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.