How Plastic Made With Algae Can Clean Waterways | World Wide Waste

The World Wide Waste series from Business Insider is rich with material science content. You'll be seeing most of their videos on the blog eventually, but I certainly recommend watching them before that.

This video explores a project to jointly clean waterways prone to algal blooms and produce plastics which can then be used to produce whatever plastic products would normally be made from many plastics.

Anything that replaces some of our oil-based polymers - even if it's not replacing 100% of the polymer - is a good thing. I appreciate that the latter half o the video explores some of the more complex aspects of this issue - trapping carbon dioxide in plastics isn't the final answer because it still creates more plastics, the causes of the algal blooms, the environmental costs of shipping the algae and products across the oceans. 

It sounds like this is a better option than plastics but that it's not perfect. 

Small steps add up, I guess.

Nitinol: The Shape Memory Effect and Superelasticity

The initial part of this video from The Engineering Guy isn't anything new to most of us teaching material science: NiTiNOL changes shape as its temperature is raised. From there, though, this video does a great job showing animations and graphics explaining what's happening within NiTiNOL when its temperature changes. 

I haven't heard the explanation of the mirrored or non-mirrored rhombic crystals. That's really interesting, and I'd admittedly like to get some confirmation from an expert that it's not an over simplification. 

How To Mine Gold From Electronics | World Wide Waste

As always and as we should probably preface every conversation that we have about materials, we should lean into the reduce side of the triangle way more than we do.

But, until we get that perfected, we need to figure out better ways to recycle those materials that we use.

In this video, an Aussie company is working on e-waste recycling, particularly toward the recovery of the precious metals: palladium, gold, copper. The activity series comes in at 2:15 when the narrator says, "palladium and gold are still stuck in the solids. They're harder to dissolve." 

He really means that they're harder to react and doesn't explain that it's because of their extremely low positions on the activity series that this is true.

"For the precious metals, you need something with a little more oomph."

Yeah, you would.

This company goes on to use - according to the video - microorganisms that consume and absorb heavy metals allowing the company to concentrate those and sort them from the waste. That's fascinating, and I love the idea that they went looking for microorganisms that had evolved to thrive on mine waste instead of trying to 'invent' a new process chemically. Brilliant, gents!

---

I also dig the gold nanoparticles appearing purple. I've read about red glass from gold nanoparticles before, but hadn't heard about purple. Upon further reading, it looks like the distinctions from red to purple depend largely on the size of the nanoparticles. 

---

150 grams of gold from 1 metric ton? 

That doesn't seem like much, but when they go on to say that open pit gold mining nets 3-5 grams per ton of rock, that looks way more profitable.

---

And the the video gets to the environmental justice side of things. There is a cost to our consumer culture. We in the wealthy west just aren't always the ones who are paying that cost.

Man, I hope that some of these phenomenal processes that we've heard about over the decades come to fruition and that they don't all go the way of anything into oil.

What Really Happened at the Hernando de Soto Bridge?

I've driven across the Hernando de Soto bridge. It was in 2019 when the wife and I took a vacation down the Mississippi River to see the various flood control measures. Seriously, that's a vacation that we took. Yes, it was my idea. Why do you ask?

This video is more about civil engineering than it is about material science, but around 6:00 there's a good discussion of fatigue-induced failure and how improper welds can lead to that failure.

As I post this (back in July 2021, I work in advance when I have time in the summer), it looks like the bridge is scheduled to at least partially reopen in August 2021. Hopefully by the time this posts in December, I won't have to update it with bad news.

Oh, and that video at 8:58 was taken at about the time I went across the bridge. And the photo right after that was way before I was on the bridge. Neither of those facts inspires a lot of confidence in our bridge inspections. Sorry, Derek.

Anodizing Titanium - How To Anodize Titanium With 9V Batteries Cheap And Easy - Full Tutorial (2020)

That looks so simple...now I just need to find a source of titanium handy so we can do that in lab.

And I'm a little afraid of the rust remover because I read an article about hydrofluoric acid's dangers a while back.

But that really does look like something I could achieve.

I wonder what colors you can get...

Oh, thanks.

Manufacturing plywood boards: then and now

I like that the music choice for the video. The beat is a little propulsive but isn't overpowering, and the groove over top of the beat is smooth enough that it can play for nearly seven minutes without becoming repetitive or annoying.

By the by, I came upon this video because my wife and I were watching a video about the making of an apple tart in which the youtuber referred to his process as being kind of like making plywood. He's correct in that he had a rotary cutter slice off lengths of apple - as the rotary cutter slices off lengths of the tree - and then reassembles the apply lengths as the tree slides are reassembled (though he went for a round tart rather than the flat plywood.)

It's interesting to see how many people were needed for making plywood in 1954 and how few are needed in modern manufacturing. 

Robots? They took our jobs, am I right?

Physics Demo Time (or Cool Party Trick ... your choice) - Opening a Can Drink with a Sharpie!

All hail the YouTube algorithm for bringing this four-year-old video to me.

There isn't much too this demonstration. The thin aluminum top of a pop can is pressed upon back and forth a few times, and the can tab 'explodes' outward...loudly.

I assume this works because the designed failure point around the can tab is relatively weak - weaker than the rest of the solid top -  and the pressing back and forth on metal stresses that point causing the failure.

Neat trick and one I think I'll give a try.

What is epoxy coated rebar and why is it being banned?

I feel bad for this youtuber having to broadcast to us from some sort of white void with bad lighting or white balance without understanding how low quality his image is compared to the quality of the images that he's sharing 'behind' him. And I don't know why he won't make eye contact with me. He keeps looking at something above and in front of me that I can't see.

Sorry for the snarkiness. 

