If you rely on one source for a material, you run the risk of that one source either holding you hostage or that source simply drying up.
Note, this is just about the clay source for Wallace & Gromit (or rather for Aardman animators) - not about anything to do with material needs in the production of rare earth magnets and electric motors.
I make glass with some regularity in my material science class. We batch glass and add in manganese oxide (purple), chromium oxide (green), copper oxide (light blue), and cobalt oxide (dark blue) to produce colors.
From watching this video, I'm thinking I may need to buy some new crucibles and try other oxides to check out more colors. I'm not as worried about their color under UV light - though that is kind of gorgeous - but rather under various visible light sources.
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| Source - compound interest |
Polycrystalline diamonds aren't nearly as pretty as monocrystalline ones are, but they seem to be much easier to produce - especially if you're trying to grow them onto a computer chip.
...which I would never have thought to do but which seems to be really desirable because diamond is a phenomenal conductor of heat, seemingly an improvement on aluminum as a heat sink for electronics on a massive scale.
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| image from YouTube video above |
All that's left is to grow those diamonds via chemical vapor deposition - which is also incredibly cool.
Found on reddit...(my apologies for the subreddit's name)...
Wear your PPE, folks.
I hear people lamenting 'government regulation' all the time, but I recognize that most government regulations were put in place at the cost of somebody's life.
Child labor laws are ridiculous!
Sure, ask the pre-teen miners with black lung.
Rules about keeping emergency exits unlocked? Who needs a rule to do that?
Ask the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.
And don't get me started on the radium girls.
Sorry, I'll get down off my soapbox now...
