal soul.

So, check this video out.

It's a brilliant computer animation showing the main crystal structures that we cover in our material science course - simple cubic, body centered cubic, face centered cubic, and hexagonal close packing. We get the coordination number of each structure, a great animation showing the slicing to find the unit cell, the percent occupied, the 

The animation showing how many total atoms are in the simple cubic unit cell (at 1:35 - and repeated throughout the video for the other crystal structures) is so simple and elegantly shown.

I absolutely show this one in class every year - though I stop at about 5:34 because they start to get into ionic compounds (ceramics) which are beyond where we go with unit cells.

(I do warn you that it looks like the video locks up about 0:15 - 0:45. The audio continue, but the video goes still. Don't freak out. It works fine after that.)

The wonder material of the 21st century | Monica Cracuin & Dimitar Dimov | TEDxTruro

No, I have never wondered why pushing harder on a pencil while I'm writing makes the line darker.

I just assumed that there were more layers of graphite being left behind.

Oh, wait, that's it?

Wow. that's not a great opening question, Dimitar.

Here Dimitar discusses the benefits of adding graphene to concrete to make the concrete even stronger. Then Professor Cracuin steps in and suggests other uses of graphene - electronics integrated into fabrics or even our skin - and graphene-like materials (?). She mentions a material of two layers of graphene sandwiched around iron chloride (a combination she calls graphexeter - after the University of Exeter where she researches) to make incredibly flexible, durable, conductive displays - possibly even 'tatoo'ed onto the skin or integrated into contact lenses.

As an aside, I think this is the first TED talk I've seen that switches presenters partway through.

Self organising steel balls explain metal heat treatment

TL;DW - Top video great, absolutely show in class...second video mathematical diversion, not efficient use of class time, good math...third video between the two - more mathy but more tightly edited and efficient and material-science-course tied)

I'm posting all three of these videos together because they're part of a series that Steve Mould made (with help on the lower two) exploring ball bearings and ball-pit balls as crystalline modeling tools.

In the above one, Mould makes a really fancy version of our ASM BB board (we use CD cases and airsoft pellets - he uses plexiglass and metal bb's, more akin to the Atomix toy of yesteryear). If you want to make something like his fancy version, here are a couple of links to check out.

Mould uses the BB board the same way we use it in class: to discuss grains, grain boundaries, heat treating etc in crystalline metals. He places the BB board on a shaker to model adding energy via heat (and there's a brilliant view of vacancy defects moving through the crystal at 2:27 and again at 2:35). Mould then discusses how the crystalline structure he's modeling affects the macroscopic properties (hardness, toughness, strength, etc) of the metal.

Honestly, it's a great explanation of about half a day of summer camp, even admitting that his model is limited in exactly how accurate it is compared to more complicated reality. He mentions a couple of videos that go further. I've already posted one and will look at the other.



The second video is Mould and Matt Parker going through to find the most efficient packing for spheres - using ball pit balls. They then shift from tetrahedral packing to a more square packing - which turns out to be exactly the same (check the below video to see that they're the same). 

I'll warn you that the second video is a lot less professionally laid out and more heavily math-leaning. (There's a slightly more organized video that shows about the same content.) But Mould and Parker do cut a whole bunch of oranges trying to calculate the percentage of space occupied in the face centered cubic packing. (It an IRL version of a computer animation that we use in class and that I'm STUNNED to see I haven't posted on the blog before - coming in two weeks now.) We include a mathematical version of the proof at 16:55 in our summer camp powerpoint (at least Becky and I do - check slides 85 & 86) and you can find the math laid out here, too.

The last video is back to Steve Mould's channel and shows - using ball pit balls and a cardboard box - hexagonal (and face centered cubic) packing. They use that to demonstrate stacking faults (maybe defects, maybe disolcations, maybe grain boundaries - I need to figure out which term is most correct there), brilliantly shown with the color-coded balls from about 6:00-8:00.

The idea that the face centered cubic lattice is really and A-B-C (repeat) hexagonal arrangement whereas hexagonal close packing is A-B (repeat) is kind of mind blowing and so brilliantly well shown with the ball arrangement. The ABC diagram is a little weird to me and very much a mathematical diagram, something I wouldn't get into in class.

Discover the materials of the future...in 30 seconds or less | Dr. Taylor Sparks | TEDxSaltLakeCity

(Must refrain from making snarky comment about mustache...boots...slacks...)

Wait, the video is fifteen minutes long ( a pretty standard TED talk length, admittedly), but the title says "...in 30 seconds or less"). That feels like a serious disconnect.

I'm also a little disappointed that I don't know Dr Sparks because I've taught a material science camp at University of Utah (where he teaches) a half dozen times. I know a lot of the people on this page - but Dr Sparks seems to have eluded me for some reason.

In the above talk, Dr Sparks goes through the historical model of - as he says - "Edisonian trial and error" and serendipity (a la the discovery of saccharine) discovering new materials. He then transitions to our needs to discover modern materials in a more purposeful way via the Materials Genome Initiative and his research using machine learning to predict properties of materials either not yet created or with ingredients too rare to risk on trial and error experimentation. He refers to this field as materials informatics, a term I've never heard of before.

I think I'm going to hunt Dr Sparks down when I get out to Salt Lake (hopefully) next summer.

Why all solar panels are secretly LEDs (and all LEDs are secretly solar panels)

In the fall of 1995, Professor Arthur B Ellis of UWisconsin came to Wabash College - where I was then a senior chemistry major - and gave a presentation about LEDs. At the time I knew of LEDs as the little red or green light bulbs that were pretty much used as power indicators on electronic devices. I didn't - before his talk - have much of an idea how they worked or how important they would come to be in our world now twenty-five years later.