I've been watching a lot of very professionally made YouTube videos recently, and it's easy to see how much better those look than this more amateurishly produced videos, but I will admit that this guy gives a great explanation of why epoxy coated rebar is used (corrosion prevention), the problems with it (the epoxy rubs off unless the rebar is handled very gently before sealing it in concrete leading to pitting corrosion and debonding), and pros and cons of possible solutions (high costs due to scale production and lack of building code acceptance).

It's easy to think that simple solutions (just paint the rebar) won't lead to secondary problems (the paint rubbing off).

(Oh, and respect to BadLandsKid who had the top comment on this video when I accessed it most recently, "Very galvanizing topic. While it’s not set in stone, it reinforced my views on rebar.")

Unbreakable Ice Cream Safe - How to make cool stuff (I made a class!)

I warn you in advance that the actual material science content in the above video is contained very tightly between 0:33 and 2:14. The rest of the video is (at the beginning) an advertisement for a future video (the glitterbomb series is actually worth watching...begins as frivolous revenge and morphs into a serious examination of global criminal capitalism...but it's not about matsci) and (at the end) an advertisement for Rober's $249 online engineering class).

But that 0:33-2:14 shows a fun application of thermal expansion in which Rober built what he's calling an ice cream 'safe'. It's simply a metal sleeve and cap for an ice cream pint. The bottom of the sleeve is made of stainless steel, and the top is made of anodized aluminum. As Rober explains, the two fit together snugly at room temp, and the aluminum contracts 50% more at cold temperatures than does the stainless steel, locking the two parts together.

Simplicity itself, and a thing I would totally buy to demonstrate in my class...if only Rober would sell them.

I have searched the web for other, similar products thinking that somebody would have produced them, but I couldn't find one. Maybe the materials and machining precision make them cost-prohibitive.

If anybody comes across one of these for sale, could you send the info my way, please?

Why are metals so stretchy? (2^13 sub special)

Very few videos leave me with my jaw hanging open, but this is one of them.

Do yourself a favor and skip to 5:10 in the video if you haven't already. Watch from there until 8:40.

That's the meat of today's video. 

That's the good stuff.

That's by far the best explanation and visual of how dislocations allow bulk metals to bend while still maintaining crystallinity that I've ever seen.

I feel like I never understood how dislocations worked until I watched this video this past summer.

The rest of the video is okay. The host embosses a copper foil rectangle into a play button and reinforces it with some 3d printed parts and hot glue. It's mildly interesting, but the bubble raft demo is brilliant.

Props to Dr Bragg...and to whoever the host of AlphaPhoenix is. The latter has earned my subscription.

There's good, historical background to the theorization and discovery of dislocations from 2:00 to 5:00 that is worth watching, too, but only after you pick your jaw back up off the floor.

How the 8th Wonder of the World Failed Due To An Engineering Oversight | Massive Engineering Mistakes

The Kinzua Bridge looks like an impressive place to visit, and it's only about seven hours from me. Might make a trip out there - maybe add in Fallingwater, Cherry Springs, and Polymath Park for a nice, long weekend.

Today's video starts with a history of the Kinzua Bridge, then at about 5:00 shifts to the material science content.

As a quick tl;dr, the railroad trestle was originally constructed from wrought iron then rebuilt using steel to accommodate heavier, faster trains. In doing so, the bridge supports required thicker, steel bases. This meant either digging out the anchor bots or just using extension nuts. They chose cast iron extension nuts.

The video gets into tension tests, brittle vs ductile fracture, cast iron vs steel. It's a really nice, simple exploration of the failure.

If you want to read more, check out these resources...

• Article - The collapse of the Kinzua Viaduct: a combination of design oversight and material fatigue left a century-old railroad bridge vulnerable to an F-a tornado
• Article - Fall of the Eighth Wonder: the Kinzua Bridge
• Article - Lessons from the Kinzua: An Investigation Into the Collapse of the Kinzua Viaduct, a 103-year Old Railroad Bridge and Civil Engineering Landmark in Pennsylvania
• Photos - photos of the collapsed bridge (and one pre-collapse), captions provide a nice description of the crash itself
• Article - Kinzua Viaduct succumbing to age (2002 description of the pre-collapse bridge)
• Article - After 121 years, viaduct falls victim to tornado (2003, next-day report on bridge collapse)

Here's what the current state of the bridge looks like. They've turned what stayed upright into a gorgeous walk out to a viewing platform.

Mechanical Concrete | This Changes Everything

Does this really?

Does this really change everything?

Like is it now less likely for a lost Lego brick to find the bottom of my foot in the dark at midnight?

No? Then it doesn't change everything.

I like the idea of using old tires to supplement the gravel road bed to keep things in place before paving over them. It seems like a great use for old tires and certainly keeps them out of landfills.

But calling them an 'industrial-strength geosynthetic confinement' technology seems a little jargonish to me.

World Record Chain Fountain? The Mould Effect Explained

I don't need more disagreement science videos between YouTube posters.

I feel like they're just cross promotional crap, and they annoy me.

I do like Steve Mould's videos as a general rule, but after watching only one Mehdi video, I'm certainly not a fan yet.

For the most part I don't see that Mould's explanation is significantly different from the Biggins and Warner video that I posted previously.

The Untold Truth of Magic Eraser

I am not at all surprised that Magic Erasers aren't anything more than microporous, abrasive melamine.

I'm kind of impressed at the Mr Clean folks for figuring out a way to market a very plain material to us as being a 'magic' cleaning product (and for folks who make and buy cheaper versions).

I'm less impressed with The King of Random's successors and their stupid experiments with Magic Erasers or idiots polishing their teeth (seriously) with Magic Erasers.

I did wish there was a little more science explanation of the material, so I turned to the gaming community...as you do, of course.

How Vegan Leather is Made From Mangoes | World Wide Waste

For much of this video it looks like they're make fruit leather like I would make at home, an industrial scale fruit roll-up effectively.

I'm not at all sure what the 'several additives' (1:10) that are added to 'turn the mango pulp into a leather-like material', but that's the interesting part that I want to know about.

