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.