Coincidentally, Dr Ellis had just written Teaching General Chemistry: a materials science companion, a book that my cooperating teacher bought for me after my student teaching semester later that academic year and that I accidentally re-purchased twenty years or so later. (I realize now that I've told this story on the blog before.)

But I digress...I have come to realize that Dr Ellis's lecture at Wabash really laid out the chemistry of LEDs marvelously well because I watched the above video - showing the LEDs and solar panels are of a kind - and the below video - in which Steve Mould explains the science of LEDs and how they turn electricity into light (and the reverse in solar panels) - and realized that I already knew that information...even down to the P- and N-type semiconductor information.

I've never had a chance to thank Dr Ellis for his lecture, so maybe - if I'm lucky - he'll come across one of these blog posts and realize that he's appreciated.

Smart Materials | Anna Ploszajski | TEDxYouth@Manchester

A little while back, I typed in "material science TED" into the YouTube search bar to see what I could learn. It turns out that there's quite a bit I can learn from that search as there are a WHOLE LOT of material science TED talks.

This is the first result of that search, but the material science TED talks will be posting every other week (I'm interrupting them with non-TED talks on the alternating weeks so as not to get too monotonous around the blog) through sometime in March.

This first talk starts with a natural smart material, the pine cone. The material, as Anna related, is hygroscopic, changing its shape as the humidity around them changes, opening as the conditions are right to disperse seeds and closing as the conditions aren't so right.

Her definition of a smart material is "an object that has a property - like its color, its shape, or maybe its magnetism - and this property changes in response to an external stimulus - which might be light levels or moisture levels...temperature, pressure, that sort of thing."

She then gets into some more 'futuristic' materials than the pine cone: self-healing cement in Egyptian pyramids, quartz (piezo electricity - with a bit of crystal basic including why quartz's unit cell yields piezo electricity), photochromic sunglasses, battery gauges on Duracell batteries, color-changing mugs, mood rings (the last four of which she describes as 'quite naff'), DaVinci's flying machine, shape memory alloys (for changing airplane wing shapes), shape memory polymers (to cover that changing wing shape), quantum tunneling composites (???), 

She then covers a few problems with smart materials - slow to react, too delicate, diminishing performance over time, toxicity, cost, issues with upscaling manufacturing - and just handwaves this concerns away saying that you engineers will solve these problems.

My general impression from this is that I want a lot more detail about the 'really cool' smart materials that she mentions instead of so much time spent on the only one she really does explain: piezo electric crystals. The talk is too short for the breadth of materials that she just mentions. It feels very much like a brief survey that might've been better served to condense the intro and spend more time on one or two more cutting edge materials.

ACME corrosion cell on a single piece of metal

Source - https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/General_Chemistry/Map%3A_Chemistry_-_The_Central_Science_(Brown_et_al.)/20%3A_Electrochemistry/20.8%3A_Corrosion

I took a three-day, corrosion-focused ASM workshop at the University of Akron a few years back. It wasn't necessarily a part of the ASM summer camp world tour, but it was a certainly adjacent to the regular tour. ASM master teachers were teaching it - Andy and Debbie, honestly - and a solid handful of the attendees were ASM master teachers helping out and learning along the way.

That workshop was - I think - the first time that I ever heard the concept of ACME as it relates to corrosion.

By way of introduction, ACME is an acronym for Anode Cathode Metal Electrolyte. In order for corrosion (or oxidation and reduction) to happen, you must have...

• an anode (a more reactive metal)
• a cathode (a less reactive metal)
• a metal (sometimes called a metallic path connecting them)
• an electrolyte (a source of ions that keep the charge of the cell balances)

For example...

Source - https://www.marineinsight.com/tech/understanding-sacrificial-anodes-on-ships/

In the cell there...

• anode - zinc, more reactive than copper, loses electrons, turns from neutral zinc into zinc ions which drift into the solution around the zinc electrode
• cathode - copper, less reactive than zinc, gains electrons, gains mass as copper ions from the solution become neutral copper atoms
• metal - the wire between the zinc and copper electrodes, allows electrons to move from anode to cathode, can involve a thing (light bulb, radio, cell phone) that needs that flow of electrons to opperate
• electrolyte - the solutions around the electrodes and the porous disk that lets the ions move to keep the overall charge on each side of the disk to stay neutral, without it charge would build up and electrons would stop flowing

If this cell is set up, corrosion is going to happen, and the two electrodes don't have to be separated. They can be dissimilar metals abutting each other.

Source - https://pomametals.com/how-to-prevent-galvanic-corrosion/

Here we see two metals joined together (like a copper and a lead pipe connecting) with an electrolyte solution flowing through them. Bad things will happen to the more active (less noble) metal.

If we can break any connection in that cell, corrosion will stop (or at least be drastically arrested).

Source - https://pomametals.com/how-to-prevent-galvanic-corrosion/

After a few years of teaching corrosion in Princeton's material science course and the ASM summer camps and in AP chemistry, I think I'm finally getting to understand the ACME cell.

And I find myself thinking back to what one of the Akron professors said at that workshop when we asked how much of this they wanted us to teach to our students. He said that if students could understand that a single piece of metal could be both anode AND cathode, he would be happy. At the time, I didn't think much about it, but I've come to realize that is a big ask, especially to identify the ACME cell on a single piece of metal.

Thank heaven for that diagram up top (and that I'll repeat here)...

Source - I already told you up top, but since you asked so nicely... https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/General_Chemistry/Map%3A_Chemistry_-_The_Central_Science_(Brown_et_al.)/20%3A_Electrochemistry/20.8%3A_Corrosion

The ACME cell is still present these on a single piece of iron...