Because otherwise, yeah, they're just making fruit jerky...and then coating it in (2:00) 'protective glaze'. 

The tiny rectangles of fruit 'leather' are interesting, but the production clearly needs to get stepped up to get some continuous manufacturing going if they want to scale things up.

I do appreciate a good 'turning one man's trach into another man's treasure' story, though, and this looks like it could be a good one.

The life cycle of a t-shirt

It's a cotton t-shirt, right?

Cotton is a natural product, so it can't be all that rough on the environment, can it?

Water used to grow cotton...pesticides to grow cotton...ship cotton...blend/card cotton...weave cotton...treat with chemical dyes and bleaches...stich cotton by hand...ship cotton again...buy shirt...wash shirt...dry shirt...repeat the last two steps again and again...

Maybe we should reduce our need for new stuff.

Which bag should you use? - Luka Seamus Wright and Imogen Ellen Napper

Paper or plastic?

It's complicated...

Really complicated...

Both comics from https://www.thecomicstrips.com/subject/The-Paper+Or+Plastic-Comic-Strips.php

How stadium seats are restored

I remember going out to eat with my parents at a fancy restaurant in Louisville and putting my plastic straw into the flame of the candle on the table.

I got reprimanded pretty quickly because - as I vaguely remember - burning plastic causes cancer. That much my parents did have correct.

Apparently, though, if you stop just short of burning the plastic and instead just melt the outer layer, you can make that plastic look like new.

From Newsweek, "[t]his torch is melting away the oxidized top layer, allowing fresh red plastic to flow across the surface."

Look pretty much right to me.

Anodizing (Or the beauty of corrosion)

Hey, Bill.

This video - as promised earlier this week - gets into the explanation of how anodizing creates the beautiful colors via interference rather than by actual light absorption. 

It turns out that titanium and aluminum don't necessarily get tinted the same. Aluminum is often anodized and dyed.

Who knew?

Facinating metal rings change multiple colours.

Edit: I had hunted down a YouTube upload of the Reddit video I'm about to describe, but that upload disappeared before this post even appeared, so I'm just linking to the Reddit original. I do warn you that the title of the subreddit contains a nsfw word. It's titled blackmagicf***ery. You have been warned. The above video is less thrilling and contains some pretty annoying music though it does show the same concept of titanium anodization.

I originally found it on one of Reddit's unfortunately-named subreddits. That link is here, but I'll avoid embedding from the Reddit source so the inappropriate subreddit title won't show up here. You have been warned.

It is exactly the same video, however the reddit version is in slightly higher resolution.

Not much to say here other than that this is a bit of a teaser for a video I'm posting later this week that explains how anodizing works...

...and the new fad deadly among teenagers that you need to know.

To adsorb or not to adsorb

 

Source - https://phys.org/news/2021-06-adsorb.html

Man, he looks like a fun guy at parties, eh?

"Hey, guys, I brought a bowl full of 3d printed phages! They can be party favors, no?"

"Sure, Ivan, just put them in the corner there next to the coats. And did you bring money for the pizza?"

"Sorry, I forgot with all the excitement about the phages. I'll get you next time."

Yeah, sure you will.

As the phys.org article says, "bacteriophages...are specialized viruses that can infect and kill bacteria without adverse effects on humans." 

In order for those phages to work, however, they have to be stored and then injected into the human body. "Unfortunately, despite beneficial treatment and numerous trials, the number of active bacteriophages in the solution for injection can drastically decrease, making the treatment ineffective."

The scientists in this study looked at how the properties of the container used to store the phage solutions affected the concentration of available phages. They found that the hydrophobicity of the polymer material of the container drastically affected that concentration as the phages adsorbed onto some container's surfaces rather than remaining available and in solution. Apparently the "aggregation of phages onto walls is mor [sic] profitable energetically than staying in solution."

As the study said, "[i]n case of sudden need...the choice of container for the phages seems to be trivial. However, as the study shows, such a factor has a tremendous impact on the number of active phages in the solution and, therefore, in determining successful therapy."

Who knew? The container matters?

Glass bakeware that shatters (December 2010) | Consumer Reports

How have I missed posting this in the blog? I've been using this video for a couple of years to explain that pyrex =/= Pyrex.

I would explain, but honestly, the Consumer Reports host up there does a great job explaining that consumer pyrex isn't the same as lab Pyrex and hasn't been for decades.

Tl;dr - don't take your pyrex casserole dish from the freezer to the oven or from the oven to the countertop.

PBF - Dick (webcomic)

From Perry Bible Fellowship - https://pbfcomics.com/comics/dick/

See, it's funny because...well, it's probably only funny in a really, really dark way.

There's this guy who seems to be captaining a whaling ship. We'll call him Ahab. 

He seems to have spotted something, a whale, we assume.

He takes a drink from the colorful bottle in his hand...then drinks from a series of very colorful, seemingly modern bottles.

We close by seeing the whale dead in an ocean littered with plastic waster.

See, it's funny because we're killing our ocean's life by polluting the water with plastics.

Get it?

As an aside, be warned that many other cartoons on PBF are less school-appropriate. Browse at your own risk. They are, however, often hilarious in very dark ways.

Fractionating column videos

Last spring - when the schools all went quarantine from Covid - we were just beginning our polymer unit in material science. 

So we went looking for videos and demonstrations that would 'teach' what we would have covered in class.

Among the better videos were these explaining how a fractionating column works to separate the various hydrocarbons found in crude oil.

Titanium - The Metal That Made The SR-71 Possible

 Hey there, Brian. Good to hear you again.

I recognize those material selection diagrams at 1:35. I've posted about similar diagrams before.

This video does a great job exploring the tradeoffs among strength, weight, cost, and properties in choosing a material. In this case, it's mostly about the tradeoffs guiding when we do - and don't - use titanium.

