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.

Glass is a recycling nightmare. Here's one city's solution.

I assume the gloves are there so nobody gets cut by accident.

I would have thought that glass would be the absolute easiest material to recycle. It's effectively sand, after all. It could go into coastline; it could be remelted into new glass; it could go anywhere that sand can go.

I wouldn't have thought about the problems of weight and shipping of the recycled glass to its final, useful location.

Here's to hoping we can get all of this stuff worked out, because I'm trying to use more glass and less man-made polymers at any opportunity I get.

Metals in glass are AWESOME!

So many pretty colors of glass!

I have to hunt down some of those metal oxides to add to my glass in matsci class.

Just look at the possibilities...

source - from YouTube video above

Oh, and the video talks about how some metal oxides (erbium and holmium, in particular) change color in different light sources, but that doesn't diminish how pretty they all are.

source - from YouTube video above

I may make a project out of producing that rainbow up there for myself.

Anybody want to pitch in to share in the purchase of the various oxides? I know I won't be able to buy less than like a quarter pound each, and I'll only need like twenty grams 

The Ridiculous Engineering of Jet Engines

Jet engines are miracles.

The more I learn about them, the more amazed I continue to be by them. 

I've heard a number of times that the hot gasses passing by the turbine blades is hotter than the melting temperature of those blades.

It simple enough to say that the blades have ceramic coatings (thermal barrier coatings) on those blades and internal cooling channels that together keep the blades cool enough not to melt (or to creep too much outward toward the turbine's housing) at that phenomenal high temperatures.

...and then we get the bubble raft demonstration - which is just my absolute favorite.

And I just found out that the older video I had posted explaining the pigtail's function in creating single crystal turbine blades has disappeared from YouTube. I'm suddenly very sad about that.