5 INCHES FROM FAILURE: How They Closed the Gateway Arch 630 Feet in the Air

I absolutely love the Gateway Arch.

My mother had relatives in St Louis, and we would visit once or twice a year. Our marker for the nearing end of our journey was the first sight of the arch from the highway in Illinois, small but definitive in the distance.

I've been up in the arch a half dozen times with various friends and relatives. I would go to the top every time I'm in St Louis if I could convince my traveling companions because I absolutely love the Arch.

I'm thrilled the Eero Saarrinen's design and for the work of the construction workers who put the Arch together and for the engineers and workers who understood thermal expansion enough to fit the keystone piece into the summit.

If you're every in St Louis, get yourself to the Arch. Marvel at the view from the bottom, looking up at the reflective steel surface; ride the egg-shaped elevator to the top; and enjoy one of the truly great views in our country - down at our greatest river from atop one of our greatest monuments.

My only issue with this video is the repeated use of the pronunciation of Saint Louie instead of Saint Lewis.

PIEZODANCE - company.mov

This video purports to explain piezoelectricity via dance.

I don't know more at the end of it than I did at the beginning, and I think I paid attention pretty well.

I think if forced to watch a performance in a stone amphitheater, I'll stick to Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii. 

Why Aluminum Pans Ruin Flavor, But Soda Cans Don't | America's Test Kitchen

When I do this demonstration in class, I use hydrochloric acid instead of sodium hydroxide. I also tend to go more quickly because I want to achieve the demo in time for my students to see it from start to finish.

Dan's version, however, likely is safer. I'm still hopeful that he wore goggles when his face was out of frame.

The Crystal That Could Destroy All Medicine

My favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut. His writing simply connects with me - might be his Hoosier background, his secular humanism, or the simplicity of his ideas on the shapes of stories. I've read all of Vonnegut's novels and many of his short stories.

In his novel Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut presents a fictional idea of ice-nine, a super-stable form of solid H2O that is able to 'infect' any sample of water with which it comes into contact. The ice-nine is so stable that it has a melting temperature of 45.8 C leading to all of the liquid water in the fictional world solidifying - which leads eventually to the end of civilization as we know it.

Ice-nine is fictional, but the two forms of ritonavir discussed in this video aren't fictional at all. Ritonavir was an incredibly important drug for HIV patients, and the useful crystalline structure of ritonavir was spontaneously replaced with a less useful polymorph and nearly destroying the drug's total production.

Along the way, the video looks at tin pest and tempered chocolate, other examples of polymorphism.

Have we been mining wrong this whole time?

I've heard for a very long time that someday archeologists would have a field day digging into our landfills.

Now it looks like our waste is useful for more than just learning about us. It's useful for recovering trace amounts of rare earth metals. 

This video begins with a look at Phoenix Tailings, a company that is trying to find rare earth metals in tailing ponds from mines around the country. If this works at scale, this could clean up massive post-mining waste dumps all around the world.

It then moves on to explore the possibility of recovering metals from acidic mine water waste like that from Berkley Pit, and the video closes with companies that are exploring how to recover metals from electronic waste (e-waste) with a look at the environmental costs and economics of all these proceses. 

GLASS ARTIST SCULPTING an EGG from BROKEN GLASS | James Parker Sculpture

Not much science in today's video, hence why it's going on Friday.

It's just a Scottish artist making a glass egg from very thick plate glass.

So pretty...likely so expensive, too.

Are Electric Cars Really More Environmentally Friendly?

I'd heard that at one point the average electric car (or hybrid) is worse for the environment to produce than even a Hummer because of the energy that goes into the production of the battery. The moment the two vehicles start driving, the electric vehicle starts catching up with its Hummer competitor.

The video today doesn't necessarily get into that. It looks at the efficiency of electricity produced by power plants and compares that to how efficient a gas-powered car would need to be in order to be more efficient than an average EV in various states of the US.