It also covers some of the concepts of chemical and electrolytic reduction around 5:00 - and states that we don't use either of the traditional processes to purify titanium. It's amazing that anybody ever figured out some of the more complicated metals processing...um...processes. They're so remarkably complicated.

We also get an application of accidental galvanic corrosion at 8:30 where the cadmium-plated tools were leaving trace amount of cadmium on the titanium.

Titanium really sounds like a pain in the tuchus to work with.

Piezoelectricity - why hitting crystals makes electricity

Heya, Steve. Good to see you back again.

The part of this video that I think I most appreciate is the actual look at the guts of a piezo electric safety lighter. I've used them for a long time and never quite been sure how they work on the inside.

I also appreciate Steve's comments on quarts 'healing crystals' around 1:40. "Don't know if you take it orally or..."

And then we get into the fact that piezoelectricity is dependent on the electronegativity differences in a quart crystal (admittedly simplified in Steve's peanut-butter-jar model). I'm totally duplicating this post for my chem blog because of that explanation.

Repairing broken water mains

One of our regular activities in the corrosion chapter of our material science course is to read and listen to this NPR story about our corroding water mains and the costs that would be involved in repairing or replacing the parts of the network in need. I start the lesson by watching video of one of the more spectacular water main breaks that I've seen, the 2014 break on the UCLA campus.

This year the students asked what it took to repair a water main break like that. 

In searching, I couldn't find the repair work for that specific water main, but I did find a few other videos - including one from Skoakie, IL, the same city as the NPR story linked above.

Year 1 Camp - End of Week Feedback

It goes without saying, but there are so many things that we've lost in the pandemic.

One of those things that we've lost - or at least that we didn't get for a couple of summers - is the in-person, summer, ASM teacher workshops.

The summer workshops are easily the most valuable professional development experiences I've ever been a part of, and I get a lot out of them both when I've taken them and when I've helped lead them.

The above video is the end of the week feedback from the teacher campers from the 2014 camp at Montana Tech in Butte, Montana. I'm happy to say that this was one of the camps that I helped lead with Andy Nydam, one of our lead master teachers. All of the campers were asked to give a little summary of their week to camera as recorded by Glenn Daehn - who's been on the blog before. It's the kind of feedback we ask for from all of our campers at each camp, but this week we were lucky enough to get it recorded.

This camp was one of our residential camps, and lots of the campers came from hours and hours away, stayed in the dorms of Montana Tech, ate at the university's cafeteria, and spent their evenings together touring the city of Butte. We were able to see Berkeley Pit, tour a silicon purification plant, go down into Montana Tech's teaching mine, and take an historic tour of Butte as lead by a local history teacher.

For the past two summers we've run the camps as virtual experiences, and I've been impressed with how well ASM has managed to translate the camp experience into an online world...

..but the online experience isn't the in-person experience, as we're all well aware.

When we get through this mess, come and take a camp with us if you haven't before.

And if you have taken one before, come back and take another one. We'd love to see you again, and I promise that at least some of the content will be different. We've had a couple of years of playing around in our classrooms to find new things to do.

Oh, and Dr Daehn did record slightly longer sessions with some of the campers at that Montana Tech camp. You can check out that full playlist at this link.

Casting Metal: the Basics

Casting The Future seems to be a British, casting education outreach program from a bunch of trade groups. The group includes Cast Metals Federation, Institute of Cast Metals Engineers, and ten companies contributing to the efforts.

Their main outreach seems to be the Casting The Future foundry kit which is demonstrated in the video above.

At Princeton we do some simple surface casting, but taking things to this next level would be brilliant. I'm going to look into seeing if we can order one of these kits and get it shipped across the pond to us.

They have also put together the following video explaining why casting is important to the UK manufacturing economy.

Casting vs Forging

Recently I was looking for some videos to compare the virtues of cast versus forged metal parts. Here are the ones I ended up using in class.

That video says it's 9:46, but it's really more like 4:50. The video segment plays twice in the upload for some reason. In this one Richard Hammons shows the virtues of cast versus forged parts, casts a hammer, breaks a cast sword, forges (or lets another guy forge for him) a sword, and shows how much tougher the forged sword is.

There are three more videos after the jump...

Amazing Molybdenum

I appreciate the playfulness of the Manchester chemists playing around in their videos. They show great curiosity and seem honestly fascinating by the results. The above video shows them running electricity through wires of various metals - copper, aluminum, magnesium, brass, tungsten, gold, molybdenum - in open atmosphere.

Even more impressive to me is their tenacity in trying to explain something once they get unexpected or at least curious results. In the video below, they explore the phenomenon of molybdenum wires producing what they refer to as unduloids - regularly spaced molybdenum blobs - on the surface of the heated wire. 

How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk | Will Stephen | TEDxNewYork

I've shared a bunch of TED talks over the past few months, so I thought I would tell you how to make your own TED Talk in case you were interested.

Warning: There is legitimately no material science content in this week's post. I'll be posting an actual material science video later today.

Sacrificial Anode Cathodic Protection Allied Corrosion

This video - without narration - would be a great, short (2.5 minutes total) introduction to how sacrificial anodes work to protect metals. In particular, there's a brilliant animation showing how electrons flow from a buried anode to protect a pipe from corrosion.

I don't have much else to say. 

The video is simple, and I'll let my post be the same.

NSFW: Plastics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

I know, I know.

I've promised that I would only post videos and articles that are safe for work.

This one definitively breaks that self-imposed rule. This one should NOT be shown to students at school unless you have a really good relationship with your Board of Education and some pretty mature students.

The video mentions - as comedic asides - sex toys, numerous f-bombs, loads of s-bombs ('shot' but with a different vowel), and cheapshots at the blobfish.

