World-first: Bio-bricks from urine

Source - https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2018-10-24-world-first-bio-bricks-from-urine

Somebody needs to drink more water.

But clearly nobody needs to come up with a more awesome idea than making fertilizer and 'cement' blocks from urine.

Some civil engineering grad students from Cape Town, South Africa have developed a process of taking urine - currently only male urine because “At the moment we’re only dealing with urine collection from male urinals because that’s socially accepted. But what about the other half of the population?” - precipitating out a solid fertilizer, then using the liquid waste to produce bio-bricks  and a secondary fertilizer.

The initial precipitation at the fertilizer-producing urinal uses calcium hydroxide to precipitate out calcium phosphate, a solid fertilizer.

Source - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213343718306043

After that, the remaining liquid heads to a secondary processing.

The bio-bricks are created through a natural process called microbial carbonate precipitation. It’s not unlike the way seashells are formed, said Lambert’s supervisor Dr Dyllon Randall, a senior lecturer in water quality engineering.

In this case, loose sand is colonised with bacteria that produce urease. An enzyme, the urease breaks down the urea in urine while producing calcium carbonate through a complex chemical reaction. This cements the sand into any shape, whether it’s a solid column, or now, for the first time, a rectangular building brick.

And the strength of the material is simply dependent on time and concentration of urea.

The strength of the bio-bricks would depend on client needs. 

“If a client wanted a brick stronger than a 40% limestone brick, you would allow the bacteria to make the solid stronger by ‘growing’ it for longer,” said Randall. “The longer you allow the little bacteria to make the cement, the stronger the product is going to be. We can optimise that process.”

The liquid waste from the bio-brick production, then, is further processed into a second fertilizer.

That's amazing, turning a waste product into three useful. As the article says, "[t]he overall scheme would effectively result in zero waste, with the urine completely converted into three useful products."

I'm guessing there are a lot of scientists who are pissed that they didn't come up with this idea themselves.

(I'm sorry...)

Adding A Funny Form Of Carbon To Silly Putty Creates A Heart Monitor

Silly putty is apparently miraculous.

It doesn't walk down stairs - along or in pairs. It doesn't roll over your neighbor's dog.

But it does appear to be usable as a pressure sensor when graphene is added to it. The graphene turns the silly putty into a conductive mass, the precise conductivity of which is highly sensitive to changes in pressure - to the point where it can be used to monitor the blood pressure and pulse in the carotid artery.

Source - NPR and Science

King Tutankhamun's Dagger Was Literally Out Of This World

"That’s right: King Tut had a space dagger."

How cool is that?

An article published in May in the journal Meteoritics and Space Science is titled "The meteoritic origin of Tutankhamun's iron dagger blade".

In the article (sadly behind a paywall but detailed at IFLScience) scientists recount the process of using x-ray fluoroscopy to determine the precise elemental composition of the dagger's blade without any harm to the blade itself.

The scientists were even able to determine the exact meteorite from which the dagger was forged nearly 700 years ago.

Science is stunning.

Japanese Scientists Create Glass That's Pretty Much Unbreakable

Image actually not from the story cited but rather from here

Previous attempts to add alumina to glass have failed, because the raw mixture crystalised as soon as it touched any kind of container. By removing the container and mixing the glass in the air instead, this problem was overcome.

I've posted before about this, but the initial article was a bit more academic and written for a journal.

This one is written for a more populist audience, so it's certainly going to be more useful for my students.

The Ship-Breakers

At low tide ship-breakers haul a 10,000-pound cable to a beached ship to winch pieces ashore as they dismantle it. (from article)

Ship-breaking...such a simple term but one that is impossibly complex.

As the National Geographic article with the simple title tells us...

Oceangoing vessels are not meant to be taken apart. They’re designed to withstand extreme forces in some of the planet’s most difficult environments, and they’re often constructed with toxic materials, such as asbestos and lead. When ships are scrapped in the developed world, the process is more strictly regulated and expensive, so the bulk of the world’s shipbreaking is done in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, where labor is cheap and oversight is minimal.

The process might be better titled as ship-recycling because that's what's happening with the ships, "Whatever the actual profits, they are realized by doggedly recycling more than 90 percent of each ship. ... Everything is removed and sold to salvage dealers—from enormous engines, batteries, generators, and miles of copper wiring to the crew bunks, portholes, lifeboats, and electronic dials on the bridge."

Steel from ship hulls is harvested in plates. Each can weigh a thousand pounds or more. Using brute strength and improvised rollers, teams of carriers move the plates to trucks, which transport them to mills where they are converted into steel rods for construction.