I did not know that - as of this video being produced in 2018 - Colorado was the dirtiest power-generating state and that Alaska was the cleanest.

Glass is a recycling nightmare. Here's one city's solution.

I assume the gloves are there so nobody gets cut by accident.

I would have thought that glass would be the absolute easiest material to recycle. It's effectively sand, after all. It could go into coastline; it could be remelted into new glass; it could go anywhere that sand can go.

I wouldn't have thought about the problems of weight and shipping of the recycled glass to its final, useful location.

Here's to hoping we can get all of this stuff worked out, because I'm trying to use more glass and less man-made polymers at any opportunity I get.

Metals in glass are AWESOME!

So many pretty colors of glass!

I have to hunt down some of those metal oxides to add to my glass in matsci class.

Just look at the possibilities...

source - from YouTube video above

Oh, and the video talks about how some metal oxides (erbium and holmium, in particular) change color in different light sources, but that doesn't diminish how pretty they all are.

source - from YouTube video above

I may make a project out of producing that rainbow up there for myself.

Anybody want to pitch in to share in the purchase of the various oxides? I know I won't be able to buy less than like a quarter pound each, and I'll only need like twenty grams 

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.

Inside the Race to Save the Clay Behind "Wallace & Gromit" | WSJ

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.

Making Uranium Glass With some Unusual Properties!

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.

Source - compound interest

The $1 Trillion Problem Diamonds Can Solve

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.

image from YouTube video above

All that's left is to grow those diamonds via chemical vapor deposition - which is also incredibly cool.

Metal Fabrication Worker Handling 700C+ Metal With Safety on Vacation

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...

Karen Lise Krabbe: Gelled Glass

That's absolutely fascinating.

I've seen the reverse spherification technique of using sodium alginate and calcium chloride solutions to produce edible, gelled products (Kool Aid worms, gelled drink spheres, cocktail pods). Sometimes the calcium chloride is swapped out for calcium lactate because it's really the calcium ions that are necessary for the process.

But using that process to make gelled glass which can be shaped in ways that glass normally couldn't be shaped is pretty amazing. All respect to Karen Lise Krabbe for developing this technique. If you want to learn more, you can check out her ebook on the technique.

Why Are Chip Bags So Hard to Recycle? | World Wide Waste | Business Insider

The materials in our world are rarely pure. Our steels are alloys. Our polymers contain dyes and plasticizers. And apparently our food packaging - like chip bags - are composed of nearly a dozen different polymer and aluminum foil layers glued together.

Trying to get those materials apart again to recycle them is currently all but impossible to recycle.

If only those layers could be separated again...

Exploding Wires

In our summer camp (more info here, natch) we have an awesome demonstration that heats an iron wire via a variac that demonstrates the solid state phase transition from BCC iron (at room temp) to FCC iron (at higher temperatures).

This video heats wires of various metals at - I think - constant voltages - and observes a few interesting things:

• copper wire produces a green flash at the moment of melting
• magnesium ribbon rose as it heated and expanded (rather than sagging) at first
• molybdenum wire produced a series of evenly spaced 'balls' (unduloids) before melting and breaking

I've seen something somewhat similar to the molybdenum balls when the iron wire melts and fails. Each end of the iron wire creates one single ball of iron on its end where the wire failed. We don't get the repeated drops like molybdenum, but the metal balls are familiar to me.

I appreciate the explanation of the formation of unduloids forming via partial melting and surface tension pulling the molten surface together. Sounds good enough to me.

I do wish they had repeated the 90 degree turned experiment with the molybdenum wire - not just with the copper wires.

Uses of expandable foam

Found on reddit...

We were talking about the expandable, polyurethane foam in class after doing the lab, and I wanted to hunt down some uses of the foams outside the classroom. I figured if I'm looking for them, some of you might be interested in them, too.

If you have any other good videos of uses of expandable foam, please link to them in the comments.

More after the jump...