But there's a whole lot of actual content about the environmental horrors of our plastic obsession, our lack of recycling in the face of more and more claims of recycling, the advertising push from the plastics industry to convince us all that the lack of recycling is our individual faults (including the famous crying Italian-American commercial, the route that plastics take into our stomach and body, the US's refusal to sign onto plastic waste reduction treaties, the movement to pass extended producer responsibility bills.

The video is well worth watching. There's good content in there. And I'll admit to enjoying the crass humor.

Bike tires that last a lifetime without any puncture or degradation are inspired by NASA's rover technology

 

I've posted about the NASA rover's memory metal ties on the blog before, and we certainly know that technology developed for the space program often makes its way into our everyday life. So it's not a total shock that those tires would be finding their way into use here on the Earth.

But I wouldn't have bet that the first Earthly use for this tire technology would be on bicycles.

Who knew?

As this article writes, "The airless METL bike tires are crafted out of the Shape Memory Alloy Radial Technology (SMART) – made from strong (like titanium), lightweight yet ultra-elastic material (like rubber) known as NiTinol+."

The METL tires come from The Smart Tire Technology Company and aren't available just yet, though they are taking names for the waitlist. I'm really curious how much those tires would cost and whether they would adaptable from one bike to the next one that a cyclist would purchase. Otherwise, it might not necessarily be a great investment.

How Used Chopsticks Are Turned Into Tables, Tiles, and Other Furniture | World Wide Waste

 I think we're all aware that we use too much stuff. 

Admittedly, the wood that we're using probably isn't the worst of that stuff. If we could use a little less wood and maybe reuse some of the wood that we are using, it might be a little better for our planet, though.

This video shows the process through which ChopValue turns used chopsticks - primarily around Vancouver - into floor tiles and tabletops. It's actually fascinating.

Columbia's Lego Homes - earthrise

They aren't Lego bricks at all.

They're interlocking bricks made of recycled plastic collected on the streets of Columbia.

That doesn't make them Lego-brick-built houses any more than me strapping rubber mats onto my feet mean I'm wearing Nike shoes.

Semantics aside, the interlocking bricks look pretty cool. I am curious about their R value, but that's a different question.

The above video, by the way, was accompanied by an article with a more information and still photos.

Meet Stephanie Kwolek, the woman who gave us bulletproof vests and yoga pants

Source - https://twitter.com/SpringerNature/status/1156489739903676417

Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar

It's a pretty outstanding title for a chyron.

It's pithier than "the fourth woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame."

It's more widely understandable than "only female winner of DuPont's Lavoisier Medal" (as of 2020, at least).

It's far pithier than "inventor of poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide", the actual chemical name of Kevlar.

In my world, though, all of those are less important than "invented the nylon rope demonstration" that I use in the classroom every year and throughout the summers.

Read some more about Stephanie Kwolek

• from Massive Science
• from Forbes
• from the Smithsonian
• from Wikipedia

Graphene science | Mikael Fogelström | TEDxGöteborg

I am becoming more and more curious as to whether the TEDx events in countries other than America are all conducted in English.

If so, that's both awesome for us English-only speakers and kind of dismissive of those non-American countries. I'm just saying. (I'm also incredibly impressed by multi-lingual people.)

"Graphene is the material of superlatives."

That's a fine description of graphene - and also a not useful description. It's the most stable, strongest, best electrical and thermal conductor, transparentest, impermeable material around. That's interesting, but until I start to see graphene actually being used to make something I use better, I'm holding back on my excitement for what graphene actually can do for us. 

It's theoretically neat and experimentally cool, but it's only theoretically useful for now.

Yes, there might one day be transparent electronics, remarkably strong but lightweight composites for airplanes, better batteries and capacitors for electric vehicles, instantaneous DNA sequencing (as the video shows at 7:30)...maybe...

(I do warn you that this video is a little less exciting as far as TED presentations go. The ideas are amazing and theoretically world-changing, but the speaker is - in his at least second language - less dynamic than he could be.)

Quicksilver and Slow Death

 

Source - "Quicksilver and Slow Death" - National Geographic, October 1972

I'm just going to let that picture sit there for a moment.

Feel free to scroll down once you've absorbed the fascination, curiosity, intrigue, and abject terror of the sight of a man sitting on a pool of mercury with seemingly no protective equipment at all.

I'll wait.

That's the picture that sent me down a rabbit hole a few years back. I came across the photo somewhere - I've no clue where other than 'on the internet' - and wanted to track down its origins. Who took that? Where were they? Why were they sitting on mercury? When the heck was it taken?

Eventually I came across a source saying that the image came from National Geographic's October 1972 issue in the article "Quicksilver and Slow Death".

At the time, hunting down the article with images was fairly difficult as I hadn't found full text scans of articles in library databases just yet.

So I headed to ebay and spent about $6 buying a copy of the magazine so I could read the original article.

It turned out to be fascinating.

Here's the original caption for the photo.

Floating on mercury, a veteran miner demonstrates the metal's high density - 13.5 times that of water. Mercury's great cohesiveness prevents it from wetting skin or clothes. Being liquid, however, it penetrates the finest crevices. Once out of the vat, the man turned out his pockets and shed his showed to shake out droplets of theś metal.

The article surveys the historical ideas of mercury...

Arabian and European alchemists deemed mercury one of the two "contraries" (the other was sulphur) that combined deep in the earth to form all other elements.

...the health hazards of mining mercury...

In one room [of the miner's hospital] the walls were lined with powerful lamps, the floor marked with a circular path. "The miners call this the 'beach,' " Don Jeśus told me. "Sometimes a man inhales too much mercury vapor in the mine and develops a tremor. If it's a sever case, the doctors send him here for treatment.

"He strips and walks round and round in the heat, sweating out the mercury. Most respond rapidly and are returned to work. A few don't; they are pensioned."

...and the health hazards of exposure to mercury, particularly from eating contaminated fish, pork, or grain...

