The Ridiculous Engineering of Jet Engines

Jet engines are miracles.

The more I learn about them, the more amazed I continue to be by them. 

I've heard a number of times that the hot gasses passing by the turbine blades is hotter than the melting temperature of those blades.

It simple enough to say that the blades have ceramic coatings (thermal barrier coatings) on those blades and internal cooling channels that together keep the blades cool enough not to melt (or to creep too much outward toward the turbine's housing) at that phenomenal high temperatures.

...and then we get the bubble raft demonstration - which is just my absolute favorite.

And I just found out that the older video I had posted explaining the pigtail's function in creating single crystal turbine blades has disappeared from YouTube. I'm suddenly very sad about that.

How The World's Most Expensive Color Is Made

Good lord that's a labor-intensive process.

I understand that the quality of the final product is important and noticeable by really discerning artists and art lovers, but I'm amazed that anybody still uses this method to produce ultramarine blue from lapis lazuli. I'm kind of glad to know that he uses a different - supposedly secret, faster, and higher-yielding than the Cennini method.

I'll warn you that the later half of the video is mostly about the politics and economics of the mining in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It's interesting, but it's not so much about the material production but more about material sourcing.

Is spider web really stronger than steel?

I was not expecting an excellent explanation of stress-strain curves (2:30), toughness (6:00), environmental costs of polymer production (7:00), amorphous vs (nano)crystalline regions (6:45), hydrophobicity (and hydrophilicity) (12:45), and CRISPR/Cas9 technology (20:30), but that's what you get in today's Veritasium video.

As an aside, I want to rant and rave about the investment in Veritasium by Electrify, but the quality of the videos, the topics being covered, and the volume of output have stayed at least as high and might in fact have improved.