• anode - the bit of iron on the left, for some reason - a crystal defect, a difference in concentration in the electrolyte solution - that site is slightly more likely to release electrons
• cathode - a different part of the iron piece, the part on the right in this diagram
• metal - the two areas of the iron are connected because they're the same piece
• electrolyte - the metal has to be wet with some ions present (keep the metal totally dry, and you prevent corrosion)

At the anode, the iron becomes iron +2...at the cathode, O₂ becomes water (it helps if the solution is slightly acidic)...in between, we have iron ions and oxygen atoms, so we get iron (III) oxide...rust.

See, clear as day, huh?

Hiding a Nobel Prize From the Nazis

This is famous - at least within the science teacher world - story about the hiding of a couple of Nobel prizes (gold medals) won by Jewish scientists by Neils Bohr. 

I've posted the story (from NPR's quoting from The Disappearing Spoon) before, but this goes into the science of the full electron shells (particularly the d-shell) and equilibrium going on a lot more than that other article did.

Fungus: The Plastic of the Future

To quote my mother anytime we my dad would order pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms, "if God had meant for us to eat fungus, he wouldn't have made it grow on our feet."

I've since moved on from sharing my dad's exact pizza order to one of bacon and banana peppers, but I'm still down with the button mushroom.

But this video certainly isn't about your dad's mushrooms any more than quorn or Ecovative (mentioned in the above video and already blogged about) are.

Today's video looks at a lab exploring the growth of fungus (mycelium) to produce all sorts of different, polymer-substitute materials.

Here's a related TED talk from Erik Klarenbeek (the focus of the middle of the above video).

Multifunctional nanofiber protects against explosions

Source - https://phys.org/news/2020-06-multifunctional-nanofiber-explosions.html

This article took me a few reads through to get the idea, but here's what I think I have. I'll use quotes from the article...

"[T]he researchers needed to explore the tradeoff between mechanical protection and thermal insulation, properties rooted in a material's molecular structure and orientation."

"Materials with strong mechanical protection, such as metals and ceramics, have a highly ordered and aligned molecular structure. ... Insulating materials, on the other hand, have a much less ordered structure, which prevents the transmission of heat through the material."

" "Our idea was to use this Kevlar polymer to combine the woven, ordered structure of fibers with the porosity of aerogels to make long, continuous fibers with porous spacing in between," said Gonzalez. "In this system, the long fibers could resist a mechanical impact while the pores would limit heat diffusion." "

"[T]he researchers were able to spin long, aligned nanofibers into porous sheets—providing enough order to protect against projectiles but enough disorder to protect against heat."

First off, whoa, there's such a thing as kevlar aerogel?

And B, I think I might need to re-read the article because I kind of went away thinking about what the heck a kevlar aerogel would be.

The World's Least Bouncy Ball

That ball makes me sad.

This is effectively our summer camp demo of the 'happy/sad balls' (available from Ed Innovations as Choositz Decision Balls). They're two polymer balls - one made from neoprene, one from polynorbornene - that look and feel almost identical but that bounce very differently.

Admittedly, The Action Lab (which feels really weird as a term to refer to a dude in a video) doesn't have the same trickster nature that I like to use to demonstrate these balls in class. He's okay, and he explains the science and all, but I would hope that you could find a more entertaining way to demonstrate this in class.

Personally, I like to hand the bouncy ball (the neoprene) to a student and give them a few challenges. Drop and catch the ball...drop and catch with a clap in between...drop and catch with a spin between...(but I take the ball back to 'explain' each step...before returning the ball for the 'drop & spin' step, I switch the balls without telling the student, leading to the polynorbornene landing flatly. I usually tell the student that the ball hit a crack, causing it to bounce oddly while they were spinning. I've gotten students to drop the non-bouncy ball like three times before they start to suspect something - even though most of the rest of the class can tell something is wrong pretty quickly.)

Desserto | Cactus Vegan Leather

The video up above is clearly pro-Desserto, which is okay because Desserto seems pretty phenomenal. 

I wish I was a little less cynical sometimes, because I find myself thinking that Desserto - leather made from cacti - seems too good to be true. The producers take leaves off of cacti - "and then the small [leaves] will grow in a matter of months" - and produce 'leather' from the leaves. 

"You get organic, biodegradeable, and durable vegan leather..." for the same cost and less environmental damage than regular leather.

So I went looking for something that looks at Desserto with a more critical eye.

I first found a video showing how a different researcher makes 'plastic' from cactus leaves. It looks like something in the same realm but not quite the same product.

...but man, I'm stumped. I can't find anything that looks at Desserto with a critical eye. I can find a bunch of articles that say it's a new, fantastic product with a lot of buzz about it. But I can't find anything that either explains the process in more detail (not surprising as it's new and likely highly patented) or that explores just how environmentally friendly the vegan 'leather' really is.

I did find leather made from pineapple leaves, though, but it's also from the makers of Pinatex, so it's only pro-pinatex.

If anybody can find a more critical look at either of these materials, please share it.

Artist Transforms Found Books into Sparkling Crystallized Sculptures

Source - https://www.alexisarnold.com/#/crystallized-books/

That's either a really sad ending for a great book or a great repurposing of an awful book.

Either way, that's a book that's been soaked in a borax solution and left to crystalize.

It's kind of cool looking.

I'll let Alexis Arnold describe her own creation, a part of the Crystallized Books series...

The Crystallized Book Series addresses the materiality versus the text or content of a book. The crystals remove the text and solidify the books into aesthetic, non-functional objects. The books, frozen with crystal growth, have become artifacts or geologic specimens imbued with the history of time, use, and memory. 