Borne by the bloodstream, methyl mercury penetrates brain membranes that bar most other poisons. First, it damages the organ without appreciable loss of cells, then erodes whole pockets of tissue. Worst hit are the brain's visual, hearing, and equilibrium centers, thus explaining the effects of mercury poisoning - blindness, deafness, and loss of balance.

The article closes with this warning, from Dr Alf Johnels, 

"It was a matter of human failure. We cannot see beyond immediate needs: Mercury did the job, so we used it and trusted the earth to absorb in. Not until people and birds died did we find out how wrong we were.

"If mercury were the only pollutant, that would be one thing. But every day we're pouring into our environment tons of other substances - cadmium, lead, industrial chemical like the polychlorinated biphenyls called PCB's. Some are stable and will be with us a long time. And we have no idea what their long-term effect will be.

"We who work in museums know about vanishing species - they are here, as always, then one dat they are gone. Their environment has changed.

"Only if we think in terms of generations, and are willing to pay the price of keeping the world clean of our our foulings, can we have confidence that man will not join that list of vanishing species."

If you want to read the full article - it's dated but outstanding - here it is in full.

"Quicksilver and Slow Death" - NatGo - Oct 1972 by phschemguy on Scribd

Nanotechnology is not simply about making things smaller | Noushin Nasiri | TEDxMacquarieUniversity

The scale of nanotechnology befuddles me, but this video focuses more on why the nanoscale matters than it does on 'hey, here's some neat nanoscale stuff'. Yes, there's some neat nanoscale material mentioned toward the end, but the better part of the video for me is the clean, clear progression from 'what is the nanoscale' to 'why does the nanoscale matter' to 'what can we do in the nanoscale'.

Well done, Dr Nasiri.

I make an ''8 Ball'' out of solid Stainless Steel and Brass

I'll admit that there's not a ton of content in today's video. Mostly it's a machining video where a guy - the unseen My Mechanics channel's youtuber - makes exactly what the video title says: an 8 ball made of stainless steel and brass.

The final product is pretty neat, and it would look good on a shelf as a curio - not really as much of anything else other than a heck of a thing to throw at someone or something you really hate.

I'm posting the video because of the neatness of the thermal expansion demonstrations at 1:50, 2:50, 3:30, and 4:10. In each case, a metal cylinder needs to be fit snugly into another metal cylinder. To get the fit to be a bit easier - but only temporarily - our host heats up the outer cylinder.

See, because metal - honestly, all materials - expand when heated. So the outer cylinder gets bigger as does its interior diameter. The youtuber is able to slip the inner cylinder inside, and when the outer cylinder cools, the fit becomes nearly seamless.

Brilliant stuff. 

What happens when you heat a plastic cup?

Shrinky dinks!

Well, it's the same science as shrinky dinks, anyway. 

Today we see Steve Mould heating up polystyrene cups (recycling code 6) and allowing them to shrink back toward their original, flat shape.

Fun times...

What is the Castillo de San Marcos made of?

Coquina.

That's it. That's the answer. 

It's a composite stone made of compressed seashells with carbonic acid leaching out calcium out of the shells to fuse them together into stone.

The above video, from the US National Park Service, explains the material of the walls of Castillo de San Marcos and how its porosity was both a weakness (it needs to be plastered to waterproof it) and a strength (the walls could 'absorb' cannon balls fired at it in an attack.)

The second video - below - explores the preservation efforts necessary to maintain the coquina walls.

The secret of the aluminum can: what is it hiding?

That's some impressive can polishing right there.

This video from MEL Chemistry shows how to reveal the secret polymer liner that lives inside every pop can (or Coke can if you're from Southern Indiana like your friendly neighborhood blogger is) using 'drain cleaner.' I assume it's something like Drano, a very concentrated solution of primarily sodium hydroxide. 

I do this experiment in class using hydrochloric acid in the 3M range, and it works just fine. Aluminum is, however, soluble in both acids and bases (not typical of most metals), so I have heard that sodium hydroxide solutions can produce the same result. 

I would certainly be careful with the 'drain cleaner', folks, because it's some nasty stuff. Weirdly, I'm more comfortable using 3M HCl because it's something I use with fair regularity at school. The Drano, however, gives me a bit of an uneasy feeling. Oddly, though, Steve Spangler's video of the same demo also uses sodium hydroxide as did most of the other videos I found showing this demonstration. That might be because buying hydrochloric acid can be a bit tougher (unless you know it's also called muriatic acid and is available at most hardware stores.)

Either way, be careful if you try this at home, but it's pretty frickin' awesome to see.

Green materials for a greener world: Athanassia Athanassiou at TEDxRoma

Ah, TED in Rome...discussions of pizza and gelato, gladiators and forums, Catholicism and plastics...

You know, plastics. The worst thing that we've done for our environment and that we keep using more of every day.

This video opens with an enumeration of the environmental horrors of plastics - volatile gas releases, effects on our hormones, increasing petroleum needs, oil spills and seeps, toxic discharges into the environment - and shifts to alternate options to our uses of polymers.

The speaker, Athanassia Athanassiou (seriously, that's what the title says), illustrates some of the polymer replacements or adaptations that her research group is working on to either modify polymers to actually help the environment or to replace the polymers with other materials.

The video is more a survey of some research than it is an inspirational TED talk. Neat ideas, though.

(As an aside, why would the foreign TEDx conferences be presenting in English? None of the TEDx conferences in America are in foreign languages. Just wondering...)

My YouTube subscriptions

In case you were wondering which science- or material science-themed YouTube channels I subscribed to, you could probably just skim back through and see which video sources I post from most frequently.

But I thought I could put together a list in case you wanted to subscribe to them, too. So, in no particular order...

