Meet the Eutectic, St. Louis' mystery mascot

That, apparently, is what a eutectic looks like in real life.

Who knew?

My understanding was that a eutectic looked more like this...



...but apparently at St Louis College of Pharmacy, their sports teams' mascot is Mortarmer McPestle, a Eutectic. Apparently, Morty has been working out because he has a six pack under that lab coat...

I particularly appreciate the logo showing Morty hard at work compounding...

If, by the way, you'd like to get a Eutectics shirt, they are available online. Looks like they would be perfect for summer camp, day 2.

Your friendly neighborhood blogger does enjoy Morty but is partial to Wally, a Wabash College Little Giant.

Cornstarch monster - non-Newtonian fluid on speaker

There isn't really anything too new and revolutionary in this video. It's pretty standard cornstarch and water on a speaker. It just happens to be very well done, showing the cornstarch mixture releasing entirely from the speaker. We also get some explorations of varying cornstarch/water ratios.

Fun stuff...

On track with SAP - Composites

Concerns in the faster and lighter areas drastically outweigh the cheaper ones when it comes to a Formula 1 racecar (a palindrome, by the way). To that end, the engineers use a ridiculous amount of high-technology materials in the efforts to shave an ounce or two from the car's weight. The most stunning comment in this video came about 0:58 for me - the chassis only weighs 45 kilograms.

I know freshman - little freshman - at my school who outweigh the chassis of a Formula 1 racecar.

What the heck?

Jet engine testing (superalloys)

I know a couple of our master teachers who should NOT watch this video because of their little fear of flying thing.

I, on the other hand, have no fear of flying at all. I don't fly very often - about twice in a typical year - and am totally relaxed when I am flying because I know that airplanes are overengineered to the point of ridiculous safety. I hope...

This video shows Rolls Royce testing one of their jet engines in the case of engine turbine blade during an event of catastrophic failure. The super slow-mo footage of the turbine going off balance and recovering is actually terrifically reassuring to me as a passenger.

"Liquid Fire" to Metal Sword in minutes! - A History of Ancient Britain

So many ancient arts have been lost and are recovered and relearned by various people throughout the decades. Here we see a trio of Brits cast a bronze sword, something that would have been commonplace a few centuries ago but that now looks almost like magic to us today.

It's gorgeous to watch, and their enthusiasm ain't bad, either.

One box of Girl Scout cookies worth $15 billion

As a chemistry teacher, hearing the quote "carbon is carbon" about 1:20 into this video just made my day.

In the video researchers from Rice University Labs turn girl scout cookies - trefoils from what I can tell - into graphene on copper, and the girl scout troop then performs some simple tests on the graphene sheet, clearly testing the conductivity (or resistance, maybe) of the product.

FYI: What's the lightest metal on Earth?

If you answered 'any lump of metal somebody else is carrying,' then you're sarcastic.

If, on the other hand, you answered 'metallic microlattice,' I'm thinking you probably already watched the video.

The challenges of materials science often boil down to some combination of 'make it lighter, cheaper, stronger.' Cut down the material's weight, and we can cut down the cost to ship it, to fly it, to make it, to throw it away when we're finished. Make the material stronger, and we can use less of it for a longer time and can push harder with or on it.

It seems that every time we start to think that we can't make strong materials from less material, somebody comes along to prove us wrong. According to a Popular Science post...

The key structural component is a series of hollow tubes. In a study published last November in Science, the researchers exposed a light sensitive liquid to UV light through a patterned mask, which created a three-dimensional photopolymer lattice. They then deposited a layer of nickel-phosphorous onto the polymer lattice, which was then etched. The remaining structure was a macroscopic material with hollow tubes as the base structural elements. The resulting material had a density of .9 mg/cm³. By comparison, ultralight silica aerogels are 1 mg/cm³.

I've held aerogel. I've let another ASM master teacher (cough-Becky-cough) break my aerogel, and to think that this material is lighter than aerogel is pretty impressive.

I'm putting the video after the jump because it auto-plays. Click through to watch.