I kind of dig it and might make one of those myself. I can't imagine it would be too tough to make. I already know how to make a borax solution. I assume the soaking isn't too tough. And lord knows I've grown enough borax crystals by just letting the solution evaporate.

Thoughts?

Source - https://www.alexisarnold.com/#/crystallized-books/

Why do Baseball Bats Break?

Oh, hey, Grady. Good to see you.

In this video - about why major league baseball saw a sharp uptick in broken bats (and subsequently an uptick of injuries caused by flying bat shards) in the early and mid-2000's - Grady gets into the differences in ash (the wood used to make almost every pre-2000 bat) and maple (a wood that became popular - not poplar - with ball players in the early 2000's after Barry Bonds used one to break the HR record).

He then goes into the non-isotropic nature of wood and how ash and maple are very different. I guess the lessons learned in making ash bats didn't translate cleanly into making maple bats. It doesn't mean that maple bats are inherently less safe, just that they need to be made - and particularly marked - differently than do ash bats.

Really, changing the material requires changing the production and use strategies for that object?

Who would've guessed it?

The Astounding Physics of N95 Masks

As far as I'm concerned, you can chuck the other two N95 mask videos that I posted earlier. This one's way better than either of those.

It does, I'll warn you, have a statistically-backed, pro-BLM message at the front end. If you want to avoid the controversial subject, skip ahead to 0:10. (That being said, I'll be playing the full video in class, but that's your call to make in your room.)

From there, the minute physics video explains how N95 masks are less like a strainer or a screen and more like a sticky spider web. Those spider webs - in the N95 masks - are really sticky because of the van der Waals force and the permanent charge imbalance  of the fibers. 

Seriously, this video is the best at explaining how the masks work.

You should watch it...

...and (if you're reading this in 2020), you should wear a mask - even if it's not an N95 mask.

Volcanic glass spray shows promise in controlling mosquitoes

Source - https://phys.org/news/2020-06-volcanic-glass-mosquitoes.html 

So, pesticides are bad.

I know, feel free to applaud for taking such a bold, controversial stand.

They're bad for pests, for us, and generally for the environment.

But there are a few pesticides that aren't terribly bad for us or the environment while still maintaining the 'really bad' nature for pests. There's diatomaceous earth, for example, which works by grinding away at insect exoskeletons but is relatively harmless to anything with skin and an endoskeleton.

In the linked article from phys.org, experimenters applied a spray of perlite, a volcanic glass, and water and measured its effectiveness in killing mosquitoes - primarily malaria-infected ones.

Their results suggest that perlite is highly effective - as high as 78% mortality rate six months after application, and the perlite seems to be safe for people in the huts. According to the article, the mechanism of mortality is that the perlite particles simply dehydrate the mosquito after they're picked up. The mosquitos also didn't show any indication of learning to avoid the perlite-sprayed walls or building up a tolerance to the perlite.

The article might say that perlite isn't a silver bullet, but early indications looks to me like it might be.

How Weed Eaters Work (at 62,000 FRAMES PER SECOND) - Smarter Every Day 236

I've spoken of my love of Destin before. One of the things that I love most about him is his scientific curiosity. He's willing to point a slow-mo camera at just about anything and set up some experiments to teach himself more about whatever that camera points at. It's kind of awesome.

In this one, Destin points his Phantom high-speed at weed eater string to see how the string cuts blades of glass (cut or rip? delaminate or clean slice?) and breaks against various wire fencing materials.

We could do a lot worse than show this when talking about destructive testing in class.

There's also a second video that tries to figure out which shape or string is best. He comes to a conclusion, but I'm not sure he does nearly enough experimenting and variable isolation to actually justify the conclusion he comes to.

How The World Of Building Materials Is Responding To Climate Change

Source - https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/15/21058051/climate-change-building-materials-mass-timber-cross-laminated-clt 

I will readily admit that I can't stand Science Friday.

I'm an NPR guy all the way, and I'm a science geek. Science Friday should be right up my alley. It's like they've made a show just to hook me in. (It's like Newton's Apple - which I loved as a kid - for the radio.)

And then Ira Flatow comes on and asks inane questions like, "what's your favorite cephalopod?" or "what does alligator poop smell like?" of serious scientists trying to discuss their research. If it weren't for Ira, I might really love Science Friday.

Occasionally, though, the topic is interesting enough that I fight through my Ira-loathing and stay tuned to WVXU (my local NPR station, I'm a sustaining member, doncha know).

In late February, for example, there was a segment (thirty-three minutes long) about mass timber buildings (buildings with wooden structural members) titled How the World of Building Materials is Responding to Climate Change.

Increasing concerns with steel and concrete construction - both release huge amounts of carbon dioxide during the material's initial production - are leading people back toward building with wood - or some form of engineered wood-based products (laminates, particle composites, etc) as a way to avoid the carbon dioxide release from concrete and steel production.

Not that the concrete industry isn't fighting back.

How N95 Masks Stop Viruses

Last week I lamented the fact that the 'what's in an N95 mask' didn't explain how the various layers actually stopped virus particles.

So I went out and found a video that did a better job of that.

Hopefully this video will help fill in some of the holes in your mask knowledge.

Holes and masks don't go together very well, doncha know?

What's Inside 3M N95 Respirator Masks? Find Out!

I, admittedly, haven't seen masks with exhaust valves in them yet. Interesting.

The video maker takes apart an N95 mask, exploring each level but apparently not looking into any research separately from what he sees under his microscope.

The first layer is polypropylene fibers, seemingly spun-bonded like Tyvek.

