I've never been to the Pacific Northwest - not further north than the Redwoods National and State Parks in Northern California, anyway.
Might have to get to the Tacoma/Seattle area to check out the Museum of Glass.
This video is an un-narrated walking tour of that museum with occasional annotations in the top corner of the video. Not a ton of information - certainly no science - just glances at pretty glass.
I've said it before, but an atomic trampoline demonstration set-up would make for a spectacular gift for your favorite neighborhood blogger.
NileRed took a different route than I've taken - which is mostly just wishing that I would stumble across an atomic trampoline and not really doing anything at all to make that happen - and decided to make a disk of amorphous metal on his own.
Admittedly, one of our ASM Master Teachers has a lead on getting sets of amorphous metal disks for us to have in our classrooms. It involves the material scientists at Apple's headquarters in California and turned out to be much more complicated than expected because - as NileRed finds out - the adhesive used to affix the amorphous metal to the steel base is highly relevant in maintaining the ridiculously bouncy nature of amorphous metals in this application.
Here's to hoping that my strategy of doing nothing and just hoping things will work out will...um...work out.
I'll include the Grand Illusions videos that inspired Steve Mould's video that in turn inspired NileRed's above video...
I love that this is a week-long research project/workshop for high school seniors. I know that we don't do anything nearly that intensive in our material science course at Princeton - partially because of time constraints and partially because we don't have anything that would test concrete's compression strength with any accuracy.
Does anybody know of similar experiences that near you that we could recommend for our high school students?
At some point in my material science and chemistry courses, I speak bluntly to my students that most research suggests that man-made polymers are bad for us.
Some are worse than others, but most research on the effects of polymers on humans seems to suggest that there are bad effects from most man-made polymers. Some are minorly bad, but others - like the family of PFAS - are more obviously and persistently bad.
The video above is short and has a direct message: DuPont is bad (or has acted badly).
The longer video below - from Veritasium - is far longer but is much, much more informative.
If this sounds familiar, you might've seen a semi-recent movie about this story, Dark Waters.
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| Source - Recyclingedu |
But scientists from the University of Amsterdam claim to have found a way to separate cotton from polyester and leave both as usable, recyclable products. The process seems chemically simple, soaking the blended fabrics in concentrated hydrochloric acid so that the cotton decomposes into glucose - which can be used as a monomer for further repolymerization - and leaving the still-polymerized polyester to be reformed into fabric.
Sounds great to me. Hopefully it'll be scaleable, because - as quoted in the article...
Textile production is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions, more than international flights and maritime shipping combined. This new method could reduce emissions, conserve resources, and lessen our dependence on virgin materials by making recycling easier and more efficient.
Seven or so years ago a non-profit group known as The Ocean Cleanup launched System 001 (aka Wilson) into the Pacific Ocean to begin cleanup on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a high-concentration 'soup' of plastic between Hawaii and the Western Coast of the United States.
Initial results were - by their own description - promising, though they did have some "unscheduled learning opportunities" leading to the creation of System 001/B then on to System 002 (aka Jenny).
If you're a long-time blog follower, you might be wondering if this isn't a repeat posting, but it's not.
I did previously post a video titled How NASA Reinvented The Wheel - Shape Memory Alloys, but that one was by Brian at Real Engineering.
The topic are largely the same, though this one goes more deeply into how NiTiNOL works on the stress-strain curve and how the deformation of NiTiNOL is an autenite to twinned martensitic crystal transformation - complete with some nice animations.
It does also mention that the crystal transformation are exo- and endothermic (17:05), something that I don't think I've seen mentioned in other videos. I admit that if hot water is necessary for the martensite to austenite transition, it must be endothermic, but I haven't seen anything demonstrating that transition being both noticeable with bare hands - and a large enough NiTiNOL sample - or via thermal imaging camera. Neat detail there, doctor Derek.