• Smarter Every Day - Hands down, my favorite channel on YouTube. Destin Sandlin is an engineer turned YouTuber who covers a whole host of science topics both high brow - How Do We Land on the Moon - to low brow - How Do You Harvest Pecans - and covers them all with a humility, curiosity, and ease of communication that is infectious. Occasionally he gets a little too excited about things (check his collaborations with Mark Robert, for example), but most of the time his tone is spot on, and I learn something from nearly every video that he makes. Most tend to be ten to twenty minutes, but occasionally he post forty-five minute to an hour videos and takes a far deeper dive into a topic - take his nuclear sub series, for example. You could easily turn his videos into a year-long science course. I'd take it. He also has a second channel of slightly less polished videos and lots of behind the scenes footage. Destin also spoke at Skepticon about balancing his faith and his science. It's a great talk. His TED talk isn't bad, either. (equally for both blogs)
  
  
• Real Engineering - Initially this channel from Brian James McManus (yes, he's Irish) focused mostly on the rudiments and basics of engineering and used a lot of white on blueprint paper background animation. He's upped his video quality and started using a whole lot more licensed footage over the years, and he now tackles some pretty deep dives into engineering topics (solar panels, renewably powered ships, tesla's battery challenges, colonizing the moon, digital vs vinyl sound, etc). Videos tend to be in the 15-25 minute range anymore. We almost never see Brian, himself, though there have been a couple of videos where we did. I learn a TON from his videos at this point. Initially, I didn't learn nearly as much. (more for MatSci blog)
  
  
• Practical Engineering - Grady Hillhouse reports from his house in San Antonio and makes civil and mechanical engineering incredibly understandable. Some of the best parts in his videos are his small-scale, homemade demonstration aids to help him explain the video's concepts. He's built tiny rivers to show how weirs function, made rebar-reinforced concrete cylinders to show how they improve concrete's resistance to cracking, crafted complex pipe systems to show water hammer, and much more. His videos stick to the 8-12 minute range, and are great explanations of basic engineering concepts. (more for MatSci blog)
  
  
• Veritasium -  Dr Derek Muller hosts - and probably writes - the veritasium channel videos. He originally did all the work himself, but one of his more recent videos celebrating his tenth anniversary on YouTube talked a bit about his increasing team helping him make videos of higher and higher quality. Muller comes out of Canada by way of Australia and is all over the map as far as topics go. His videos are about optical illusions, origami engineering, calculating the speed of light, close packing with shade balls, and - my absolute favorite video of his - how trees get their mass. He covers chemistry, biology, engineering, physics, and general philosophy of science. (equally for both blogs)

• Steve Mould - Steve's videos are far less focused on any one area of science (or of math). He covers everything from "I calculated absolute zero with vodka" to "Tree tumors are GMOs but not made by humans" to "Self driving cars are dangerously confused by LED lights" to "Does Canadian money really smell like maple syrup?". He's a bit of all over the place, in other words, wandering pretty much anywhere that his curiosity happens to take him. The initial videos were pretty low-budget and short (1-4 minutes long), but the quality of video made a pretty big jump about five years ago. The videos have gotten longer over time, some of them wandering to the fifteen minute range, though he still makes a decent number of videos that are in four or five minutes long or shorter. (equally for both blogs)
  
  
• Mark Rober - Mark's all about building bigger, more theatrical versions of everyday things. He's build a scaled up SuperSoaker, filled a pool with jello, and set up the world's largest elephant toothpaste (or devil's toothpaste). He's also built machines to skip stones better than humanly possible, squirrel obstacle courses, and a liquid sand hot tub. Admittedly, most of his videos could be cut by about 25% of their length by eliminating the over-reaction shots. I think his best videos are the most focused. I particularly recommend the rock skipping video.

AMP Recycling Robots

I desperately want recycling to work.

The more I read about recycling in the US, the more I just want to cry. 

Whether it's NPR's report on how little plastic gets recycled and how the plastics industry developed recycling codes to make us feel better about using their products, a video on the un-recyclableness of black plastics, or the last twenty years dashing my hopes from turning "Anything Into Oil", I find myself hopeless and lost whenever I think of the magnitude of our plastics problem, and I fear that recycling - at least as it is right now - isn't the solution.

And then along comes the AMP sorting robot (an article about them), and they pull me right back in.

Mystery blue & white beads

The blue and white bead bottle up there might look familiar to a lot of science teachers, especially the ones who have taken our ASM summer camps. The bottle can be bought from Educational Innovations or from Flinn Scientific (though Flinn's version is green and white).

The bottle is a spectacular demonstration of density and of solubility, both of which are explained by Steve Mould in the above video.

We do a similar activity in a lab in our material science course at Princeton (one we certainly didn't develop but have tweeked to our needs) using preforms and polymer pellets. An extension we particularly like is related to the food coloring demo that Mould mentions in passing near the end. I especially recommend green food coloring. The effects are far more dramatic than the red that Mould shows.

Another extension involves shining ultraviolet light at the bottle. It turns out that - as one of our Utah campers pointed out to me after I'd had the bottle for a decade or so - that the white beads are actually the UV beads that Ed Inn sells. Apparently having a classroom with no windows blocked me from seeing that happen until she pointed it out to me.

I did also find a video showing how you can make one of your own - without the UV beads, however. The YouTuber's full instructions with quantities can be found in the video description.

I'll copy the video description, however, in case the video experiences link rot...

"Sorry for the spelling mistake in one sentence!

Water and Isopropyl alcohol are SOLUBLE with each other. (solvable is wrong word)

Poly Density Bottle

Take any size bottle, divide number of ounces of the bottle into half. Half number of ounces distilled water and half number of ounces 91% Isopropyl alcohol.

I used 50oz bottle.

So I added 23oz water and 23oz Isopropyl alcohol.

Salt 1tsp for 1oz of water.

So I mixed 23tsps of Salt in water.

Not filling the bottle completely and leaving some space for air at the top is a good idea.

Easy to shake and mix liquids.