Then there's a thicker, rigid layer of also 'randomly' laid fibers. He doesn't tell us what that layer is made of. The layer is repeated.

He mentions - almost in passing - that the mask is electrostatically treated to help trap particles.

The final layer, the one against your face, is made of a mixture of small and large polypropylene fibers.

I do wish he went into a little more details of what the material in the middle layers is, how each layer contributes to the overall function of the mask, and how each layer's material is made. But, it's the best 'what's in an N95 mask' video I've found yet. Thanks to Material Science Girl for the tip on this video.

How a Former Rocket Scientist Makes the Best Copper Pots in America - Handmade

For some reason, I never would have thought of pots being handmade.

Knives? Sure...I've seen knife-making videos.

But copper pots always seemed like an industrial commodity to me, though I guess I understand that they must've been hand-made originally.

This video isn't necessarily about material science, but the use of three different metals to produce  single piece with different properties in each part would allow for a good wrap-up of a metals chapter.

The copper is a great conductor, so it's a great choice for the body of the cookware.

But copper is reactive, so the inside of the pot is coated in tin - a not terribly active metal with a lower melting point.

And a copper handle would be too hot too quickly, so the cast iron handle is riveted onto the copper body.

Apparently different metals have different properties. Who knew?

Sustainability: definition with simple natural science

I don't know why you'd need a fancy, French guy telling you what sustainable development is. It's development that can be sustained.

See, simple as can be.

Actually, the definition that Alex (sp?) gives - sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs - works really well. He does go on a bit to explain this in more scientific (thermodynamics, law of conservation of matter, photosynthesis) terms and to explore a few of the root causes of unsustainability.

The four causes of unsustainability...

• Relatively large flows of materials from the Earth's crust (mining, drilling)
• Accumulation of substances created by society (CO₂, polymers, trash)
• Physically inhibit nature's ability to run cycles (deforestation, paving over grass)
• Barriers to people meeting their basic needs worldwide (economic inequality)

The above video is posted on the Sustainability Illustrated website alongside a BUNCH of other videos. It's only an introduction to the topic, and his other videos go into much more detail on the topic.

The Chemarts Cookbook

From the ChemArts webpage, "[t]he CHEMARTS Cookbook offers both simple and more advanced ideas and recipes for hands-on experiments with wood-based materials. The book showcases interesting results, focusing on raw materials that are processed either chemically or mechanically from trees or other plants: cellulose fibres, micro- or nano-structured fibrils, cellulose derivatives, lignin, bark, and wood extractives."

ChemArts is a program at Aalto University in Finland pairing chemical engineering and art and design students to explore innovative uses for Finnish plant life (their words, from the video just below).



The program has published a 'cookbook' of sorts in which they provide recipes for 'cellulosic material exploration'. In other words, they have a bunch of recipes using cellulose derivatives from minimally processed materials like wood pulp to more processed ingredients like nanofibrillar cellulose, carboxymethyl cellulose, and microcrystalline cellulose along with fairly non-toxic materials like baking soda, calcium carbonate, glycerol, and starch.

The 'cookbook' is broken down with some basic science and ingredient background, methods and safety discussion, then the recipes themselves. The recipes are further classified as hard, soft, transparent, flexible, (3d) printed materials, colouring and dyeing, long fibres from nature, papermaking, and growing materials. The book then ends with some 'inspiration' projects that their students have made from the recipes in the book.

Some of the materials are going to require a bit of sourcing to manage, but the fact that they've published a recipe book for material science exploring sustainable, tree-based raw materials is spectacular.

The cookbook itself is available for €30.00 or as a free download pdf. You can check out some of the images from inside the 'cookbook' on this article (or they're all in the pdf.)

And, in case they make the free download disappear, I've uploaded the pdf to my Google Drive.

BORAX: What it is, how to use it, and how to cook it down PROPERLY

Wait for it...wait for it...

I promise you there's a punchline coming in this one, but it takes about 4:50 of set-up to get to the punchline.

What Trent (as previously featured) shows us here is the results of heating borax as a flux in blacksmithing of steel. He shows, initially, what happens when you pour borax straight onto heated steel. The borax bubbles up and doesn't necessarily stick right when it's been poured. Because of that, according to Trent anyway, some blacksmiths will 'cook down' their borax resulting in glassy beads (as previously featured) that can then be pulverized and used as a non-bubbling flux.

I get the feeling that Trent might not exactly see this as a necessary step.

The science of what's happening seems to be pretty straight forward

First off, borax is actually sodium borate (or maybe sodium tetraborate) decahydrate (Na₂B₄O₇·10 H₂O) (source).

Initially, the puffing seems to be from a simple loss of the water of hydration (the ·10 H₂O part of the formula).

Then the borax seems to decompose into sodium metaborate and boric anhydride through this reaction (source & source).

Na₂B₄O₇ ⟶ 2 NaBO₂ + B₂O₃ 

This appears to be the same reaction that causes the creation of the borax glass beads.

When the beads pick up colors, one source says that the color comes from the formation of metallic borate compounds such as Co(BO₂)₂. That's not relevant to this video, though.

Here we just get to have fun seeing Trent rant again.

HOW ROCKETS ARE MADE (Rocket Factory Tour - United Launch Alliance) - Smarter Every Day 231

So much to cover here.

The quick version is that Destin (of Smarter Every Day) shows us his tour of United Launch Alliance (ULA with their CEO, Tory Bruno. The ULA factory has some pretty highly-regulated manufacturing going on.

I'll go with a bullet point list of things I found interesting and possibly useful for a material science class. Admittedly, the full video - fifty-four minutes long - is probably more than any class could watch in total, but it's got some awesome clips.