Only the problem is that the other 10%, the unrecyclable 10% is poisoning the water, the beaches, and the workers along the way to recovering the 90%.

Carriers spend their days slathered in mud contaminated with heavy metals and toxic paint particles that leach from the ships into the tidal flats.

How do we continue with this?

Is the recovery of the 90% worth the cost in environmental damages and lives shortened or lost?

Material Uses Insect Technology to Stay Dry Under Water

Let's start with the basics, shall we?

In general water is bad for the long-term durability of most surfaces - especially metal surfaces.

Water molecules hold together pretty well. I've even seen (and highly endorse) magnets that show this.

Water molecules have some volume, especially when they hold to other water molecules.

(Now, the tougher step...)

If you can make bumps...pores...posts...something on the surface of a material that leaves spaces too small for water drops (clumps of water molecules) to go into, the surface of the material will stay dry.

Seriously...like forever dry...not from a coating that will eventually wear off...permanently dry (or at least for four months as the early research shows)...

Left column: (top) Polymer/HFS (NC1) composite coating on aluminum substrate, (bottom) silicon square microposts. Middle column: (top) zinc oxide nanorods on silicon substrate, (bottom) silicon nanowire forest. Right column: (top) silicon microgrooves, (bottom) silicon nanograss.

See those scanning electron micrographs (SEM) above? They're from an article on Nature's website. Each surface was tested to see how long it would resist being wetted when immersed in water (then in water that had been thoroughly degassed - to make sure it wasn't gas bubbles being trapped that resulted in the lack of wetting).

Left: Wetted surface with 25 μm pillar spacing. Middle: Wetted surface with 5 μm pillar spacing. Right: Dry surface with sub-micron pillar spacing. Abbreviations: Frozen water (H₂O), Silicon substrate (Si)

And there you can see their results. Make the pillars wide enough to leave 25 microns of space, get a wet surface...5 microns, still wet...less than one micron, dry...forever dry...perfectly dry.

There's a nice summary of the article on IFLScience's website, but you do, as always, run into the issue of that F in the web address...

The Point of a Monument: A History of the Aluminum Cap of the Washington Monument

The Washington Monument was capped with aluminum in 1884 because aluminum was among the most valuable metals at the time, and the use of aluminum as an apex for the monument was a way for the United States to demonstrate its material science and industrial primacy in the world.

At least that's the story I tell in my material science class and in my summer workshops.

George Binczewski, however, tells a different story in his article "The Point of a Monument: A History of the Aluminum Cap of the Washington Monument." In the article, Binczewski recounts the story of how aluminum was chosen, cast, and subsequently refurbished. Apparently aluminum was not the first choice, and material selection had more to do with use as a point to the lightning protection system.

That isn't nearly as exciting a story as the mic drop version of material science. "We have aluminum. You don't. Deal with it, punks. US out."

Sadly, though, it just might be truer. I'm going to have to adjust my patter again.

By the way, you can check out the aluminum apex actually looks - as of the Monument's 2013, post-earthquake check-up, anyway - in this pic (source: Wikipedia).

And here's a look at the most metal version of the apex in its era of having a copper jacket (visible just above at the base of the apex) but without its temporary copper spikes to further its job as a lightning rod. (Source: Phillip C Marshall)

Pic up top is from Red Ice Creations.

If We Want to Keep the Gadgets Coming, Let's Mine Greenland

We need heavy metals. Without the continued influx of Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Kiss, and others like them, our supply of disaffected, midwestern teenage boys may dry up at any time.

(I'm sorry, but I swear that I'm contractually obligated to tell a corny joke at the beginning of every post. Them's the rules.)

This Wired article from February, 2015 opens by explaining the usefulness of many of the rare earth metals (or lanthanides as they point out) and then to point out that current Chinese supplies look to run out soon, America's supply isn't profitable right now, Australia's deposits need to find a refiner, but Greeland's deposit, the second largest in the world, is sitting right there under 1.3 miles of ice.

The article also points out that Denmark's environmental stewardship record would give us hope that the mining would be done in as environmentally friendly way as possible.

I doubt the last paragraph's assertion, however, that, "There are no native populations to displace, no salmon runs to despoil." The macrofauna under the ice may be minimal to nonexistant, but I would venture to wager that the microfauna is pretty well balanced there under the ice sheet.

Until then, I'll go for the fist of rock with lead.

Shimmery sea sapphire disappears in a flash

An invisible car, I don't get.

An invisible animal, I get. That would be the best camouflage ever, just turn slightly to the side and go all Kate Moss on your predators.

