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.