• 5:15 - The video cuts to avoid filming "that" to Destin's left and right, items that Tory narrates but that he says flatly can't be filmed and shown.
• 7:15 - Quick discussion of the supply chain for the aluminum sheets that the rocket fuel tanks are made of
• 8:30 - We see the finished product of a machined isogrid panel as well as why that design - not the ideal design - was chosen because of the limitations of FEA analysis calculations in the 1990s.
• 9:50 - Discussion of the safety margins in space flight (1.1 - 1.25 times designed load) as compared to those of land-based transportation (7-12 times designed load)
• 12:15 - Amazingly, we get a mixture of, as Bruno says, "the pinnacle of technology...high-tech, robotic operations but mixed in [with] craftsmanship with people who are very skilled and have great attention to detail." That's amazing that something this precise is partially done by hand. This will come back in a bit.
• 13:30 - Machining, subtractive manufacturing is mentioned...as well as their recovery system for recapturing the aluminum chips for eventual recycling.
• 17:00 - 19:20 - Advertisement for Audible, skip it
• 19:30 - Replacing the isogrid with an orthogrid, saving time and weight, along with a quick discussion of strain and work hardening that happens by hand after the machining. We get a nice close-up of the orthogrid at 21:10.
• 22:00 - Destin uses the term strongback to describe the construction of the press used to curve the machined panels. That's a term I had to look up.
• 22:45 - Destin questions whether the aluminum is annealed, and Tory says they allow the aluminum to artificially age at room temperature after they are slightly work hardened from the curving process.
• 24:15 - Back to manual manufacturing to a precision level that - according to Tory - can't be achieved by automation. "You will always get better results by doing it by hand," he says.
• 27:30 - We see the anodizing facility to create a thick oxide layer for hardness and corrosion resistance. I knew that bare aluminum automatically formed an oxide layer, but I hadn't heard - as Tory says around 28:10 - that the natural layer is very thing and porous, leading to poor corrosion resistance.
• 31:30 - I wonder what the various acid concentrations are.
• 32:10 - We head toward the friction stir welding area, and Tory explains why friction stir welding is the better choice for strength of their final tank.
• 34:05 - Destin 'peaks over there' at a highly pixelated area. Cute
• 36:00 - Quick explanation of why it's better to order one large pizza than to order two medium pizzas
• 37:40 - Another pixelated section with the specialized head of the friction stir welder
• 40:15 - We switch over to stainless steel - half the thickness of a dime - instead of aluminum as we switch from boosters to upper stages. 
• 43:00 - We get a finished view of the 5m composite payload faring and a discussion of ULA having brought the manufacturing of that from Switzerland to north Alabama via business partnership.
• 44:00 - Bruno discusses ULA's record of flying both payload and actual people successfully with 135+ consecutive, successful launches. 
• 45:20 - Discussion of mass fraction (without explanation)...I had to look that up, too.
• 46:30 - Changes coming from hand arc welding to automated welding in the next version of Centaur (the upper stage) to save time (and assumedly cost).
• 47:40 - We get a quick glance of the team of people who are walking around behind the scenes with Destin and Tory. Admittedly, it looks like Tory is taking Destin around solo, but there are clearly people supervising even the CEO the whole time.

In general, I'm incredibly impressed with Bruno's knowledge of the entire process. It's amazing to see that from a CEO. Maybe that's the way that all CEOs are, but I doubt it.

And, if you want even more, there's a second video - on Destin's second channel - where the guys get into some discussion about the rocket engines themselves and ULA's position within the industry. It's less materials-focused, but it's worth watching.

CERAMIC COATING - How It Works | SCIENCE GARAGE

First off, thanks to Eric Moorman who sent me this video. Mad love for Eric.

Let's go through the material science awesomeness in this video about how to get the most durable, prettiest finish on your car.

• The first four minutes or so are all about the causes of the tiny scratches on car surfaces and how to clean the car before applying a finish coating of either wax or ceramic.
• At 4:10 we get a discussion of wax, and the host even uses the word hydrophobic, explaining how the water beads up because of the hydrophobic nature of the wax.
• At 5:10, we finally get to the ceramics, "a non-metallic solid material making up an inorganic compound of metal and nonmetal (or metalloid) atoms primarily held in ionic and covalent (?) bonds." The host explains that those atoms can be crystalline (in various ways) or even vitrified.
• There's an explanation of the Moh's hardness scale, and a mention that there are other ways to measure hardness like via measuring scratch resistance.
• Heck, he even shows a very simplified version of covalent bonding with shared pairs of electrons.
• We get into using nanotextures to increase the hydrophobic character of a surface, increasing the contact angle between a drop and the surface - with a nice diagram, too - explaining super hydrophobic coatings.

Admittedly, I had no idea such coatings existed for cars.

Pole vaulting - physics, material science, miracle

One of my students in chemistry recently picked up my copy of Materials in Sports Equipment (vol 1) by Jenkins (speaking of which, three questions...one, does anybody know if a Vol 2 ever came out? And did you know an updated edition just came out in May 2019? Does anybody know how different the updated version is?)

He skimmed the first few pages and came to me with questions about the energy transfer in pole vaulting. That sent me looking for videos about the energy transfer in - and the material science of - pole vaulting.

The first video I found - the above one - goes through the energy transfers spectacularly, explaining via stick figure drawings just how the energy changes forms in the course of the run up and eventual vault itself.

That, then, sent me looking some more for videos about the materials of the vault pole.




I couldn't find a corny joke either at the beginning or end of the How It's Made video, so that was a little disappointing. But I did notice that some of the How It's Made footage was in the LSU video up top.