The color is due entirely to the distance between crystals in the sea sapphire's back, causing it to look blue when seen directly on but to shift its 'color' appearance into the ultraviolet range when it tilts slightly and shortens that wavelength.

The full science is summarized in an article in New Scientist and originally in Journal of American Chemical Society.

Carbon-fiber epoxy honeycombs mimic the material performance of balsa wood

Balsa wood?

Seriously, the blades of modern windmills are filled with frickin' balsa wood?

That's the fancy level of modern technology that we're working with to replace coal and natural gas and hydroelectric power?

It's not really a surprise that materials engineers are looking to replace balsa wood with something a little more reliable.

Check out all the details in the article or see the research group's video above.

Memory alloy that bounces back into shape 10 million times

Admittedly, I'm a bit far from testing any of my samples of NiTiNOL ten million times, so I can't guarantee that my metal samples don't survive ten million cycles.

Professor Manfred Wuttig, however, seems able to make an actual claim that his new memory alloy (NiTiNOL doped with some copper), can survive ten million cycles.

And that's certainly something. In fact, it's the kind of something that makes a memory alloy far more useful. See, most memory alloys return to their shape above their transition temperature, but every transition sees the sample adding dislocations to the original shape during the transition leading to eventual functional fatigue and a change in the transition temperatures. After only a few transitions, the sample is less and less back to its original shape. A sample that can return to its original shape for ten million cycles, though, is a significant breakthrough.

Check out one of the these articles covering the original research...

• Popular Mechanics
• BBC
• Born2Invest

Engineering the Strongest Foam in the World

I'm not sure I would want the metal of my boat to look like the Swiss-cheese-ish piece of metal in the video still above. It just wouldn't instill confidence from me and - I would imagine - my fellow passengers.

Still, the decrease of weight without subsequent decrease in metal strength is a fairly perfect pursuit for research, particularly as it's being undertaken by Nikhil Gupta at NYU Polytechnic.

Check out either of the two articles that cover the same content as the above video and start getting ready not to worry about the 'holes' in your boat.

• A metal composite that will (literally) float your boat
• One of the strongest, lightest metals ever made is less dense than water

Artistic Chemistry: a beuatiful collaboration

I'd never heard of Frog Valley before reading the April 2012 Chem Matters article, "Artistic Chemistry: a beautiful collaboration," and to be quite honest, the article didn't exactly tempt me to drive six and a half hours to see an artist collective. As the last paragraph of the article says, "you may want to try raku pottery or stained glass. Classes are offered throughout the United States, and chances are, classes are available near you." 

Apparently there's no reason to go to Frog Valley. Thanks, Helen Herlocker.

The other part of that last paragraph, though, "while you learn about the properties of the materials and how they interact with each other, you will discover that it really is all about chemistry!"

The article covers the science of raku pottery (oxidation, reduction, metals, and metallic oxides) as well as the copper foil method of making stained glass windows (chemical reactions, production of hydrochloric acid, tarnishing of the copper foil).

Plus you get to see some really pretty artwork.

Get out there and take a class this summer, folks. Make a stained glass piece (don't leave it out for your custodian to knock over like I foolishly did with mine). Throw a raku pot. Blow glass.

Learn something.

Make something beautiful.

The afterlife of plastics

In 2003 I read an article titled "Anything Into Oil" from Discover magazine. That article described a process through which effectively all trash (other than heavy metals) was going to be recycled into usable oil of various molecular weights.

That's it, I thought, no more trash. We're done. We've got that whole trash problem licked. All the landfills can be dug back up and run through the Anything-Into-Oil-er machine to make profit. Step two had finally been solved.

Two years later...update... two more years later...another update...

Flash to seven years later than that and I'm still sending my trash to Mount Rumpke.

Along comes "The Afterlife of Plastic" from Al Jazeera in which we get to read about a new plant opened up to turn plastic into oil. Some of the details are simplified a bit...

Plastic is usually made by heating crude oil, cooling it and adding preservatives so it is able to hold its shape. It can then be molded into light, flexible forms for use as shopping bags, takeout containers or plastic toys.

I'm all in favor of the recycling of plastic and keeping microscopic bits out of the oceans and everything, but I've been hearing promised solutions to the intractable problems with plastics for a decade now.

Don't toy with my emotions here, folks.

Thanks, by the way, to Brian Wright for passing this link along.

The Sand and the Fury

Our civilization is literally built on sand. People have used it for construction since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. In the 15th century, an Italian artisan figured out how to turn sand into transparent glass, which made possible the microscopes, telescopes, and other technologies that helped drive the Renaissance’s scientific revolution (also, affordable windows). Sand of various kinds is an essential ingredient in detergents, cosmetics, toothpaste, solar panels, silicon chips, and especially buildings; every concrete structure is basically tons of sand and gravel glued together with cement.