Beads 260 of each kind.

You can add or minus number of beads according to the size of the bottle."

This mushroom brick could replace concrete

Cement sucks.

It's pretty bad for the environment on the front end as its production releases a whole bunch of carbon dioxide into the air, and it's not great on the back end because large swaths of pavement deny water's opportunities to get back into the ground, increasing runoff that is frequently polluted.

I've posted about mycelium materials before, but I particularly like this video's combination of a bit of pro-forest coverage and the fact that the reporter made her own 'mushroom' brick.

That might have to be a project for next year.

Three-point bend test fixture - with plans

3 Point Bend Test Report by phschemguy on Scribd

In the spring of 2015, Bob Hanlin, one of the ASM master teachers and a professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, came to our spring training with a project that some of his students had developed. It was a three-point beam tester made on the cheap and designed to be cheaply made by high school teachers to more accurately and repeatedly test the cement composite beams that we make as part of the material science curriculum.

Bob had tasked his students with the following requirements, as found on page three of their final report - embedded above...

• Repeatable testing
• The new fixture and method of breaking the cement has to be able to be repeatable and provide similar results.
• Portable
• The fixture has to be compact and easy to transport since high school teachers will have to take the fixture to school and carry it around.
• Accurate
• The testing mechanism hast o prove similar test results when in use.
• Easy to make
• The new fixture design has to be simple and easy to make since high school teacher[s] will be building it to teach the students the importance of material science.
• Inexpensive
• The fixture has to be as low-cost as reasonably achievable since high school teachers have to function on a meager budget and sometimes [are] forced to spend their own money out-of-pocket.

Man, that's a set of requirements that screams understanding of the high school science/engineering teacher world. Cheap, easy to make, portable (storable, too), accurate, and repeatable...that's pretty spot on perfect for our world.

Bob showed off his students' creation at the training, and we were all amazed at the results. No, it's not a commercial beam tester, and the accuracy doesn't approach that level of precision and repeatability, but for $30, it's a brilliant bit of engineering.

I finally got permission from Bob (who actually had to get permission from the university) to publish the tester's plans here on my blog. The one stipulation was that credit had to be given to the students - Gabriella Baptistella, Zach Kellogg, Vincent Nolan, and Lee Seela - and to the University of Missouri-Kansas City. I'm happy to credit all of those folks because their product is just brilliant.

The students explored two fixtures and two methods of testing for each fixture. In the end, the best choice is the one they labeled fixture 2 - method 3. The exact plans for 2-3 can be found in the embedded document above in appendix B (p17). The fish scale that Bob used when he showed us was - I think - this one from Amazon. Everything else would be a Home Depot/Lowe's/local hardware store purchase.

Here are pics of the final product - along with Bob in the dark blue plaid.

 

By the way, in explaining how he'd gotten students to help design the tester, Bob mentioned that the funds for the design project came from the tuition that our ASM summer camp teachers have been paying for grad hours related to the teacher summer camps over the past few years. So it you - like I - have taken the grad hours, thank you for your contribution to this project.

So, go, make yourself some beams and get to testing them.

Oh, and if you want to see our old method for testing the beams, here's a pic from the UMKC website showing our pre-these-plans method from their ASM teacher summer camp.

Source - UMKC website

ASM Student camps

Edit: This post was originally written a long while ago, back in the spring of 2020. I certainly was under the assumption that summer 2021 would be back to some sort of pre-Covid normal. As of today (1/18/21) the student camp schedule for 2021 has not been posted yet. It looks like the 2021 teacher camp schedule is planned to be fully virtual for 2021 (as it was in 2020), but I have no knowledge beyond what those webpages show.

It's that time of year when many students (and teachers) are starting to plan out the summer.

For teachers, I'll heartily recommend the ASM teacher materials camps. I've posted about them before.

I've also posted about the ASM student materials camps, too, but I've posted much less frequently about them - both because there are fewer of them and because I haven't ever been personally involved in those camps.

I thought I'd take a post today to rectify that and give you a whole bunch of student camp resources.

There's a video about what went on at the Eisenman camp in 2012. The Eisenman is the only ASM student camp that takes place at the ASM headquarters near Cleveland, OH, but there are about twenty other locations (appropriately, as of the summer of 2020) around the country.



This video goes through - as the title suggests - some of the legacy of the first ASM materials camp for students, the Eisenman at the ASM headquarters. They talk to some of the mentors, some former attendees who are now mentors, and ASM trustees about the history of, goals of, and - well - legacy of the Eisenman camp.



The ASM folks also interviewed some of the student attendees at the Eisenman camp one summer (including Lucas, who your friendly, neighborhood blogger was lucky enough to have taught at Princeton HS.). They, in the long run, offer probably the greatest testimonials as they lived the camp. The playlist (embedded above, click next video) also ends with a trio of videos showing some of the activities from the camp (metal casting, blacksmithing, and using a scanning electron microscope).


So, just what are materials camps? This video answers that both about the student and the teacher camps, focusing more on the student camps, though.

The camps are free. What do you have to lose?

Take a look at the student camp schedule for this summer - or the teacher camp schedule if that's more your speed.

The Future Of Energy Storage Beyond Lithium Ion

I've watched enough videos about renewable energy to know that one of the biggest issues with increasing our use of renewables isn't necessarily the actual energy production but rather the storage of the energy from times when it's produced to times when it's needed.

There's lithium ion storage batteries...3:15-4:05...

...flow batteries...4:10-7:50...

...pumped hydroelectric...8:15-8:40...

...energy vault (the most entertaining storage method if you ask me)...8:40-10:15...

...thermal storage...10:20-11:40...

...compressed air...11:50-12:00...

...cryogenic storage...12:00-12:15

Oh, and I absolutely love the joke at 1:28...energy storage methods all have 'serious potential'...

See, because stored energy is potential...it's funny.