...but I will say the production value on the "How It's Made" video is higher than this less fancy video showing how Gill makes pole vaults.



Then I started to go further down the rabbit hole and found just how steam is involved in the production of vault poles, something that clearly the American Boiler Manufacturer Association must care about deeply.

And I'm really curious about the Essx pole video which seems to show some materials above and beyond fiberglass - possibly carbon fiber and what seems to look like saran wrap (?). I kind of wish their video wasn't entirely wordless.




...and because I figure somebody came here to see this, I'll include a compilation of pole vault breaks. Heads up, though, that nobody in this video gets seriously injured.

Making Uranium Glass

I hope this goes without saying this time, but do NOT try this at home.

Today's video shows YouTuber NileRed making uranium glass. He first has to refine the uranium from uranyl nitrate into sodium diuranate (mostly a simple reaction with sodium hydroxide solution), then he has to dry the powder product, and then he has to make glass.

Making the glass is actually the most straight-forward task in that it's just melting silicon dioxide, boric acid, and soda ash together. We do that in our material science course, but we add in something to color the glass: copper (II) oxide, manganese dioxide, or chromium oxide.

NileRed adds in sodium diuranate, a uranium compound that makes a gorgeous yellow glass that fluoresces a brilliant green under UV light.

He then gets to figure out how to anneal his glass because it keeps shattering on him.

And he never tells us - as he mentions at 10:30 and a couple more times - what the heck 'special waste container' he has that makes it okay for him to dispose of uranium waste.

I feel like we might be getting into radioactive boy scout territory here, NileRed.

How It's made - Aluminum cans

The top comment on the video (at least when I checked in on it) said the following "I watched this whole video to see how the pull tabs were assembled on the top of the can–sincerely disappointed."

So, I'll warn you in advance that this video stops with the cans assembled - except for the top of the can being attached, something that happens after the can is filled with liquid. If that means you don't want to watch the video, move along.

The main reason I watched the video was to find out how the polymer liner is put into the can. Thankfully, that part was included - the polymer liner is sprayed in as a 'varnish' (but take that with a grain of salt because the whole video uses British language such as aluminIum) at about 3:40.

Alfred University 90's Ad: Ceramics Engineering

Just how 90's can one video get?

Let me count the ways

• 0:15 - dutch angles shifting back and forth (repeats at 0:31...and 0:53...and so many times) just to make things 'exciting' 
• 0:25 - flickering font on screen
• 0:37 - jumping footage, eliminating some frames to make the motion 'edgier'
• 0:40 - the good doctor's duster coat
• 0:46 - repeated, slightly closer footage of the same hammer hitting a window
• 0:49 - animation repeating quickly again and again
• 1:24 - science lab lit with green, orange, and purple lights
• 1:53 - slow motion glass jar drop
• 2:24 - unnecessary sound effect
• 2:50 - glass falling footage repeated from earlier
• 2:53 - racing footage stretched and tilted as it plays
• 3:09 - washed-out airplane footage tilting back and forth to a rock score

Ok, I quit...the cliches are just too numerous for me to note for the full fifteen minute run time of the video.

It's like the Bill Nye Show has come alive all over again.

I will recap the content, however...

• hardening tempered glass
• space shuttle tiles
• ceramic engineering lab footage
• basic ceramic properties
• possibilities of ceramic engines in cars
• catalytic converters
• superconductivity
• piezoelectric crystals
• liquid crystal window coatings
• fiber optics
• bioceramics

The animation at 2:03 - showing ion exchange to harden the surface a glass (similar to the production of Gorilla Glass) isn't necessarily a 90's cliche, but it is really well explained.

In case you're curious, Alfred University still hosts the New York State College of Ceramics. Looks like it might be fun to visit. Plus it looks like Alix (now Alexis) Clare is still there.

Flamethrower vs Aerogel

They killed that poor kid's flamethrower.

That sucks.

Dr Derek got himself some big sheets of aerogel and stood behind them while a makeshift flamethrower went full bore at the sheet from barely a feet or two away.

I think aerogel might be a pretty good insulating material.

I may need to get myself some of that stuff...and not to let Rebecca get ahold of it.

To me, the demonstration after the blow torch - around 6:20 or so - is more impressive. Dr Derek touches a piece of metal that is mostly coated with a 1mm thick layer of aerogel. The coating is at 125 C, hot enough to boil water. Dr Derek then rests his hand on the aerogel coating without harming himself - because the aerogel does such a spectacular job of not allowing the thermal energy to be transferred to his fingers.

He also shows a few other commercial uses of aerogel to keep really cold things really cold - like pipes carrying liquid natural gas in industrial settings...and deep undersea insulating oil pipelines.

My closing take-away is that this stuff is miraculous.

The Toxic Pit With A $3 Admission Fee

Hey, I've been there!

And I've written about it, too.

Berkeley Pit is fascinating as a legacy of the environmental consequences of mining - particularly of open pit mining - and a roadside attraction that you can see for a scant $3 admission fee.

Tom Scott - whose YouTube channel is mostly fascinating explorations of Tom's many interests (languages, computer technology, "Things You Might Not Know", and a couple of 'shows' that I should probably check out) - makes a stop at The Pit in the above video and gets a lot closer to the water than I was ever allowed to go - or than I really tried to go, honestly.

He visits the propane cannon used to scare off birds, sees the high-powered rifles used for the same, and sees one of the world's largest water treatment plants - only to be fully online once the water level within The Pit equalizes with the water table outside The Pit and the toxic, sulfuric-acidic water begins to leave The Pit.

