Hazardous Turkey Cookery Part 2

Let's be honest. That was predictably dumb.

Can I make Titanium Damascus?

tl;dr - Yes, he can, but it's expensive and involves a whole lot of oxidation.

Damascus steel has a noteworthy pattern that is really what Alec is trying to reproduce with the titanium shown in these videos. Here he starts with alternating grades of titanium stacked then forge welds them together.

The steps required to then anneal and machine the titanium billet that he produces are labor-intensive to say the least.

But he does get some cool rings out of the process.

Parts 2 and 3 of the series are after the jump.

You're Being Lied To About Ocean Plastic | Truth Complex | Business Insider

The widening gyre...

Yes, there's a garbage patch in the center-ish of the Pacific Ocean. 

That garbage patch is not anything worth looking at, though. It's an area of higher than average concentration of plastic waste, but it's not something you could walk across or would have trouble boating through. Even a higher density area isn't necessarily a high density area.

As this video reveals, the most common photos attributed as being of the garbage patch are not of the garbage patch. They're of near-shore, highly polluted areas - which might actually be easier to clean up than the garbage patch would be - if we even should clean it up.

The video goes on to explore the sources of plastic pollution (hint - mostly not littering), the value of recycling (limited but worth doing), the role of big corporations in producing plastic waster (suck it, Coca Cola), the problems with microplastics (bad, very bad), and the need to reduce more than reuse and recycle.

These kinds of videos are way too easy to find on YouTube.

Plastics bad...we need to use less of them.

...and I write that as I sit beside of plastic bottle of Coke Zero Cherry that I'm drinking today.

Sugar glass

"All you need to do is melt some sugar."

Yeah, there's a lot more than that involved in making sugar glass.

You need to make sure the 'glass' remains amorphous so it stays translucent - which is is a little tougher than it seems. 

And the sugar shouldn't actually be sucrose but rather isomalt.

...and the stuff you make isn't exactly safe to break across a friend's head.

Not a lot of science presented in that first video, so let's try another one.

Can this sugar-based material replace single-use plastics? | All Science. No Fiction.

Sugar glass itself isn't the solution to single use plastics.

It's too brittle and too water soluble.

But it sounds like the composite of sugar glass (isomalt) and sawdust - particularly with a waterproof coating - might be a promising possibility.

St Louis Arch Final Construction and Thermal Expansion

I absolutely adore the St Louis arch - technically The Gateway Arch - and have been to the top at least a half dozen times. If I had my druthers, I would get to the top every time I'm in St Louis, but my wife and mother-in-law are less interested, so I merely admire it crossing the bridge each time we're in town.

One of our campers in Boise this summer explained that she had a lesson in her science class about the final topping-out ceremony of the arch, it being interesting because one side was in more direct sun. This lead to that sun side expanding more than the other, causing the two legs not to initially line up and the gap for the keystone to be too narrow if not for the hydraulic jacks installed to spread the legs apart.

Check out the details in the above video at 0:50 and in from the Arch's wikipedia article...

It was slated to be inserted at 10:00 a.m. local time but was done 30 minutes early because thermal expansion had constricted the 8.5-foot (2.6 m) gap at the top by 5 inches (13 cm). To mitigate this, workers used fire hoses to spray water on the surface of the south leg to cool it down and make it contract. The keystone was inserted in 13 minutes with only 6 inches (15 cm) remaining. For the next section, a hydraulic jack had to pry apart the legs six feet (1.8 m). The last section was left only 2.5 feet (0.76 m). By noon, the keystone was secured.

Brilliant, man. hose down the hot side with cold water. 

How cool is that?

I'm sorry...I know...it's a corny joke...but it was right there...I couldn't help myself...

Indestructible books

A month or so ago, my wife brought home an Indestructibles book. She'd picked it up from our local Target store as a baby shower gift for a coworker and said it was made of a neat material that didn't rip.

I asked if it was Tyvek, knowing that Tyvek is a rip-stop fabric. She, a successful Appalachian Trail thru-hiker knows Tyvek as a lightweight ground cloth, and she said she wasn't sure whether the books were Tyvek or not.

So off I went on an internet hunt...

On the Indesctructibles FAQ page, I found the following... 

What are Indestructibles made of that is so durable yet paperlike and delightful for my baby?  

Indestructibles are printed on a synthetic material made from flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers (getting technical here, we know). It feels like paper, but liquid water cannot pass through it and it is very difficult to tear.

Which then sent me to the wikipedia article on flashspun fabrics...

Flashspun fabric is a nonwoven fabric formed from fine fibrillation of a film by the rapid evaporation of solvent and subsequent bonding during extrusion. 

...and wikipedia links onward to 'see also' Tyvek...

Tyvek (/ˈtaɪ.vɛk/) is a brand of synthetic flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers. The name Tyvek is a registered trademark of the American multinational chemical company DuPont, which discovered and commercialized Tyvek in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

 

Tyvek's properties—such as being difficult to tear but easily cut, and waterproof against liquids while allowing water vapor to penetrate—have led to it being used in a variety of applications.

See the parallels between the Tyvek entry on wikipedia and the Indestructibles description?

waterproof...liquid water cannot pass through it...

difficult to tear but easily cut...very difficult to tear...

flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers...flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers

The books might not be made from the branded Tyvek, but it sounds to me like they're made of a generic Tyvek.

I'm going to take that as a win.