Our appetite for expansion, for building, for creation is nigh on bottomless.

And it seems like our sources of sand for that expansion should also be bottomless. There's the deserts of Africa, Asia, North America - even of Antarctica. Heck, there's enough sand in my swim trunks from my recent trip to the beach (more on that material science connection later). But it turns out that desert sand (weathered by wind) and river sand (weathered by water) aren't even remotely the same when it comes to building. As the Wired article explains, "Desert sand generally doesn’t work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert grains are too round to bind together well."

That leaves us dredging rivers and bays and oceans for more and more sand, diving deeper ("he thinks the river’s sand will soon be mined out. 'When I started, we only had to go down 20 feet,' he says. 'Now it’s 40. We can only dive 50 feet. If it gets much lower, we’ll be out of a job.' ") and evend destroying entire island ("Sand mining has erased at least two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. The stuff of those islands mostly ended up in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea. The city-state has created an extra 130 square kilometers in the past 40 years and is still adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer.")

We need to, as always, remember that building is a zero-sum game. Everything that goes up has to come from somewhere.

And often, there are huge environmental and human costs in getting that materials from that somewhere.

Researchers build aluminum battery that can be charged in one minute

The aluminum-graphite battery being displayed in the video (and in the post) sounds a little too good to be true. It's flexible, safe even if drilled, rechargeable in minutes, made of environmentally safe materials, and theoretically cheap.

I assume somehow it'll be found to kill puppies every time your recharge it.

Something has to be wrong with a battery like that, right?

Hendrik Marius Jonkers - Self-healing concrete containing bacteria

Expensive, ugly, sometimes dangerous? I feel like there's a joke to be made there...maybe something about a mother-in-law...or a political opponent...something...

Let's put a pin in that and come back to it.

If we do put a pin into some of the self-healing concrete that Hendrick Jonkers is developing, that pin just might get cemented into place from the limestone-excreting bacteria.

Jonkers is up for a self-described "prestigious" European Inventor Award. Feel free to throw a few votes his way if you read this before June 4, 2015.

This 1,600-Year-Old Goblet Shows that the Romans Were Nanotechnology Pioneers

The Romans were genius.

The had the baths, the vomitoria, the toga parties, the aquaducts, the fingers.

And they had goblets that change color as light went through them and as different liquids are filled into it. In fact, the science is pretty stunning...

researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.

...

[T]he researchers ... imprinted billions of tiny wells onto a plastic plate about the size of a postage stamp and sprayed the wells with gold or silver nanoparticles, essentially creating an array with billions of ultra-miniature Lycurgus Cups. When water, oil, sugar solutions and salt solutions were poured into the wells, they displayed a range of easy-to-distinguish colors—light green for water and red for oil, for example. The proto­type was 100 times more sensitive to altered levels of salt in solution than current commercial sensors using similar techniques.

Clearly, the lead hadn't kicked in just yet when these goblets were being made.

Metal Fabricating in a New Millenium

'The Bean' - officially Cloud Gate - in Chicago is a brilliant piece of sculpture. 

If you haven't had a chance to visit and walk under Cloud Gate, you have to make sure you do so when next you're in the Windy City. There are few enough opportunities to share a public experience like Cloud Gate with a hundred of your closest friends, and seeing Cloud Gate is one of the best examples of that experience.

But how the heck was it made? It can't have been cast that large, right? And if it's sheets shaped and welded, we'd see the seams, right?

Check out all the details of the production of Cloud Gate in a great article about Cloud Gate over at TheFabricator.com. It turns out it's a fascinating process involving way more hand-skilled work than I would ever have guessed. (In case the article disappears, I've uploaded it to Scribd.)

A less-detailed article about The Bean can be found on Outo Kumpu's website (They made the steel for the sculpture.) Again, I've uploaded this article, too.

Bulletproof graphene makes ultra-strong body armor

 
That title, from a New Scientist article, might be over-selling things at this stage of development.

Lee and colleagues ... used a laser pulse to superheat gold filaments until they vaporised, acting like gunpowder to fire a micrometre-size glass bullet into 10 to 100 sheets of graphene at 3 kilometres per second – about three times the speed of a bullet fired from an M16 rifle.

That's pretty far from actually having a product in development.

It's sort of like saying that I can take a few steps in my back yard and announcing that I've walked on the moon.

Well, maybe that's a little exaggeration because graphene is amazing stuff.