I did fact check one detail of the video -  at 0:29 when Tom says "and so deep you could fit the new One World Trade Center standing upright in it."

According to Wikipedia (citation needed), the approximate depth of The Pit (I really like capitalizing both words there) is 1780 feet. According to Wikipedia again, One World Trade Center's architectural height is 1776 feet, but the height to the tip of the antenna on top is 1792 feet.

So, looks like Tom is approximately right, but the tip might extend just a bit above the surface.

I wonder what the water (pH~2.4) would do to the building?

How NASA Reinvented The Wheel - Shape Memory Alloys

Was the Mars Rover really lowered down by flying platform and hooks and winches?

That's kind of awesome!

We get to see the reveal of the memory metal 'tire' at 4:10 in the above video, a mesh tire made of what looks like a chain mail of nitinol. Then there's a great explanation of why nitinol is a super-elastic material (using our old friend, the stress-strain curve) and some nice atomic-level diagrams.

Then we get a bunch of close-up video of the wheel deforming and returning to its original shape.

It's a brilliant idea.

Yemen's Deadly Ghost Ship

I just read an article about the FSO Safer, an oil tanker that has been taken out of service as a ship and converted into floating storage off the coast of Yemen. Apparently, according to OpenDemocracy, anyway, that's a bad thing. (All of the below quotes and the above image are from that article.)

A victim of Yemen’s current civil war, the Safer has fallen in to a dire state of disrepair, with rust spreading around her hull and on-board equipment. She is packed with more than a million barrels of crude oil, which over time is thought to have steadily released flammable gases meaning the Safer could explode if she doesn’t simply begin leaking huge volumes of oil into the sea.

Well, as long as there's a way to avoid an explosion. All we have to do is leak the three MILLION barrels of oil into the ocean.

That's a fair trade, right?

But it gets worse. The 1.15m barrels of oil on board is Marib Light, a type of crude that mixes more easily with water, explains Dr David Soud at IR Consilium, a maritime security consultancy that has been tracking the FSO Safer situation. 

Should that oil begin to flow out of the rusting hull and into the Red Sea, it could form a spill roughly four times as large as the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 – and with crude that mixes down into the water column. 

... 

That means the Safer presents a significant threat to nearby coral reefs, marine life and also desalination plants in the region that provide drinking water to nearby countries including Saudi Arabia.

Ah, so apparently leaking three million gallons of light crude oil into the ocean would be bad.

But what's the problem with just leaving the tanker in place? It's not like an unmaintained metal tanker in a salty ocean is going to be a problem, is it?

A victim of Yemen’s current civil war, the Safer has fallen in to a dire state of disrepair, with rust spreading around her hull and on-board equipment.

...

Sitting in the sea, it is corroding away rapidly as we speak.

Since civil war broke out, little or no maintenance has been carried out.

...

“Any kind of ship that sits in the sea or moves around in the sea has to be regularly maintained,” says Laleh Khalili, professor of international politics at Queen Mary University London.

...

In the absence of constant sanding and painting of the hull, the Safer has essentially been left to rot.

...

Plus, the Red Sea is a particularly salty body of water, meaning that the Safer’s hull is corroding faster than it would elsewhere in the world.

...

A giant problem begging to be fixed – waiting, rusting, creaking

Oh, that's right. Steel in salt water is going to corrode quickly and disastrously.

Honestly, though, I don't understand the idea that the tanker was simply, "converted into a stationary storage facility for the Safer oil company and brought to an offshore position near the Yemeni coast".

That's weird, but I guess it's not really different from rolling storage.

Mui Ho Fine Arts Library

At first glance, there's not much thrilling about the library - the Mui Ho Fine Arts Library - in the video above.

There are a bunch of bookshelves in open stacks three stories high.  All in all, meh. That's been done before - and much higher, honestly.

But then you get to the moment in the above video - about 0:55 in - where they mention that the books and the floors and shelves supporting them are NOT actually supported by the floor below but rather are hung from the ceiling.

Tension...not compression.

How cool is that?

I mean, as long as you aren't wearing a skirt, a dress, or high heels, anyway.

Corrosionpedia

Corrosionpedia isn't a wiki (that would mean that the website and its information was editable to anyone in the website's community), but it is along the lines of a corrosion encyclopedia - with the words just mushed together.

The site has a huge amount of corrosion-related content, and I've particularly enjoyed the industry news section - a weekly collection of one-paragraph summaries of corrosion in the news with links to more in-depth articles about the story. Some of the stories are in very industry-specific publications, but others are in more popular media. No matter what level your students are, you should be able to find some corrosion-relevant current events with minimal searching.

Much of the rest of the website, however, is internally-written articles on specific corrosion topics. A quick survey of those finds articles on "corrosion control considerations in the equipment design process", "what new materials science studies suggest about corrosion control in the future", and "an intro to pipeline corrosion and coatings". The articles are written on a level that people - students, teachers, even non-education folks - should be able to get much of the content, and the articles have a number of links internal to corrosionpedia if you want to know a little more. The articles are broken up by topic - "cathodic protection", "materials selection", and others.

They also have webinars - some of which are free, all of which require creating an account; downloads - whitepapers, reports, slide presentations; Q&A - single questions with answers from "corrosion experts"; a directory of corrosion-focused companies; and an events calendar of upcoming (and recently past) corrosion industry events.

I've found the articles and news story collections useful. I haven't found the other sections useful...yet.

So, take a look at corrosionpedia and see if you can figure out why a gas station canopy collapsed, why a pedestrian was injured by a streetlight pole, or why a bridge in Mumbai, India collapsed.

You know, in case you couldn't guess from the website's name.

This ain't crazepedia.